Deliberate Rest

A blog about getting more done by working less

Category: Attention / Distraction (page 1 of 27)

“Exploitation is encoded into the systems we are building”

November 6, 2017 / / Comments Off on “Exploitation is encoded into the systems we are building”

Writer and artist James Bridle has a long, but rather amazing and disturbing, piece arguing that “Something is wrong on the internet.” Specifically he’s talking about how kids’ videos on YouTube have turned super-strange and -dark, thanks to the weird profitability of kids’ videos, their low production standards, efforts to hit the right SEO and keyword notes, etc.. The result, he says, is that

Automated reward systems like YouTube algorithms necessitate exploitation in the same way that capitalism necessitates exploitation, and if you’re someone who bristles at the second half of that equation then maybe this should be what convinces you of its truth. Exploitation is encoded into the systems we are building, making it harder to see, harder to think and explain, harder to counter and defend against. Not in a future of AI overlords and robots in the factories, but right here, now, on your screen, in your living room and in your pocket.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the future of automation and work, and whether it’s possible to avoid the kinds of race-to-the-bottom, exterminate-the-worker imperatives that seem to be implicit in so many automation projects today, so this is a bracing argument.

It goes on, after walking through a number of examples of videos that are literally nightmarish:

To expose children to this content is abuse. We’re not talking about the debatable but undoubtedly real effects of film or videogame violence on teenagers, or the effects of pornography or extreme images on young minds, which were alluded to in my opening description of my own teenage internet use. Those are important debates, but they’re not what is being discussed here. What we’re talking about is very young children, effectively from birth, being deliberately targeted with content which will traumatise and disturb them, via networks which are extremely vulnerable to exactly this form of abuse. It’s not about trolls, but about a kind of violence inherent in the combination of digital systems and capitalist incentives. It’s down to that level of the metal.

This, I think, is my point: The system is complicit in the abuse.

And right now, right here, YouTube and Google are complicit in that system. The architecture they have built to extract the maximum revenue from online video is being hacked by persons unknown to abuse children, perhaps not even deliberately, but at a massive scale. I believe they have an absolute responsibility to deal with this, just as they have a responsibility to deal with the radicalisation of (mostly) young (mostly) men via extremist videos — of any political persuasion. They have so far showed absolutely no inclination to do this, which is in itself despicable. However, a huge part of my troubled response to this issue is that I have no idea how they can respond without shutting down the service itself, and most systems which resemble it. We have built a world which operates at scale, where human oversight is simply impossible, and no manner of inhuman oversight will counter most of the examples I’ve used in this essay.

I spent a little time looking at some of these videos, and they are beyond weird. They combine Second Life-level clunky animation; the kinds of repetition that adults find irritating and toddlers love; that distinctive kids’ music; and extremely strange cuts and changes of scene. About four minutes into one of the videos, the scene shifted from a totally anodyne house to a graveyard in which familiar toys sing a song about how sugar is bad, only they have flayed zombie heads; it was exactly the kind of thing that your mind would cook up as a nightmare.

Honolulu fights ‘smartphone zombies’

July 30, 2017 / / Comments Off on Honolulu fights ‘smartphone zombies’

The city of Honolulu has passed a law that “targets ‘smartphone zombies’,” people crossing the street while using their smartphones and not looking where they’re going:

“We hold the unfortunate distinction of being a major city with more pedestrians being hit in crosswalks, particularly our seniors, than almost any other city in the county,” [Honolulu mayor Kirk] Caldwell said.

The ban will go into effect in late October and will run from $15 to $99, depending on the severity of the offense.

I was recently in Hawaii, though on a different island, and was struck by how reflexive checking phones in restaurants, taking selfies, etc. has become. Even in an island paradise, many of us feel the need to keep our phones out and active all the time.

When the world doesn’t provide us stimulation, it’s offering us a gift: More on creativity and boredom

July 26, 2017 / / Comments Off on When the world doesn’t provide us stimulation, it’s offering us a gift: More on creativity and boredom

More people seem to be getting interested in boredom. Now the World Economic Forum has a video about the value of letting your mind do nothing at all:

It’s kind of a follow-up to a piece by Silicon Valley author Jordan Rosenfeld about why we should “Learn how to be bored instead” of constantly reaching for our phones during down moments. Since writing The Distraction Addiction and Rest, I’ve become more of a fan of taking those moments and just doing nothing at all, staring into space and letting my mind wander.

Of course, what Rosenfeld and the World Economic Forum are talking about isn’t really boredom, per se, but rather treating those moments when you don’t have to focus on anything– that time in line at the store, for example– as an opportunity and positive thing, rather than a negative space defined by an absence of stimulus. As I argued in my Maria Shriver Sunday paper article this weekend, boredom isn’t a state that’s determined by the world around us. It’s conjured by us.

Boredom isn’t like a thermometer that measures how dull our environment is. it’s a more complex reaction of our selves and our surroundings. We might be bored by a movie that we’ve seen many times; we might find a conversation at a reunion dull because our lives and our classmates’ have gone in very different directions; or we might find a place dull because we were dragged there by our stupid parents who think stupid Renaissance paintings are cool. All kinds of things can be boring, as this piece of graffiti in Oxford reminds us:

Still, the underlying idea that when the world doesn’t offer us stimulation, it’s offering us a gift, is one that is worth repeating, even if I think we need a better term than “boredom” to describe it.

 

On rest and value of boredom

July 24, 2017 / / 1 Comment

Over the weekend I had a short piece in Maria Shriver’s Sunday Paper, which was dedicated to “the benefits of boredom.” My piece explains why “Rest and Boredom Are Scientifically Beneficial for Your Brain:”

We treat boredom as something that we can banish from our lives, like smallpox or polio. But boredom isn’t a disease. We don’t catch it. We cause it ourselves. Boredom is a state of mind, a reaction to the world rather than a reflection of the world. Sure, we can be bored standing in line or waiting around for a delayed plane. But we can also be bored of a once-favorite haunt, or under-stimulated by a too-familiar restaurant. Teenagers are geniuses at weaponizing boredom: kids are brilliant at being stubbornly bored by this dumb thing in this dumb place that their dumb parents have dragged them to.

This suggests that we can modulate even control, our reactions to situations that normally trigger boredom. But why should we? In a world where we can binge-watch television in line at the grocery store, why should we ever let those empty moments stay empty?

The answer is, those moments when we don’t have to focus on anything in particular, and can allow our minds to roam free, are actually quite valuable.

I first realized that boredom was a state of mind that we could control, and that when we’re young we weaponize it, when I was at the British Museum with my kids. We were at the Rosetta Stone, which of course is one of the great jewels in the Museum’s collection, and one of the single most important archaeological artifacts in all of history.

There was another family there, and while the parents were explaining why the Stone was important (and by implication why it was cool that they were there), one of the kids Was. Not. Having. It. He was determined to stay disengaged, no matter what. (It’s not the child in the striped shirt. That’s my son, six years ago!) It struck me just how forcefully the kid seemed to want to be unimpressed, and wanted his parents to know just how stupid the whole thing was. I doubted that he could come right out and say it, but conspicuous boredom made his feelings pretty clear.

This is probably something I did plenty of myself when I was younger. Of course there were times when I legitimately felt like there was nothing for me to do– this was my default state from roughly third grade through high school– but there were probably times when I was bored to make a point. For kids, who don’t have a lot of choice in their lives, the ability to be bored is probably a useful form of rebellion: you can drag me to all these places, but you can’t make me like it, even if it’s something really cool.

But like most of us, as I’ve gotten older and busier, I now have a greater appreciation for the value of those periods when I have nothing I need to focus on; it’s less something to flee from, and a little more a luxury. It can even be good for you.

Smartphone distraction and pedestrian deaths

March 31, 2017 / / Comments Off on Smartphone distraction and pedestrian deaths

Time to update this poster.

A new study by the Governors Highway Safety Association finds that in the first half of 2016, pedestrian fatalities reached a two-decade high. More people are driving in a more active economy, and more people are walking and running for exercise; but as The Guardian reports, those aren’t the only reasons the numbers are up.

But researchers say they think the biggest factor may be more drivers and walkers distracted by cellphones and other electronic devices, although that’s hard to confirm.

Increases in driving and walking aren’t as dramatic as the rise in fatalities; smartphone use has skyrocketed; and areas where people do more walking are areas that have seen the highest increases. All of this suggests that distracted driving, and distracted walking, are the main drivers of the increase.

Toy-free play

March 28, 2017 / / Comments Off on Toy-free play

The Atlantic has a piece about the German practice of putting away toys in kindergarten for a period in order to encourage children to learn to rely more on their own imaginations and social abilities when they play– and develop the inner resources to resist addictions later in life.

It grew out of an addiction study group… in the 1980s. The group included people who had worked directly with adult addicts and determined that, for many, habit-forming behavior had roots in childhood. To prevent these potential seeds of addiction from ever being planted, the researchers ultimately decided to create a project for kitas and kindergartens, which in Germany typically serve children ages 3 to 6, and remove the things children sometimes use to distract themselves from their negative feelings: toys.

Was digital distraction responsible for the Oscar gaffe?

February 27, 2017 / / Comments Off on Was digital distraction responsible for the Oscar gaffe?

Sounds like it could have been, according to Variety:

Brian Cullinan, one of the two PriceWaterhouseCoopers partners who handled the Oscar envelopes on Sunday night, was tweeting photos from backstage minutes before he handed Warren Beatty the wrong Best Picture envelope.
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The flat, non-distracting doorways of the new Apple spaceship

February 9, 2017 / / Comments Off on The flat, non-distracting doorways of the new Apple spaceship

Having written so much in and on this blog about the creative power of walks, I was struck by this detail in Julia Love’s Reuters article about how “Apple seeks design perfection at new ‘spaceship’ campus:”

One of the most vexing features was the doorways, which Apple wanted to be perfectly flat, with no threshold. The construction team pushed back, but Apple held firm.
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Constant availability, job performance, and the loss of professional autonomy

December 19, 2016 / / Comments Off on Constant availability, job performance, and the loss of professional autonomy

In the Martin Scorcese movie Goodfellas, Henry Hill explains how people interact with the big Mafia boss, Paul Cicero.

He got all his calls second hand. Then you’d have to call the people back. There were guys, that’s all they did all day, was take care of Paulie’s calls.

For a guy who moved all day long, Paulie didn’t talk to 6 people.

This was a sign of how powerful Paulie was. You didn’t call him. You didn’t talk to him. You talked to someone, who talked to him, who’d then get back to you.

In a world as action-driven and performative as (the imaginative world of) the Mafia, being able to interact in such a limited way is a sign of real power.

Indeed, you can measure how powerful someone is by how accessible they are, and how easy it is to figure out how to talk to them. Me? You can find my contact information easily. Larry Ellison or Bill Gates? Good luck.

I was reminded of the Goodfellas scene by this anecdote told by Diane Shannon, author of the new book Preventing Physician Burnout:

During the question and answer period after a talk I gave on preventing burnout, the male internist, a faculty member at a university medical center, told the audience that hospital administrators had recently begun requiring that physicians list their cell phone numbers with the contact information on the organization’s website. There were no guidelines included about when and under what circumstances patients should use the numbers.

He told us, “I now get texts from patients who expect an immediate response. I was recently in clinic seeing patients when a patient texted me twice in an hour, then when I didn’t reply called the office and yelled at our staff. This summer I was out of the country on vacation with my family and received multiple texts from patients. No matter the time of day or the seriousness of the medical condition, patients have complete access to contacting me. I feel like I’m never off.”

Put simply, this policy is bonkers. Heaven knows I like the idea of a doctor being accessible when I really need, but I also like dealing with a doctor who isn’t exhausted from having to answer texts at 1 a.m.

It’s not like burnout wasn’t already a problem before the rise of smartphones. Mayo Clinic physician Tait Shanafelt has been measuring the extent and impact of burnout on American doctors, and he conducted surveys in 2008 and 2010 measuring burnout rates. He found in his 2010 survey, for example, that 40 percent of surgeons reported feeling burned out, 30 percent were depressed, and those who felt burned out were more likely to have made a “major medical error” in the previous three months. Poorly thought-out policies like publishing a doctor’s cellphone number will only make this worse.

More broadly, this is another indicator of how the profession of medicine has lost status. When you lose control over your schedules, see your privacy eroded, and have to interact with other people under the assumption that you don’t get to set up and maintain boundaries between their working and private lives, you’ve lost status– and your work is likely to suffer, too.

 

Greyscale your smartphone screen to make it less compelling

June 1, 2016 / / Comments Off on Greyscale your smartphone screen to make it less compelling

I hadn’t heard of this idea until this Atlantic video from James Hamblin:

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