We are All Disempowered Digital Citizens

“You get a show or a movie you're really dying to watch, and you end up staying up late at night, so we actually compete with sleep,” Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix.

This quote is recounted a number of different ways and I’m sure Reed Hastings was essentially forced to repeat himself enough that we have many variations.

This quote originates from 2017 (I think) and I’ve worried about streaming (alongside the attention economy pull of social media) ever since. It was a known problem made more insidious.

So, it does not give me any comfort to hear that Netflix continues to break records.  

Everyone is competing for our attention these days.

As we know, on one level, and it’s easy to forget, mostly what we have at the end of the day is our time. Everyone is (and it’s ok to be a bit conspiratorial about this one) actively trying to steal our time. There are a bunch of attributions for spinoffs of the concept that “If you don’t schedule your time, someone else will do it for you.” Marketing Gurus and the like talk about this constantly. And there is a lot of truth in this.

We know that “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” We’re a little more easily taken advantage of when time is broken down to a more granular level. When it’s small blocks of time we struggle to recognize that that 5 minutes here, 15 minutes there, 10 minutes here, 20 minutes there, adds up to enough time where you could have fully focused on something you might have really gotten some value out of instead of mindlessly scrolling or getting sucked in to the powerful algorithms since the puppeteers have designs on us.

This reminds me it’s a great moment to plug spending a little bit of your time considering a lesson from Tristan Harris who worked as a “Design Ethicist” for Google and then stepped away from that role (because Google has been failing their alleged “Don’t be evil” mission) and created the “Center for Humane Technology”. Harris makes an excellent point that that we are wrongly disempowered as digital citizens and this is battlefield is an important new frontier.

12.12.22