THE DIGITAL DETOX 2035
Fair Warning, Netizens. Be warned. When you log on to the Net, you are entering a battlefield. It’s the domain of hyper-fast bots and algorithms all vying for your prized attention, constantly shifting and shaping themselves to seduce you, morphing into everything you see, hear and think online. It’s a high stakes, high speed war and the winner plants it’s tiny triumphant cookies into the convoluted terrain of your fertile brain.
For a moment, picture the flow of information online as an infinite buffet. The kitchens of the Internet produce a barrage of food for your consumption, and with every dopamine rush triggered by every seductive plate, you eat a little more. With every morsel you consume, the kitchen learns your preferences. Pick a rack of lamb, and you will be served 10 more the kitchen thinks you will also enjoy. Pick a sorbet, and you will eventually be force fed another 15 that the kitchen says your friends loved.
It’s the classic dilemma. A never ending hunger fed by information of astronomical proportions.
The archaic, static a-la-carte website has given way to the feed; an unlimited assembly line of seduction, conspicuously peppered with ‘curated’ advertisements and sponsored content.
While the production of this digital feast seems chaotic, we see only a tiny sliver. This mathematically enforced myopia creates likeminded, similarly oriented clones of our online personas to complete the illusion and cement preconceptions. Traditional boundaries of geography, income and interest blur. We are now grouped by what we choose to consume on a minute-to-minute basis.
The Nature of the Beast
The digital feast keeps growing, and it shows no signs of slowing down. In the year 2017, Internet usage reached 47% of the global population, which now represents a staggering 3.8 billion people. Let the numbers sink in. Every minute of every day, Google conducts 3,877,140 searches, Tinder users match 6940 times, Instagram users post 49,380 times, Twitter users tweet 473,400 times and Netflix streams 97, 222 hours of video. 5 new Facebook profiles are created every second, with 1.5 billion users currently active. Last year, mankind collectively took over 1.2 trillion photos, with 4.7 trillion photos stored. By the year 2020, it is estimated that each of us will produce 1.7MB of data each second, according to the website Domo.
With the rise of the Internet of things, inputs now come in from an array of ‘smart’ objects and nontraditional sources. This new network is exploding, from 2 billion connected devices in 2006 to a projected 200 billion devices in 2020.
What is increasingly scary is the nature of this data buffet. According to a recent report by the security firm Imperva, 52% of web traffic is non-human or generated by bots. Of this, harmful bots like impersonators (bots that assume false identities to bypass security solutions) comprise 24.3% of all bot traffic.
The Internet is crawling with algorithms that create the massive marketplace feeding us our unhealthy digital diet everyday. And its exploding.
The recent fake news epidemic is symbolic of this rot: single news articles re-blogged and aggregated by bots in increasingly faster cycles, powered purely by sensational headlines and clickbait, blurring the lines between news and propaganda.
The average lifespan of a news article is now 30 mins. As bots get increasingly realistic in their interactions with us, the lines between truth and fiction, human and machine will get extremely hard to define. In the hands of totalitarian governments, these become powerful tools to manufacture obedience and consent from a population. The barrage of information creates a sense of resignation and helplessness, while our minds submit to the rollercoaster.
The endless scrolling only stops when thumbs begin to ache. Generations are defined by the scars they carry. Shrapnel wounds, industrial accidents, assembly line malfunctions are wounds of the past. We are the carpal tunnel generation.
The Kitchen is in hyper-drive.
The Digital Detox 2035. Information is power. While the staggering profusion of all this digital food may seem like being shoved into a brightly lit supermarket aisle, with shelves upon shel ves of junk food whizzing past, power now belongs to the platforms that are able to make sense of the barrage. The natural impulse is to fill the cart with all the inane produce that fills the shel ves easiest to reach.
Your Keto diet plan may save your body. Your Digital Diet plan may well save your mind.
On October 2nd, 2001, the Government of France passed the El Khomri law or the “Right to Disconnect”, to adapt Labour Law to the digital age. They asserted that the need for correct balance between work and private life is essential to allow digital transformation to have a positive effect on a workers' quality of life. It also stated that knowing how to disconnect was a skill that needs to be supported by all employers. The accompanying report also identified “cognitive and emotional overload, which can lead to a sense of fatigue as a psycho-social risk of being constantly connected.”
The Right to Disconnect is one of our most important experiential rights.
While we are increasingly mindful of what we put into our mouths, we shove the equivalent of a greasy super-sized bacon burger with steak fries every minute into our brains. In the future, independent developers will create diet plans for your digital diet, only showing news by verified sources with a bot-check filter, screening unwanted advertisements and promotional content, setting up the building blocks for a Digital Vegan diet. The need for a Digital diet will spawn a whole generation of new opportunities across disciplines, with self-editing featuring prominently in the creation process.
While the Right to Disconnect is born online, it will soon enjoy a strong offline life too. Physical spaces that become places of refuge from stray signals, and active signal jamming will soon find its way into the resistance movement. While the new diets are a backlash to the culture of conspicuous consumption, the Right to Disconnect creates the counterpoint to contemporary media culture.
Guerrilla jammers will be the Banksys of the Future.
Activists of the Future will find the same meaning in jamming and occupying data streams as they find in occupying Wall street today. We will see the resistance creating Temples of Disconnection; safe zones broadcasting jamming signals to keep data streams away. The recurring trend of places going ‘Dark’, as in, dropping off the network maps of large network service providers, will physically manifest the Right to Disconnect into our built world.
They will use inbuilt Faraday cages to conduct away stray signals, with a host of companies and corporations supporting this new requirement, much in the same way that hospitality companies have supported new age dietary requirements.
Dark consultants will audit our home and workspaces to assess Network leakages, and create network-safe “cold-spots� for young infants and progressive bedrooms.
The Right to Disconnect featured prominently at the follow up to some of our work at an Unbox Lab event in Ahmedabad in 2016, in conversations with Akshay Roongta, Design Researcher, Quicksand Studio, and the incredible Vladan Joler, co-founder of the Share Lab, an investigative research lab doing cutting edge mapping and research around some of these problematic paradigms. We collaborated on a series of provocations around the Right to Disconnect, and created the Order of the Dark Temple, a manifesto that outlines some of our responses. Vladan’s work at Share Lab is of critical importance; mapping and making invisible networks visible, allowing us to take a closer look at the crazy world of bots that create increasingly dystopian situations. We spoke to Vladan about some of his work:
The Share Lab
How did you first see the dark side of connectivity, and what strikes you as the evil we should be mindful of? “From the beginning, this research expedition never really had a clear end goal - it was always an open-ended journey. We started with a visual representation of network structures, gained by following the journeys of singular internet packets. But slowly after that we were diving deeper and deeper into the depths of the surveillance capitalism architecture, ending with the map that is visualising algorithmic inner workings of the worlds biggest social network.�
“The deeper we dived into those black boxes, the more conscious we became of the fact that our capacities to understand and investigate such systems are extremely limited. Currently, with the rapid development of technology, and the lack of transparency-related tools and methodologies, outdated laws and ineffective bureaucracies, we are left behind in understanding what is really going on behind the walls of leading corporations whose business models are based on surveillance capitalism.�
How do you regulate your digital intake? “More and more I feel technology and digital communication tools as an burden and not something that is making my life more healthy. In general, I try not be in the real time communication. Sometimes I even don’t have an mobile phone for the months. But disconnection has its own price. By being disconnected You are becoming an obstacle for people around You, an anomaly that others need to take for. This social price we are paying is what is defining this new form of techno colonial practice.�
Can you point us towards some tools we can all use to be mindful of our own Digital diets? “It will be probably absurd to use digital tools for digital diet. So, I would say.. maybe an paper calendar can be useful, or a bicycle :)”
What does Digital Detox Diets mean to you? “Its an interesting way to think of our own habits and way we interact with technology.”
Can you tell us about the Order of the Dark temple? “As we described that strange meta-place on our website, Dark Temple is a Void in the spectrum, an absence of signal, sphere of not-self in the ocean of electromagnetic waves. This is an abstract non-place, an emptiness in which one can be alone with their inner self or with others without interference from the World of electronic communication, artificial sensors and The World of Immaterial Work. It is an un-place which one neither adds anything to nor takes anything away from. It is a black hole that does not allow wireless data and meta-data to escape, and therefore cannot be directly observed. This non-object was created as an part of the Unbox Caravan and Mozilla IOT Studio event in Ahmadabad in 2016. Wonderful group of people gathered around that idea was called The Monks of the Dark Temple. So, we had an Order. The Order of the Dark Temple was not an Order. It didn’t had a specific structure but was a set of fuzzy ethical principles that can evolve, be modified or disappear. The Order consisted of all beings (human, non-human, transhuman or posthuman ) that create or enjoy electromagnetic voids. It was a lot of fun :)”
Here’s some interviews from India 2035, around the Right to Disconnect.
“When my 18-year old son returned from the Festival of Disconnection completely refreshed and finally started helping out around the home, I was extremely interested in understanding the grammar of his experience. We had just shifted into a new home, and were planning our rooms around fun. During one of these discussions, he told us about the singularity he’d experienced; the clarity of thought and the focus he’d found in the big inflatable Disconnection Temple at the Festival. We thought it’d be great to build a small space for disconnection at the centre of our new house. We called our neighbourhood wallpaper vendor and asked him to use a copper mesh behind the wallpaper, to create a cocoon that banned stray signals from our sanctuary. This was three years ago.
We now hold all our family gatherings, discussions, and dinners in this room. It’s the closest experience to the calm my grandparents must have felt while visiting the neighbourhood shrine. It’s truly amazing that my son taught (or re-taught) us the meaning of true religion, a connection with ourselves that is experienced on a day-to-day basis. Devkiranbhai Parmar, 46 yrs old, Pune resident.
“With new signal sensor tech getting embedded into our new generation of implants and wearable fashion, the sheer volume of signals that surround us came into sharp focus and serious critique. The massive backlash against broadcasted signals and the helplessness of policy around it’s regulation has resulted in residents adopting their own measures. Due to this unprecedented interest in “Darkness” proliferating into the hospitality scene, companies like SafePapers have recently launched their copper mesh laced wallpaper series, to create Faraday-cage like rooms within existing hotels. The recently launched Dark B&Bs allow for conscious tourists to explore the dense urbanity of cities without exposing themselves to this weather storm of radiation. They are in the process of launching a zero-tolerance window protection as well, to filter out any outside signals. With the high adoption rates in urban environments, these are fast becoming the go-to materials to combat network pollution. India Focus, article January 2035
“As a newly married couple holding down three jobs each, we were extremely mindful of the sanctity of our sex lives. Recent reports surfacing around long-term exposure to low frequency Electromotive Force that significantly decreased sperm count put us in panic mode as we were struggling to conceive. In a casual survey of our building, we realised that most residents were either suffering dull headaches or mood shifts, and most suspected the nearby signal hotspots. We insisted on getting in Dark consultants to audit our signal leakages and suggest plugs for our building. Being one of the largest housing societies to implement this system, we hope it will set a benchmark for other societies too.
Builders are now increasingly building Dark Bedrooms and promoting them as procreation heavens, with increased chances of conceiving healthy offsprings. The increasing reports of mind-blowing sex according to news clippings are triggering a lot of curiosity in the new Faraday-enhanced rooms.� Parivesh and Monika Sharma, Mumbai 2035.
Welcome to your new Digital Diet. Adherence is Critical.