Prisoners Of The Cyber Space – Click Delete to Save Your Mind

August 2019 (Wall Street International)*  — We are at the beginning of the 21^st century, which means these words will be read mostly by non-people: automata or stunned crowds that no longer act as individuals, words will be chopped up, atomized and turned into search engine keywords within industrial conglomerates of cloud computing, located around the world in remote, hidden places, words will be copied millions of times by algorithms designed to send an advertisement to someone, somewhere, who accidentally identifies itself with something I say.

Those words will be scanned, remixed and twisted by crowds of fast and lazy readers on wiki sites and added automatically under message chains. Reactions to my words will degenerate over and over again in absurd cables of nameless anonymous insults and unrelated polemics.

The algorithms will find correlations between those who read my words and their romantic adventures, their debts and, shortly, their genes. In the long run, these words will contribute to the fortunes of those few who have been able to position themselves as lords of computer chaos.

The wide range of destinations of these words will unfold almost completely in the lifeless world of pure information. Only in a small minority of cases these words will be read by real human eyes.

And yet it is you, the person, and a rarity among my readers, whom I hope to reach. The words here are written for people, not computers. There’s something I want to say: you have to really be someone before you can share what you are.

Less than a decade ago, the possibilities of the Web were still a promise full of hope.

Its commercial power was a fact, it was no longer difficult to see that it would transform any kind of industry forever, and the newly born social networks seemed able to achieve, quite perfectly, an old enlightened dream: connect individuals and allow them exchanging affections and information, so easily, that the origin of many of the human conflicts – the lack of communication, the lack of elements of judgment, the survival of frontiers that separate and distinguish the experiences of each other – could be minimized.

Addicts to attention

However, almost all of us seem to accept it for a simple reason: Internet have made us addicted to attention; what we most want is for them to pay attention to us.

Again, this is not new, but its scale has taken dangerous proportions: Without anything else to aspire than the attention of others, ordinary people often become idiots, because the greatest idiots receive the maximum attention. This intrinsic bias in favor of idiocy marks the functioning of all other parts of social networks.

Anyone who devotes some of their time, even a small part, to social networks has experienced it. It may not be very different from other addictions: it excites our brain, but we know it is wrong. So, what can we do? First let’s explain it a bit better, and a bit deeper. As I mentioned in a previous post, these are just few motives why it is necessary to control (or delete) your social media accounts: