Has Your Attention Been Hacked?

(First published on Kiltr Jan 2017)

How many beautiful ways are there to start your day without looking at your phone? Without checking your email or social media feeds? Surely checking a news feed is different, right?

That sleak piece of tech in your hand is loaded with code, in its hardware and in all the apps you’ve added. And somewhere along the way, they’ve developed a creepy synchronicity with some of your most primitive desires. Its absolutely clear that for many unfortunate souls, the tech plays them like a fiddle.

Not just the tech but the thousands of employees behind it, behind the networks which carry its lifeblood, working algorithms, mechanising, codifying your attention. Convincing you a day spent online, working social media, is still being ‘productive’. Or at least fooling your dopamine responses into convincing you of it. That junky itch to glance at your phone, just a little hit to see you through, is an understandable reaction to apps, media, websites engineered to get you clicking and scrolling as often as possible in what Tristan Harris calls a ‘race to the bottom of the brain stem’.

It's true for some that online connection, to community or information, is and should remain non-negotiable. I don’t mean the countless numbers who have grown up with the technology and find contemplation of its absence absurd, almost beyond their concept of reality, they’re the opposite of what I mean. I mean those in isolation to whom it is a vital lifeline. If your only connection to any kind of community, to humanity, to empathy is online, disconnection could be an act of self harm.

Are you in the vanguard of social change, leading resistance? Do you only leverage your networks for the forces of good? Really? When you do that, do you wholly own your attention?

Of course its been a long, interconnected (what else?) road getting to here and we all have our twists and turns we’ve taken along the way, but the wider push, the increasingly dominant narrative has been the same for us all. Maybe you think talk of ‘digital detox’ is the latest tech hipster fad. Or even that angst around 'disconnecting' and social media addiction are uniquely 'first world problems', a matter of privilege. Maybe they are, maybe more besides. Perhaps there are other stories to tell.

Indulge me a little if you will in asking for a little of your overstretched attention, not demanding, co-opting, manipulating, weaponising or mechanising it. Just telling a story. It's what we do, us humans, to make sense of the world, the universe around us, we tell stories. This is just a short one, an aside if you will. Its relevant. Its about hacking.

Some seven years ago, I contacted the property developer in my home town I was working on a project with. It was an excited call. We’d been developing a mutual trust.

See, he owned a big, old building, which had lain empty for years. On my recommendations, he’d sub-divided into smaller, more manageable units, which I marketed and managed as creatives’ business space.

He was then a seventy year old man, used to spending most of his year either at or sailing out from his property in the south of France. The building I managed, as well as running a small design/music studio and cafe with my partner in, was supposed to augment his pension. He wanted the arrangement to be as ‘hands off’ from his end as possible. As long as the rent coming in met our agreed amount, he was happy.

My excited call was because not only had we exceeded that amount for over a year but I'd also signed a year’s lease with new tenants on the last available unit that morning, putting us at full capacity. Given the negotiated rental fees (still well below ‘market’ value), we would be running at double our agreed figure. Things were looking rosy.

My excitability was threefold; because I’d doubled my target expectations; because I’d managed to fill 14 units in a town strewn with ‘To Let’ signs and because I’d filled them all with creative enterprises which complemented each other. I was additionally very much looking forward to seeing how our new tenants' business model developed.

‘Go on then, tell me what it is they do. I can tell your dying to say!’, my business partner’s voice crackled down the line.

‘Well, as far as I know, they’ll be opening up, certainly Fife’s first, possibly one of Scotland’s earliest, dedicated Hackspaces!’

If I’d taken a beat between my enthusiasms, I could have pre-empted the stony silence. I should have known the images the words would have conjured in the imagination of a seventy year old man, whose laptop I was always having to ‘work’ on. Usually because something relatively simple had happened on his travels and he just couldn’t get it to function; the kind of thing which takes a minute or two in browser or desktop settings and would have me passing his machine back to him amid his exclamations of wonder. When I tried to explain what I’d done, even though I’d demonstrate slowly and speak in layman’s terms, his eyes would glaze over. Ultimately he’d ask ‘If it happens again, you can fix it easily enough again though?’

So I should have known what that word would have done. Its black hat has been popping up ubiquitously recently, maybe you can relate. Hack. There it is, what did you see?

For my septuagenarian friend, I should have known the word would conjur up post-cold war images of some kind of pop-up, ready to run should the proverbial hit the fan, outsourced Kremlin outpost at best.  At worst, as it may be for most non-tech minded peeps of any generation, the words ‘hack’ or ‘hacking’ are imbued, dripping with sinister seeming ideas of using sophisticated ‘coding’ skills to break the security of a corporate or governmental system for illicit purposes, possibly even the downfall of civilisation as we know it!

Putting aside for a moment our new tenants’ Hackspace’s tenuous relationship to coding for networked systems, it's worth noting here, for the sake of clarity, most self-identified hackers, from the outset of said systems’ evolution, weren’t necessarily involved in either espionage and/or cruelty. During the 1990s teenage hackers wanted to break into computer systems of major institutions, especially those which symbolised or were part of any ‘security establishment’ simply to show they could. Their aim, certainly, was to achieve a sense of power, any power at all within systems designed to render them powerless. It was all fun and games until someone lost an eye or, you know, got arrested.

What those early ‘hackers’ did was to simply extend the original idea of what a ‘hack’ should be. Neither their interpretation nor the original definitions were redolent with the black hat associations most people assign to the words now.

Early definitions of the word ‘hacker’ were ‘A person who enjoys learning the details of programming systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary’; and the slightly wider ‘A person who delights in having an intimate understanding of the internal workings of a system, computers and computer networks in particular’. What these highlight, as an inception and reference point, is that violation of security around technical, corporate or governmental systems were not necessarily the sole or even primary objective of many ‘hackers’. 'Hacking’ is, and has always been, about leveraging skills to push back the boundaries of organisational systems.

I filled that silence on the line with my business partner giving only a truncated explanation and bland reassurance. I knew he was due to return in the March and the briefest of visits to the Hackspace would allay his misgivings. These guys were ‘life-hackers’. They’d be holding workshops for makers, thinkers and doers. Sure, one or two of them had coding skills. The closest they’d get to using them for evil ‘plotting’ was for the axes of their self-built, rickety 3D printer.

To give my developer friend credit where its due, his first response may have had as much of the post cold war, cyber espionage based understanding about it (or even be just as oblique) as this type of link...

...yet when introduced to the technology, given the right information, and the ‘hackers’, he became fascinated and it kicked off a resurgent interest in all things technological, turning him into a veritable ‘silver surfer’ defying, like not a few others, the generational stereotypes. His second question on our calls, after the inevitable bottom line led essentials, became always, ‘Have they printed anything with that machine yet? I’m counting on those boys to replace this dodgy old ticker of mine!’. Thing is, there never seemed to be any doubt who was in control of the attention he gave it.

Since those late cold war and early post-cold war days, ‘hackers’, in the technical and wider sense, have attempted to leverage a mix of technical and social engineering skills to challenge, reconfigure if possible, networks of power. Yes, some still insist it needs to remain ‘for fun’. Others have found lucrative ways to turn a profit, driven by dollars, pound and Bitcoin signs. Others still are motivated by ideology. It is a burgeoning field and by no means the niche interest it once was, especially since some have been, and are increasingly, intent on attacking how information is supplied and presented to the attention economy.

As with so many internet based phenomena, this didn’t begin as an ideological or political crusade. It began with a teenager, in 2003, looking to share pornography and anime.

He started an image board based site derived from a Japanese trend called 4chan. As the site’s popularity grew, so did issues with managing the volume of traffic whilst still storing the inceasing amount of file data. The site began deleting older files as newer ones were updated. Frustrated users, disappointed at the loss of their favourite images would repost them with slight modifications. This gave birth to what we now call internet ‘meme culture’. Yes, LolCatz too.

These were some of the earliest notions of attention on or information about things ‘going viral’ due to emergent social media trends. People began producing memes for fun.

As social media and meme culture evolved in their dastardly synchronicity, a new generation of ‘hackers’ shifted their focus away from security infrastructures and began to find ways to attack the nascent attention economy, in hopes of manipulating the media narrative. In many ways this impulse was similar to initial ‘hacks’ on security; it was an assertion of ability to control the stories we tell ourselves, of power exercised by those who traditional media narratives, particularly in the post 2008 financial crash era, and the symbiotic support between it and entrenched social structures and dynamics, would render powerless.

By engaging in these campaigns, participants learned how to shape information within a networked technological ecosystem. They learned to design information to spread quickly and widely across social media. They were not alone in learning how to ‘game’ the system, in learning how to manipulate its underlying algorithms in attempting to undermine the structures of both old and new media.

At one end of this spectrum a sense of a legitimate ‘social media marketing’ evolved. The trends it shared with other forms of disruptive practice made it difficult to determine where the boundaries were between those ‘hacking’ for ‘legitimate’ reasons, those doing so ‘just for fun’, those doing so for cynical profiteering and those with other ideological ends and intent.

Social media and all its attendant nascent networks created new pathways to manipulate information as it reached wider audiences, and in how that information was delivered and consumed. As marketers claimed the future, activists broke down new frontiers and political campaigning was reborn, a new form of propagandising gave common ground to them all.

The psychologies and attendant language which evolved, grew out of the interplay between different networks disrupting old and new media, as ‘information intermediaries’, with a whole spectrum of ideological motivations. Norms and tactics shifted with them. Techniques like ‘doxing’ and ‘swatting’ emerged. Politicised, disruptive elements from across the spectrum began using the tools of the new media to do personal, emotional, psychological, reputational and social harm to groups, companies and individuals, to those seen as ‘opposing’ them.

This became nowhere more apparent than in the emergent ‘men’s rights activists’ network, which began pushing a politicised agenda to ‘counter’ feminist ideology. Alongside this emerged the growing use of the practice and term ‘gaslighting’. The ugly, insidious nature of the practice seems to work effectively (which is in no way to condone it, just an underlining of how nefarious it has been allowed to become) in an information ecosystem where it is possible to share information in such a distributed way as to make it unclear what is ‘legitimate’ information, what is ‘fake’ and what is ‘propaganda’.

As has become increasingly apparent with the rise of populist ideologues and previously unlikely alliances in the post truth quest for disrupted political power, these new and evolving tactics became, have become, increasingly efficient at sowing doubt and mistrust among the public, the polity, in democratic and/or supposedly dispersed power based institutions, in the corrupting systems of entrenchment and support for them through information intermediaries. It has become an age old lesson in asking for a consensus of opposition based only on what it is ‘against’, leaving a vacuum, which politics, like nature, abhors, in its place rather than finding that agreement, that consensus, in what it is ‘for’.

Where civic minded hackers, in all their guises, may have leveraged new communications platforms to speak truth to power, ultimately their tactics were co-opted in the quest for power over truth. If Arab Spring, Occupy, Black Lives Matter and yes, the Yes Movement, energised progressives as ‘proof’ that technologies could make a new kind of civil life possible, that proof also enabled the populists and dog whistle blowers to have a far greater reach in assuming their place in it too.

As political establishments, law enforcers, corporate marketers and hate groups have scaled up and built capacity at manipulating the new media landscape, it becomes increasingly difficult to draw red lines about disruption, about what is socially and morally acceptable in that environment. What has unfolded, is unfolding, is difficult to manage.

Harassment, self-censorship, fear, ‘fake news’, ugly bias, misinformation, disinformation and propaganda were not on many people’s wish lists around the promise of a networked world. It has become a common practice to encode ideas so access to content does not preclude access to meaning or import. The very companies which built the tools for communication fully admit to difficulties in combating abuse of them. Institutions and legal instruments designed to stop abuse find themselves ill equipped to function in light of ever changing, evolving, networked dynamics.

And for you, me, the individual at the centre of our personal maelstrom, the answer may lie not out there but in our ailing synapses and primitive responses.

Understanding of dopamine responses has moved beyond the simplistic notions of a reward circuit as more sophisticated neuroimaging techniques define brain areas and functions more precisely. The key to that inability to stop checking, refreshing, checking again, updating, posting, repeating it all again on social media is in the mesolimbic dopamine system.

The ventral tegmental neurons, in the brain’s mesolimbic system, were thought to be reward neurons and the entire mesolimbic system, the brain’s reward circuit. More recent studies, however, have found that this overlooks its role in motivation. Earlier studies are now seen as too simplistic, often because neuroimaging techniques could not detect the specific areas where these effects were taking place or how they were linked.

Studies now have reached something of a consensus. If this dopamine circuit is disrupted, the ‘pleasures’ resulting from addiction remain. It is something of a cliché, but nonetheless a prevalent finding, of addiction study that even though the pleasure of an addiction may be long gone, ‘stopping’ is still nigh impossible without assistance of some kind for many addicts. The area responsible for this behaviour is the nucleus accumbens and it is as much dedicated to the anticipation of reward and pleasure as it to pleasure and reward in and of themselves.

There are two systems within the mesolimbic system: the ‘wanting’ system and the ‘liking’ system. The wanting system is dopamine based and the liking system opioid, but they are interactive. The wanting system keeps you going back for more. The liking system becomes sated. The wanting system ignores and overrides the sated signals and keeps right on wanting. The dopamine neurons keep anticipating rewards and are excited by larger than predicted or expected rewards, dictating repeated behaviours to repeat the rewards. A dopamine loop keeps you wanting more and is never sated.

So, checking your social media platforms for likes, comments, notification, retweets, coupled with the variable ‘reward’ schedule they determine and its unpredictable frequency, its almost as if the whole thing is designed to keep you tweaking.

Is it as simple as Obama’s imploring of the people of America, in his farewell address, ‘if your tired of arguing with people on the internet, speak to them (just people in general, not the ones you argue with on the internet, has he never heard of catfishing?) in real life’? Will cold turkey stop you wanting?

In the ongoing heat of the battles to come, perhaps the most defining of our era and for all to come hereafter, between hierarchies and networks, the surprising twist has been that the latter has been hacked by the former. The 'gig' economy has coupled the tools of the attention economy to livelihoods, has 'hacked' them. And that's before we worry about the increasing reliance of refugee and enforced migrants (with climate refugees set to add even greater weight to their numbers, particularly if US climate policy flies increasingly in the face of international agreements, as seems likely given the indications by the President elect on the campaign trail and his appointments to his cabinet since election) on smart phone technology, wifi and social media.

Given some of the history, given the stories we tell ourselves and how they are changing the way we think and act, ask yourself, in all seriousness and answer with thorough candour, has your attention been hacked? And how can you hack it back?

(Thanks for reading. I realise this was a longer, dry piece, without my customary breaking it up with some comedic video interludes. As a little dopamine, reward type affair, for sticking with me to here, the bitter end, here's a little of my go to guy at the mo, the indefatigueable Reggie Watts, Live at Central Park...it's relevant, tenuously, because in the breakdown, around 5.00, he does a sweet lil riff on organisms, organisation and hacking, amongst a plethora of other things...Y'know, sometimes you just gotta feel this shit inside yourself, y'know?🤓 enjoy, and maybe give it a little bass!✊🏻)