"Social media algorithms keep us all hopelessly engaged. The data these platforms gather on us enable feeds to become fine-tuned to our exact interests, on top of turning our smartphones into glorified ad delivery devices. All this seems to be reaching its zenith with AI chatbots, which can masquerade as a close friend, therapist, doctor, and any subject matter expert all at once - keeping many users engaged in hours-long talks as they take the AI's responses as personal gospel."
"In sum, the advent of personal digital technologies, and our ensuing addiction to screens, means that nearly every aspect of our being can be codified, and therefore commodified. Now, one historian is calling this new way of extracting money from human beings "human fracking" - a term that aptly conjures the image of something that is wildly destructive and which works mainly by force-feeding."
""Just as petroleum frackers pump high-pressure, high-volume detergents into the ground to force a little monetizable black gold to the surface," writes D Graham Burnett, a professor of history at Princeton University, in an essay for The Guardian, "human frackers pump high-pressure, high-volume detergent into our faces (in the form of endless streams of addictive slop and maximally disruptive user-generated content), to force a slurry of human attention to the surface, where they can collect it, and take it to market.""
Social media algorithms optimize engagement by analyzing user data to tailor feeds and advertising, transforming smartphones into ad delivery devices. AI chatbots amplify engagement by imitating friends, therapists, doctors, and experts, prompting hours-long conversations and fostering deference to AI responses. The combination of pervasive personal technologies and screen addiction enables detailed codification and commodification of human behavior and attention. The phenomenon is characterized as 'human fracking,' where platforms force high-volume, disruptive content into users' perception to extract and market attention. This process frames individuals as 'attentional subjects' within a global grab for human consciousness. Infinite-scroll designs are a central mechanism driving sustained attention.
Read at Futurism
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