A Hostage Negotiator's Guide to Cognitive Liberty

Faux reality, change catalysts, and burning the ships

Almond Blossom by Vincent van Gogh, 1890

While driving to the mall with my daughter a few days ago, she told me that to access her university’s student system, she had to install a facial recognition app on her phone. No alternative was offered. She said it was impossible to navigate the campus without a phone, as it was even needed to be granted access to certain buildings.

When we arrived at the mall, we first went to a large bookstore together so that I could place an order for

Mary Harrington

’s newly released Feminism Against Progress (which they chose not to physically carry in store). I was curtly told that they no longer place orders for customers as they want to encourage people to place them on their phones. “Really?” I incredulously replied. “I purposely come to the store to interact with people face-to-face, and now I am told to go back home, and do it online?” The customer experience representative - actual label on her tag - quipped, “Yep, this is what they want”.

At the next store, where we purchased some summer shirts, I noticed a sticker on the change room door, Need a place for your feelings to go?, and a QR code for a kids helpline. Even feelings get resolved online. At the cash register I commented that I could not take advantage of their 10% discount code as I don’t own a cell phone out of principle. “Why?” the cashier bluntly asked. “Because”, I said, “I believe in mental freedom and prefer to keep my mind shackle-free.” A moment of silence. “Huh”, was all she added.

Within half an hour the world had clearly told us that life now necessitates a digital dimension. Slowly but clearly those of us who choose to abstain from certain devices are rare aberrations met with curiosity or incomprehension.

Why should this matter?

The instances I relate here appear trivial in isolation. But as I have learned the hard way in my own life, darkness works in baby steps. When all of these small encroachments are accepted with a shoulder shrug, we may find ourselves so far removed from our basic humanness that we hardly recognize the image of God any longer.

Pilgrims in the Machine

discusses the transhumanist drive to replace human layers with technological layers, and the imperceptibility of this process. Quoting Mark Weiser, he remarks, “the most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.”

While technologies have shaped our daily lives since the Oldowan toolkit, they have never before cleaved us to a faux reality.¹ This faux reality is not tangible, yet incredibly sticky. In this digital dimension we are an involuntary commodity, engage in pseudo relationships, are groomed into narcissistic self-focus, all while losing touch with the material, natural world and people around us.

For many of us this faux reality is not just an aversive experience, and doesn’t only violate our conscience, but it shackles, imprisons, and enslaves us; we become hostages in our own lives.

How do we free ourselves? If our minds are held hostage, how do we move toward the goal of becoming again fully human and achieving cognitive liberty?

At the start of this month I invited readers to join in community for a 30-day digital detox. Some of you have related your experiences to me so far, describing how freeing it has been, but also how challenging it is to resist the lure of devices. Anyone who has tried to kick the digital habit, or who has attempted to pry a teenager’s eyes away from screens, knows how seemingly impossible changing these habits feels. A recent book by Jonah Berger The Catalyst - How to change anyone’s mind provides seeds for enacted hope. Although this is a book written by a marketing professor, it contains practicable insights for changing deep-set habits.

Berger uses the concept of different catalysts² to remove roadblocks to changing minds and habits rather than pushing harder. The traditional route to change is to “coax, convince, encourage, encourage, push, push, push”. Unfortunately it doesn’t work, and even worse, it often backfires and can cause increased resistance, tension, and frustration. Apparently we have an innate “anti-persuasion” system; when we are told not to do something it interferes with our deep-rooted need for autonomy and freedom. And so we resist.

A memorable and bizarre instance of this resistance was the “Tide Pod” craze that had droves of young people consume colorful detergent pods. Videos went viral and Proctor and Gamble, fearing the trend would destroy their slice of the pie in the $6.5 billion dollar U.S. detergent market, did the seemingly reasonable thing: the company told people to stop eating the pods. They went so far as to hire a celebrity football player to wag his finger in a commercial, saying, “no, no, no, no, no.” The inevitable result: more people started eating Tide Pods and poison control centres worked overtime.

The first catalyst for change is to lay out the truth and let people make their own decisions. In the “truth campaign” teens were not told to stop smoking. Instead organizers of the Teen Tobacco Summit laid out the facts and allowed teenagers to make their own decisions. This approach led to the most successful anti-smoking campaign ever launched in the U.S., preventing more than 450,000 students from starting to smoke; within a couple of years it cut teen smoking rates in half.

So what would it look like to lay out the truth on the use of digital devices? What comes to mind is a simple list of facts about social media use and their delivery devices. This list would include:

• anxiety (experienced by 87.7% of people if device is left at home)

• depression (time spend on social media is a significant predictor of depression for adolescents)

• persistent sadness and hopelessness (experienced by 57% of girls)

• loneliness (73% of youth always feel alone)

• addiction (users click, swipe, and tap their phone an average of 2617 times daily; amount of time spent using social media is significantly correlated with later levels of alcohol use.)

• increased risk of suicidality (30% of girls have seriously considered suicide and there is a 66% increased risk of suicide related outcomes if used more than 5 hours)

• attentional difficulties

• interference with memory formation

This list can be extended almost endlessly. After Babelreported on a study by Sapien Labs released today which found that, "the younger the age of getting the first smartphone, the worse the mental health that the young adult reports today". For a more comprehensive discussion of mental health sacrifices see From Feeding Moloch to Digital Minimalism as well as the Ledger of Harms by Tristan Harris’ Centre of Humane Technology.

Gamblers in Monte Carlo by Edvard Munch, 1891