Flow and Focus

I heard Johann Hari on the Megyn Kelly show several weeks ago and immediately ordered his book. He was talking about the way in which technology has destroyed our attention span. His book is Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention - and How to Think Deeply Again. It is well-written, clever, and thoroughly absorbing. My only criticism would be that Hari unquestioningly accepts that we are in a global warming climate emergency caused by carbon dioxide emissions, he assumes manipulation of social media for nefarious political purposes is perpetrated only by the political right, and he also uncritically accepts the reality and severity of the pandemic. The book is not about these issues, each of those obviously could be books in themselves, and on the question of how the modern world is stealing our ability to focus and shrinking our attention span it is excellent, a genuine ‘must read’.

What grabbed me when I heard Hari’s interview was how relevant this discussion was to the strange looking-glass world we had found ourselves in over the last two years. Dr Robert Malone’s viral podcast with Joe Rogan went viral as much because of his reference to Matthias Desmet’s idea of mass formation (psychosis) as because of anything he said about the vaccines or Coronavirus. The internet was awash with pathetically transparent ‘fact checks’ intended to mock, diminish, and discredit Dr Desmet’s theory, which was probably an indication of how rattled the powers trying to push the Covid narrative were by this analysis of what was going on in our strangely hypnotised societies.

In his discussion of the theory Dr Desmet explains that over the last decades society has become increasingly fractured in part due to people being engaged in ‘bullshit jobs’ . When people feel as if their lives lack meaning and purpose they are subject to free-floating anxiety, which in turn makes them vulnerable to being preyed upon by manipulative elements. We are familiar with this process in advertising. A television advert will first create anxiety in the viewer that their teeth are not white enough or their breath is not fresh enough, and then provide the solution in the form of toothpaste or mouthwash . The consumer is presented with a double promise: that their teeth will be whiter and that their anxiety will go away.

Now this is being presented on a society-wide scale. Demagogues have always known how to manipulate anxious, weak societies. Hitler did this in the nineteen-thirties when German society was weakened economically, and pervaded by a sense of shame and insecurity at the loss of the First World War. People filled with anxiety and dread, to which there were no easy solutions and no specific target, were directed at a specific enemy and given a focus for hope.

In a similar way, when the 'pandemic' was presented in the press and by politicians it gave people a focus for their free-floating anxiety, which they may have experienced, strangely, as something of a relief. In addition, as the days and weeks unfolded, people were given actions and measures they could take in order to 'slow the spread', which gave them a sense of purpose, and were encouraged to feel that they were in this 'together' with neighbours, medical staff, even politicians, and public health officials. Suddenly they felt a feeling of social inclusion and community which they had been lacking and even though it was in the face of what they believed to be a serious threat, a pandemic, this sense of connection was almost heady.

Dr Desmet clearly argues that if people were more socially connected, and engaged in activities in their local communities, if they found their work more fulfilling and believed it had meaning, if they experienced mental calm, and were possessed of an ability to focus, concentrate, and think more critically, they might have been able to resist the manipulations of the coronavirus 'narrative'. Social connection, mental calm, fulfilling work also sound like the recipes for a happy life: an existence which is fulfilling and neither leaves us with untethered anxiety searching for a disaster to attach itself to, nor with frustrated energy looking for an outlet in the form of a cause to adhere to. Happy, fulfilled, occupied individuals in a thriving society would have been far more difficult to manipulate into a mass fear and a herd adherence to liberty-destroying rules and regulations.

At the time when I heard Johann Hari's interview I was about three quarters of the way through Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's hugely influential book Flow, published in 1992. I had read it once before a few years ago and returned to it now because I had been experiencing a tremendous amount of stress.

Of course many of us, especially those of us who have not been captivated, or captured, by the mainstream narrative have probably been experiencing possibly an even greater level of stress than those fully engaged in the community activity of fearing and fighting the depredations of a dangerous virus. We have not had the comfort of being surrounded by people who think the same way we do, and we have watched as society has become more and more hostile to our views and even our very person if we refuse to wear masks and to get 'vaccinated'. During this stress I had noticed my mind had become extremely scattered. I had so many pieces of information gleaned from so many podcasts and articles washing around in my head, and a multitude of half-formed ideas on what I should do to try to help the world back to a place of human flourishing and defeat whatever dark forces were at work in western society, that I found I could not choose what action to take and so constantly flitted from one idea to another, one activity to another, accomplishing nothing.

So I was reading Flow once again in an effort to remind myself of the activities I could engage in to try to bring my mind back to that state of energised but calm concentration that allowed not only creativity but productivity. I wanted to get stuff done.

Into this moment came the interview with Johann Hari. He spoke about becoming increasingly distracted by technology, primarily his phone. He talked about social media. I had been using Twitter a lot since the summer of 2020 as a way of finding news and connecting with views outside of the mainstream Covid narrative. I had also become aware of the amount of time my children spent on their phones, primarily on social media apps like TikTok and Instagram and how this was noticeably negatively affecting their mood, and their ability to concentrate. Hari talked about technical detoxing, and being in the present and engaging with the real world as a way of clawing back that ability to concentrate, read difficult books, and follow and develop trains of thought. He also discussed the ways in which tech companies design their products so they are attention-grabbing and addictive without any thought for the negative consequences of this on users, and also wider society.

His ideas struck a chord, and when I read the book I discovered they were developed in a clever, involving, and sympathetic way. He had spoken to psychologists who studied attention and addiction to devices, and he had spoken to the developers of the social media products that are designed to sap our time and concentration. What emerged was a picture of an industry really in need of regulation, a sense that to try to fight individually, with our own willpower against the pull of these powerfully designed apps was as hopeless as fighting individually against the expansion of our waistline when the world was filled with too much tasty, sugary, cheap food. The point being, that whilst it is possible to lose weight and even keep the weight off permanently, only a few individuals with a steely willpower succeed, and that as those few individuals stay slim, society as a whole continues to get fatter. In a similar way a few tough individuals may be able to limit their social media use and still maintain a high level of concentration and productivity in other realms, but as those few succeed, society as a whole becomes more and more addicted to social media, and less and less capable of prolonged, meaningful thought, or productive activity.

That is clearly a problem, not just for individuals but for society. Hari suggests it is time for some kind of legal framework to be put in place to limit individuals' exposure to such highly addictive apps.

My scepticism over the Coronavirus and the accompanying measures, pharmaceutical and societal, has led me to consider so much more than just how societies respond to health threats. I have thought about the structures of power: how social-media companies have been able to censor open debate so successfully; how it was possible to buy the compliance of mainstream media; how so many companies have all followed the same 'disease mitigation' strategies despite there being little proof of their effectiveness or indeed that the disease was any more threatening than an ordinary flu.

One of the answers to this puzzle I have come up with is the all-pervasive nature of technology and specifically social media. In a way the mainstream media, the nightly news shows, and the familiar, centuries-old newspapers could only fantasise about, social media has been able to manufacture consent more rapidly and more robustly than ever before. I suspect social media has been used clandestinely in ways we can only begin to imagine to manipulate and influence users into compliance with the required world view. From bot farms, to paid celebrities, fake accounts, to 'misinformation' labels, and the constant stream of big data emanating from every interaction, perhaps right down to eye-movements, and the resultant tweaking of content, tech companies have used a vast armoury of potent psychological tools against us and in the service of the desired narrative.

Tech companies contrive to suck our attention away from the real world into the world they are creating. In many ways, if we spend too much time on social media, we are already in the Metaverse. Everybody who uses social media has at some point or another emerged from a prolonged period of scrolling through a stream of outrage to run some essential errand and marvelled at the fact people are buying their cornflakes perfectly calmly, not screaming in each others faces about the latest celebrity controversy, no doubt itself manufactured by a PR company. The jarring contrast between the world social media created in our heads and reality is telling. Eventually if we stay in the realm of social media that will be our reality and as we go about our business that toxic mental reality will begin to seep out, like the Upside-down in Stranger Things, turning the world black.

Furthermore as well as destroying our peace of mind, our ability to interact constructively with each other, and our productivity and creativity, social media and the internet in general is gathering our data and using it against us. Our overlords, whoever they might be, have an incredible resource at their fingertips that no dictator has had before. Like a man in a boat looking down at a shoal of fish, our the masters can drop a pebble in the water and watch how we scatter. They have a constant, almost real time, readout of everything we are thinking and feeling, everything we 'google', everything we buy, and no doubt everything we text, email, and say on the phone should they so wish. They know what we are afraid of, they know what we think is going to happen. They know which parts of their stories we believe and which we don't. They have the greatest tool with which to manipulate us and the greatest panopticon from which to survey the results of their manipulations.

Are we screwed? No. Not yet at least. We can fight back by starving them of our information. We do this through VPNs, using browsers, like Brave, that do not track us or sell our information. We can do most of our shopping offline, even, if we are feeling very determined, in cash, so there is no record of what we purchased. We can buy a street atlas to our city and a road atlas to our country, switch off the satnav, take a non-GPS phone when we go out of the house. We can buy a fax, write letters, put the landline back in and call people instead of texting. We can stop updating social media with our every fleeting thought, drawing them a map to our hive mind.

All of that effectively minimises the power they exert over us through technology. With less data, they have less power, they may even see the value of their companies fall. The less insanely, GDP-of-a-small-country wealthy they are, the less power they have.

Next we regain our own power. Our power over our minds, our mental health. We engage our brains in fulfilling activities, we become productive again. If we have a bullshit job, we try, as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi suggests, to find the value in it, to do it to the best of our ability, to invent challenges and add interest. We at least make the most of the social interaction it provides and we resist the temptation to join the WFH crowd which will only imprison us with our abuser - the internet!

Further we find those activities which result in flow, creativity, productivity, and peace-of-mind. We connect with our community. We take a walk every day without AirPods and we listen to what there is to hear; birdsong, or traffic, waves washing the beach or people chatting in roadside cafes. We join a local library. We go to the local pub or restaurant regularly. We say hello to our neighbours, or at least wave. If there is local democratic political activity, council meetings and the like, we go, we listen and then when we have something worthwhile, constructive, and moderate to say, we say it. We keep our front garden tidy and maybe even make it beautiful. We read, or fix our rusty old bike, or play the piano.

We do all these things but most of all we don't go on social media. We don't hang out on Facebook for hours at a time demoralising ourselves and dissipating our useful energy. We don't think activism is a way of contributing to our community, we contribute to our community by being a gentle, helpful, tolerant member. If we want to organise a petition, save some trees, or cut some down, we spend time talking to people we know in our community first, and listening, finding out what those people think, taking on all the different points of view and then maybe deciding its not worth a petition after all or deciding it is, and taking gentle, enthusiastic volunteers with you for the ride. You can't please all the people all the time but you don't have to make it your mission to sow discord and misery by joining and amplifying every cause there is. Some things, perhaps most things you can let go.

But don't let this go. Don't let go of fighting back against the tech tyranny, the predator class tyranny, the one-size-fits-all-lets-globalise-everything tyranny. It used to be a McDonalds in every city, from Moscow to Bangkok, now they want to command-and-control the entirety of society. We are not going to let that happen. We are going to put our phones down, step out of the panopticon and remember how to be ungovernable.