The following are a couple of books I finished reading last month. I've also included some affiliate links to Bookshop.org in case you want to pick up any of the books mentioned. Support your local bookstore and your new favorite author all at the same time!
The Battle for Your Brain
I first encountered this book after listening to Emily Jahinsky interview the author for her podcast at The Federalist. Now, I unknowingly encountered the author earlier in a video put out by Jimmy Dore, but I had no idea these were the same person, and Dore's video had no bearing on my decision to read this book. Farahany's main point with the book is to advocate for a new set of rights which she labels "cognitive liberty," a set of rights that must be protected in the wake of technologies that can interpret your thoughts and use data your own body produces against you.; which she sees as necessary in the wake of technologies like what she describes here:
[Clip about mind reading earbuds]
She goes on to say in the book that:
The average tech-savvy person can now "see" their emotions, arousal, and alertness, and track how effectively they are meditating... Neurotechnology can tell us if we're wired to be conservative or liberal, whether our insomnia is as bad as we think," and if we're in love with someone or just "in lust..."Neurotech devices can also track changes in certain brain regions associated with the onset of conditions like Alzheimer’s disease, schizophrenia, and dementia.1
But it doesn't stop there. There's technology that implant advertising in your dreams. There's tech that can use your brainwaves to detect your relationship to crime scene evidence without you having to move your lips. There's even tech, straight out of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, that can wipe your memory. In some countries, the use of mind-penetrating technologies like these is a precondition for employment--and we are rapidly running out of runway to protect people from being forced into this system the way we were forced into internet in our pockets.
The good news is there's still a bit of time to enshrine protections for individuals. She makes a lot of great arguments for protecting people from having corporations profit of the sale of cognitive data but at the same time, makes concessions for the use of it by governments when it becomes in the interest of the public good. I'd go a step further and say that penetrating the mind in any capacity, especially by a government, is a severe violation of bodily autonomy. But my biggest concern is in the widespread adoption of this technology for the purpose of creating a frictionless onramp to transhumanism.
The book goes into detail in the final chapter about the debate between the transhumanists and the bioconservatives, which upon first read feels like the imposition of politics into yet another sphere of discussion but its tenets I can mostly agree with. What makes us as humans unique among the animal kingdom is worth preserving, and outsourcing our cognitive function to corporations who can use that data to engineer the experience of our lives with the false promise of improving our cognitive function (when chances are just as likely that they will atrophy the very functions they purport to enhance) is a recipe for disaster, especially if the beta version of this in the form of smartphones is anything to go by.
There is potential to have the base functionality of the human mind strip mined for profit; robbed from us under the guise of convenience and the privilege of what we had already sold back to us at a profit. This frightens me to my core, because it seems the core operating ethic of capitalism in the 21st century is to find ways to take from us what we already have and sell it back to us as a service. People already don't remember phone numbers for their closest relatives and can't drive without access to GPS; imagine a world where even the ability to think requires a crutch. I don't want that world for me, and I certainly don't want it for my children.
If that speaks to you at all, read this book and call your congress person. If you know someone who can get this more directly in front of such a person, get them to do that as well.
The next book I finished in August is also somewhat related to the *beta version* of this tech I mentioned earlier.
Irresistible
This book came up a few times in other books I was reading earlier this year, particularly Maryanne Wolf's Reader, Come Home & Cal Newport's Digital Minimalism. It was also referenced in the rerelease epilogue for Nicholas Carr's The Shallows, so after seeing it pop up three separate times, it shot up to the top of my list of next books to read. It was also one of the main motivating factors behind my choice to switch over to a dumbphone for a month, which is a story for another time.
Alter is an associate professor of marketing at NYU's Stern School of Business, and details how technology companies are strip-mining our attention for profit, to the detriment of our personal lives and mental health. A lot of the things he talks about, from terms like *dopamine* to *variable reward schedules* have found their way into the cultural conversation around our smartphones--including the ones I have among my family.
What *hasn't* found it's way into that conversation yet, and Alter demonstrates in the opening chapter of Irresistible, is how many of Silicon Valley's most vocal technologists do not use this technology themselves and they absolutely do not let their children use it. Sean Parker, the first president of Facebook admitted that the social network was designed from the beginning to exploit "a vulnerability in human psychology." The designers of these systems "understood this consciously, and we did it anyway."2 Chamath Palihapitiya, another former Facebook executive, stated that "You don’t realize it, but you are being programmed."3
Silicon Valley’s business model isn’t far removed from that of Las Vegas casinos, as detailed in both Irresistible and from this quote in The Shallows:
The goal of the programming is to maximize "time on device" a term common both to Las Vegas and Silicon Valley. The Internet industry may have begun in idealism, but it's now powered by a manipulative and very lucrative feedback loop. The more we use our phones, the more data social media companies amass on the way our minds respond to stimuli. They use that information to make their apps even more addictive. And the money rolls in... Mind control will be automated. Steve Jobs told us we'd have our lives in our pockets. He didn't warn us about the pickpockets.4
By the way, Steve Jobs, the man who once called the personal computer "a bicycle for the mind" refused to let his children use an iPad. If it's okay for us, but not okay for them, what are we not being told? Much of what's being left out of that conversation is found here in Alter's book. If you have kids, or are thinking about having them, you have to understand the relationship between them and their screens and Irresistible is one of many great reads on the subject, of which I've included some at the bottom. If you're at all interested in why smartphones are so hard to put down, Irresistible is a must read.
Wrap Up
Thanks for reading this inaugural version of my Reading Roundup. I plan to post more frequently on Substack as the year rounds out and into the next. In some ways, a manner of procrastinating on my next novel an in others, a way to make sure people even know it exists. I’m looking forward to sharing more about that when the time is right, so make sure to subscribe so you know as soon as that happens.
Books Mentioned
The Battle for Your Brain by Nita Farahany
Irresistible by Adam Alter
Reader Come Home by Maryanne Wolf
Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport
Books on Children and Screens
iGen by Jean Twenge
Dopamine Nation by Anna Lembke
Nita Farahany, The Battle for Your Brain (New York: St. Marin’s Press, 2022): 3-4
Erica Pandey, "Sean Parker: Facebook Was Designed to Exploit Human Vulnerability," *Axios*, November 9, 2017
Amy B. Wang, "Former Facebook VP Says Social media is Destroying Society with 'Dopamine Driven Feedback Loops," *Washington Post,* December 12, 2017
Nicholas Carr, The Shallows (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010): 230