181 - Digital Walls

As I sat in a "co-working" space, within a "co-living" location, in one of the more popular destinations for digital nomads, I pondered to myself why this would appeal to anyone. If you take a typical cubicle-based work environment, remove the physical barriers, but also remove any connection to or knowledge of other people in the room, you get a "co-working" space. Everyone silently kept to themselves for all of those hours, glued to their screens and dead to the world.

Have humans grown so desperate for socialization that this serves as some kind of mild supplement? Much like the concept of parasocial activity on streaming platforms, I see no viable added value from this, as such environments risk the reinforcement of neuroticism for those whom they may appeal to.

Many humans may have escaped the literal cubicles, but for every literal wall that has been shed, it seems like several new imaginary walls have been added. People have grown to strongly associate specific activities, like forms of socialization, with specific apps and platforms, often at the exclusion of considering such activities in other common contexts.

Want to meet new people? Plenty of apps will claim to offer you means of doing that, each attempting to sell their own services, as well as those of advertisers, and often tickets to events. The free and naturally occurring ways of meeting new people are pushed away, as services build on a plausible-sounding, but often wrong, proposition of doing a better job in less time.

Anything more specific along the same lines also becomes increasingly broken and detrimental, such as specifically seeking people who are hiring, who are looking for romance, or who have some specific expertise to offer. The adversarial illusion of functional options operates directly at the expense of both those who use the services and any alternatives that could actually deliver what the illusion only promises.

As human decision-making is fundamentally emotional, and societies, as well as learning processes, are primarily social, there are few things that are capable of more severe, widely distributed, and long-term harm than digging 1,000 emotional spike pits and listing them on app stores and at the top of search results. Bad actors have long understood that compromising the emotional health of an individual can reliably cripple their decision-making capacities, leaving them addicted, predictable, and easy to "farm" in an "attention economy". This dystopian kind of maladaptation has already gone through several generations of digital era refinement.

For such hyper-complex problems the vast majority of possible, and even plausible-sounding, configurations for proposed solutions are demonstrably wrong. However, people will gladly pay for demonstrably wrong services in droves when viable alternatives are hidden or taken from them.

Humanity evolved via iterative "good enough" mechanisms of evolution, but those mechanisms were never designed to handle the levels of globalized and technological hyper-complexity we now face. While humanity has guarded the gates against nuclear and biological weapons, the cognitive and emotional gates have been overrun, with the pillaging of humanity well underway.