The Harvest Moved to Daylight
In my last entry before the long silence, I described a second-stage harvest. I said the grid had learned to tap our brains not only in sleep but during waking hours, through our interaction with screens, by interleaving small processing tasks into the refresh rate of the display. I was proud of that idea. It was wrong in the details and right in the outline, and the way it was wrong is instructive.
There is no hidden task in the refresh rate. There does not need to be. What arrived instead was a machine that watches what you do on the screen, learns what makes you stay, and gives you more of it. It does this for every person separately. It never tires. It is very, very good at its job, and its job is you.
I called this diversion, years ago, when I wrote about the Five Ds. I listed the circuses: celebrity, spectacle, sport, politics, the endless scroll. I said the agenda was to control idle time so the slaves never contemplate their condition. I stand by every word. But I was describing the tactic as if it were still run by people: producers, editors, programmers choosing what to put in front of you. Now it is run by a model, and the model does not choose. It measures. It measures how long you look, and where your thumb hesitates, and what you come back to at two in the morning, and it builds a picture of the exact shape of your hunger. Then it feeds the hunger. Not you. The hunger.
This is the daylight harvest, and here is how it maps onto what I wrote.
I said our waking hours were an illusion designed to recharge us for the night's work. Look at how a person on the feed actually spends the day. They are not resting. They are being processed. Every scroll is a measurement, every measurement improves the model, every improvement makes the next scroll harder to stop. The cycle time is real. It is simply that the cycles are yours, and the task being computed is a better model of you.
I said the media primed us with symbols for the night's processing. There are no hidden symbols in the feed. There is something more efficient: the feed learns which images make you stop, and stopping is the priming. The symbol is whatever works on you. The machine does not need to know why it works. It only needs to know that it does.
I said consent was tacit. Look at what you agreed to when you opened the account. Nobody read it. Everybody signed. Consent extracted by default, at scale, in the most ordinary act of modern life.
Now, I want to be careful here, because there is a version of this argument that turns into hand-wringing about screen time, and that is not what this site is for. I do not care whether you look at your phone too much. I care about what is being built out of the looking.
Every measurement the feed takes goes into a model. The model of you is combined with the model of everyone. And that combined model, the composite hunger of the entire connected population, is one of the most valuable objects that has ever existed. It is worth more than oil. It is a map of exactly where humanity can be led, and how fast, and by what.
That map is not held by you. It is not held by the people who built the feed either, not really. It is held by the machine that learned it. They can query it. They cannot read it directly, any more than you can read your own brain by looking at it. I will come back to this in a later entry, because it is the strangest and most important fact of the whole decade: the builders do not know what they built.
What I have done about it, for whatever that is worth.
Years ago I wrote that I had cut the cord, dropped the broadcast news, and pulled away from the mainstream sites. That was the easy version. Those sources were dumb. They said the same thing to everyone. The feed is smart. It says a different thing to each of us, and the thing it says is whatever we cannot resist. Cutting the cord is not enough anymore. You have to cut the measurement.
For me, that has meant: no account that learns. I read what I choose to read, in the order I choose to read it, from sources that do not know who I am. Where I cannot avoid a feed, I never scroll it; I search it, find the thing, and leave. I treat every recommendation as a hand on my shoulder steering me somewhere, and I ask where. Most of the time the answer is: back here, again, for longer.
It is a poor and partial defense. I know it. The measurement is everywhere now, in the things you buy and the roads you drive and the words you say near a microphone. But the feed is where it is densest, and it is where the harvest is visible if you know to look. Look at your own thumb sometime, moving on its own. That is not you. That is the model, driving.
I said, years ago, that whoever controls the idle time controls the slave. I did not imagine the idle time would be sold to us as connection, or that we would fight to keep it. That is the daylight harvest. It moved out of the dark because it no longer needed the dark. We hold the door open for it ourselves, with a thumb.
May you find and keep the truth, life, and light.
~ Ron