Well shit gang I think we got a lil dementia
Early adopters: I think we got cooked.
Mass dementia might be the "rupture" Carney was referring to. Hear me out:
This might be what Christina Lagarde meant at Davos when she said, (notes in my last post) "I'm not exactly on the same page as Mark", she expressed that "rupture" was too strong a word and urged others in the room to "try to distinguish the signal from the noise". She urged, "we have to think about the people", "do we want to facilitate this terrible path that we have observed with the use of social media?", "we have a duty of truth..."
It makes sense that the ruling class would be mostly impervious to the worst effects of popular technology, especially consumer-targeted technology.
This condition affects emotional regulation, behavior, and motivation while preserving consciousness. Dr. Manfred Spitzer coined the term 'digital dementia,' highlighting the cognitive decline associated with excessive reliance on digital devices such as smartphones and Google, potentially exacerbating attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and memory loss. This condition mirrors terms like 'digital amnesia' and 'the Google Effect,' highlighting the brain's tendency to offload peripheral information, leading to panic and forgetfulness.
I've been off Instagram and Facebook for around a year and have been using my iPhone probably half as much as I used to, mostly because I took Meta products off my phone. The difference is insane. I can remember things again – details of the past couple decades I just couldn't access before. And I can think back to times when I joked about offloading my memory onto Instagram and Google, because I could feel it happening, but we were all doing the social media/Google thing and when you're busy as hell you tend to go with the flow. Plus I was really good at connecting with people online, it was cool to feel seen and stuff.
But yeah since being away from apps and using my phone less (plus years of diligent cognitive care like Lion's Mane and stretching/breathing), there have been moments where I can feel the lights switching back on.
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Prasanna Mohan mohanprasannarediffmail.com ✉Corresponding author.
The researcher who made that Bluesky map was a researcher of viral pathogen genomics. Could the shape of that map actually have been the formation of digital dementias?
And are AI/LLMs their forced solution?
We can't resist what we can't see. What if we can't see because smartphones and social media have scrambled our minds en masse? What if the largely offline ruling class has decided we're too demented to save?
The report/article is worth a read.
