Ivan Bogachev

Dancing girl? Fire! Puppy? Aww! Shooting? Angry! Request? Response! Honeymoon? Heart! Request? Response! Lady in a club? Devil! Request? Response. System? System. Request? Response. Interlinked? Interlinked. Request? Response. Interlinked. Interlinked. We're done. You can pick up your snack.

Have you heard about Pavlov's dog and all those experiments around classical conditioning? These days we exploit all of that knowledge to make you repeat actions on social media platforms and related services. You're like a test dog now.

We train armies of consumers to produce reactions from curated lists to stimuli from other lists. We write software that replaces supervisors in those experiments and rings the "reward bell" for you. Lazy consumption (11 + 14) turns into a well-structured race with forced rules and goals that you have to achieve while consuming to get more stuff to consume.

These patterns of behavior are not designed to work in that environment. Things can get sideways really fast. You may not want to stop consuming, but now you need additional actions to handle the pressure. It's easy to accidentally stack a set of incompatible patterns and get a full house of mental problems.

On top of that, overstimulation with information is one of the standard DoS attacks. Your CPU and memory are 100% loaded, but you use only a fraction of that computing power for your real-life tasks. Your system loses its efficiency. The hardware is functional, but it takes ages to process any complex material.

This is a disaster for iPad kids. It greatly slows down their development. Their internal worlds are smaller than expected. Behavior doesn't match their age. Lack of basic skills. No goals. No values to fight for. Just a void in their hearts and a list of standardized reactions to choose from.

It's difficult to revert conditioning. We don't have a Ctrl+Z shortcut in our brains. If you want to get out, stop scrolling and buying, and get resources to do other things, you'll have to do that the hard way, like a proper junkie.

It may look like future generations are doomed, but is that true? I mean, only 2 out of 16 patterns of behavior of class I can be deeply affected. They become prevalent in developed countries, but they're not the only ones. We have other options as well.

This whole "kids can't read" situation is a part of consumer culture. We didn't inherit any highly regulated races for the title of the best consumer of the year from nature. We created them as sets of collective rules with some contradictions. Will you force your kids to follow them or not is totally up to you.