Mind the stimulus-response gap
On hucksters and their hustles, the "Gutenberg Parenthesis", and one of the best habits to impress on young minds so that they don't become peasant-brains
Political scientist Seva Gunitsky offers an excellent tongue-in-cheek guide to what intelligent people can do in a world where oral traditions overtake the written word all over the place (a process he calls “the rise of Medieval Peasant Brain”). The best line: Do modern-day peasants “know that vitamins are an Ancestral Vitality Stack? Leverage your elite vocabulary to write that TikTok script.”
■ Lines like that are hilarious because they hurt: The truth of the joke is what forces us, like Lincoln, to choose to laugh in order not to cry. It is too soon to call this the terminal bracket of a “Gutenberg Parenthesis” of written-word literacy, but it is high time to make sure that certain literate habits are molded especially into the minds of the young.
■ One of those habits is to learn to shut off the feeds that automatically project a recommended video straight into the eyeballs on YouTube, Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok, or wherever else. There’s a natural human instinct to feel compelled to keep watching -- it’s a social-media-enhanced version of FOMO -- but it can be circumvented by using bookmarks, “watch later” playlists, or simply emailing links to oneself instead of watching them on autoplay.
■ Most of the time, the simple act of imposing a tiny gap between stimulus (being fed a video by an algorithm) and response (taking the time to watch later) is enough to substantially diminish the urge to watch. That stimulus-response gap, often associated with positive psychology, is exactly the kind of tool that needs to be cultivated at a time when so many factors are conspiring to steal precious time through unthinking passive consumption.