By Eaon Pritchard
In my life, why do I give valuable time?
To people who don’t care if I live or die?
—The Smiths
The eminent Swiss scientist Conrad Gessner famously noted that ‘The modern world is overwhelming people with data and that this overabundance is both confusing and harmful to the mind.’
Indeed, the term information overload is now in the common vernacular. It was first coined around the early 1960s by the nascent management gurus, including Bertram Gross in the 1964 book, The Managing of Organisations, and was popularized by Alvin Toffler in his influential 1970 volume Future Shock.
To be fair, it’s worth noting that Gessner, for his part, had never sent an e-mail, minted an NFT, or conducted a lab meeting in the metaverse (i.e., a shared virtual environment that people access via the Internet). He had never even switched on a computer.
That’s not because he was a technophobe but because he died in 1565.
He was concerned about what he saw as the unmanageable flood of information that the printing press threatened.
Gessner was talking about Gutenberg’s movable type printing press – already nearly 100 years into operation – and the seminal event, which ushered in the modern of human history.
It played a key role in the development of the Enlightenment, the scientific revolution, and laid the foundations for the knowledge-based economy and the spread of learning to the masses.
So, he shouldn’t have worried, but complaints about new technology have happened throughout history, in a broadly similar fashion, with each generation reimagining the dangerous impacts of new technology particularly on the mind.
Panic
Other opponents of the early printing press were concerned that ‘Scribe monks are being put out of work’. (Wait until they hear about probabilistic, fuzzy-matching AIs.)
Then, the popular 19th-century novels by the likes of Jane Austen were viewed as a menace to bourgeois society for giving young women ‘unrealistic expectations of love and romance’.
(This may have been true for those unfortunates in a mining village around that time).
More recently, shoot-em-up video games have been said to cause violence in the streets. Although as the funnyman Jimmy Carr once noted, there are comedians all over TV but no one worries about spontaneous acts of comedy breaking out in the streets.
Facebook could raise your risk of cancer, online ads fund terrorism, Russian hackers are brainwashing the proles to vote for Trump and Brexit. Not a single shred of evidence supports any of these stories, but they make headlines across the world because they play to our recurrent – and innate – fears about new technology. Or more specifically, fear of the unknown.
Many evolutionary psychologists would agree that fear of the unknown may be the fundamental fear. And as we are about to enter into the next generation of the internet, somewhat unimaginatively titled web3, I’m going to posit that our Silicon Valley overlords have now got wise to fundamental fear and are designing their wares with this in mind.
Zuck and co know very well that to sell something surprising, you have to make it a little bit familiar. And to sell something familiar, you have to make it a little bit surprising. It is in this interplay between familiarity and surprise that the strongest appeal lives.
This is the key idea in the book Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction by science journalist Derek Thompson.
Star Wars is essentially a Western movie, set in space. On steroids.
Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want
The most interesting trend in the development of the Internet is not how it is changing people’s ways of thinking but how it is adapting to the way that people think.
—Steven Pinker
The idea of the supernormal stimulus was developed in the 1950s by biologist and ornithologist Nikolaas ‘Niko’ Tinbergen. He found that biologically salient objects, like beaks and eggs, generated more interest from his bird subjects when they were painted, pimped up, and blown up in size.
Evolution has designed male Australian jewel beetles to go after for cues of shiny amber-brown surfaces with the presence of dimples, as these were almost certain to be female beetles. This normal stimulus triggered a normal adaptive behavior. But Australian beer bottles – stubbies – give off these exact same cues, only much bigger and shinier.
Supernormal is a term that can be used to describe any stimulus that elicits a response stronger than the stimulus for which it evolved.
Junk food is a super stimulus version of real food to humans. Stuffing our faces with calories, drinking and taking drugs, and psychological junk food like gambling, obsessing over the lives of celebrities whom we are never likely to meet and competing for status at the office. These are just a few examples of common, and maladaptive, behaviors.
Of course, all of those new temptations mentioned are hard to resist, because they didn’t exist in the world our minds evolved to inhabit.
The successful products of the digital economy so far are the ones that mirrored and exaggerated these response mechanisms, and with the metaverse, psycho junk food supernormal stimuli are about to 10x (to use a Silicon Valley-ism).
Everything is sexier, cuter, sweeter, bigger, louder, and with more teeth.
The First of the Gang to Die
Amongst the more benign businesses already thriving in the nascent metaverse are digital dogs – a supernormal stimulus version of real pets – but the metaverse development is probably not good news for many real dogs. Already stuck inside again after briefly being the center of attention during COVID lockdown, soon to be replaced by cuter non-pooping simulations.
Less flippantly, it’s estimated that about 30 percent of the current internet content is pornography of some description and something in the region of 88 percent of that porn contains violence against women. The supernormal stimulus metaverse version of this is likely to be even more unpleasant. And don’t pretend that it’s not going to dominate. Remember it’s the socially awkward tech-bro fraternity who are building it.
Interestingly, one of the sub-plots in Simon Funk’s 2006 online psych-cyberpunk novella After Life – the main protagonist has worked out how to transfer consciousness from a biological brain into a computer – describes the stealth extermination of homo sapiens by artificial children that are much cuter and sweeter and more fun to raise than real children.
Tinbergen’s discovery of identifying the stimuli for fundamental instincts and then exaggerating these beyond anything in nature will continue to drive the natural selection of successful media.
And as the tech giants take more interest in evolutionary psychology, the metaverse strategy will become more deliberate. They want you to live, work, shop, play, and (kinda) mate inside.
Late last year, we sadly lost the ‘godfather of socio-biology’, Edward O. Wilson, but one of his insights remains prescient. ‘The real problem of humanity is the following: we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology’.
Every year, many people die playing basic online games for days without rest or food, but that’s no longer news. Who will be the first metaverse death? Maybe supernormal stimuli may even be the one weird trick to human extinction.
Until then, and to combat, the rest of us would do well to understand our own ancient mental mechanisms as the coming metaverse goes full tilt to hijack our circuitry.
Or don’t worry about it and just get your teledildonics freak on. It’s later than you think.
This article was edited by Lachezar Ivanov.
