How can we defend ourselves from the new plague of human fracking'?

"It has been driven by a remarkable new way of extracting money from human beings: call it human fracking. Just as petroleum frackers pump high-pressure, high-volume detergents into the ground to force a little monetisable black gold to the surface, human frackers pump high-pressure, high-volume detergent into our faces (in the form of endless streams of addictive slop and maximally disruptive user-generated content), to force a slurry of human attention to the surface,"

"where they can collect it, and take it to market. Fracking (of the Earth and of our minds) produces tectonic instability, toxicity and the despoliation of our landscapes, natural and social. We now know that the heedless exploitation of our external environment has been so relentless and irresponsible that human survival on Earth has been placed in actual jeopardy. The new gold rush into the inner environment of the human psyche is well on its way to effecting parallel, if even more insidious destruction."

In the last fifteen years, smartphone ubiquity and platform-driven internet access have reshaped everyday personhood, with nearly 70% global smartphone ownership and screens occupying roughly half waking hours. Powerful digital platforms monetize attention by designing addictive, disruptive streams of user-generated content that harvest concentrated human attention for profit. The metaphor of human fracking captures the high-volume, high-pressure extraction of attention, producing social and psychological toxicity analogous to environmental fracking. This exploitation threatens social landscapes and may jeopardize human survival by eroding capacities to care, think, and direct attention toward oneself, others, and the world.

Read at www.theguardian.com