I listened to TWiT this morning while I worked, as is my custom on Mondays. Leo and the gang, enthralling as ever, started talking about the funny, interesting and possibly detrimental reality of Farmville. Yes, Farmville. Leo referenced an article by A.J. Liskiewicz which discusses some of the more pernicious social engineering aspects of the colorfully addictive, eye glazing facebook game. A very interesting read that once and for all, explains what we have all know for a very long time: that Farmville is a very BAD game!

Leo’s co-host for the day, Tom Merritt, chimed in and added to the conversation by bringing up Geoffrey Miller’s provocative article (which I’m embarrassed to say I haven’t heard of until Merritt referenced it) about his theory of why we have not met aliens yet.

I suggest a different, even darker solution to the Paradox. Basically, I think the aliens don’t blow themselves up; they just get addicted to computer games. They forget to send radio signals or colonize space because they’re too busy with runaway consumerism and virtual-reality narcissism. They don’t need Sentinels to enslave them in a Matrix; they do it to themselves, just as we are doing today. Once they turn inwards to chase their shiny pennies of pleasure, they lose the cosmic plot. They become like a self-stimulating rat, pressing a bar to deliver electricity to its brain’s ventral tegmental area, which stimulates its nucleus accumbens to release dopamine, which feels…ever so good.

This playful observation Miller makes is astonishing and frightfully accurate. When I look around some days at our digital world, I see exactly what Miller describes, a world that is “too busy with runaway consumerism and virtual-reality narcissism.” He goes on to say:

The result is that we don’t seek reproductive success directly; we seek tasty foods that have tended to promote survival, and luscious mates who have tended to produce bright, healthy babies. The modern result? Fast food and pornography. Technology is fairly good at controlling external reality to promote real biological fitness, but it’s even better at delivering fake fitness—subjective cues of survival and reproduction without the real-world effects. Having real friends is so much more effort than watching Friends. Actually colonizing the galaxy would be so much harder than pretending to have done it when filming Star Wars or Serenity. The business of humanity has become entertainment, and entertainment is the business of feeding fake fitness cues to our brains.

Miller’s ideas are really interesting and raise quite a few questions about our use and mindless acceptance of technology and our inward looking, shiny penny chasing tenancies. I still firmly agree with the notion that to resist technology is like resisting the winds and tides, it is futile. However, understanding technology, and understanding how it shapes our minds and effects our relationships is essential. In a world where it is all too common for best friends who live down the street from each other to talk constantly online but physically interact with one another less than once a month, I’d think it is safe to say that some technologies (if not all) could have a dark side. The sooner we understand this, the sooner we can use the technology instead of the technology using us.

Tags:a-j- liskiewiczaliensfarmvillegeoffrey millerleo laportetom merrittTwit