Worship, Attention, and the Baalgorithm

I propose that worship is none other than what we consciously attend to, moment to moment, in our daily lives. Whatever it is we pay attention to, we are implicitly worshipping.

-Thomas McConkie, “At One Ment

Some moons ago I tweeted something along the lines of “there is a god of the internet, the same old god Baal but back with a new trick- the algorithm.” This I portmanteaud into “Baalgorithm” to properly characterize the actual pernicious nature of the black box by which social media and internet companies generally have turned the internet from a true powerhouse of entertainment and learning into a constantly spiraling hellhole of outrage-mining and ignorance entrapment.

This positive feedback loop becomes more powerful with every interaction. You don’t need to consider this for long before you recognize its truth. Even the time spent scrolling past a post is considered as Baalgorithm devises what to feed you next. There are two sides to Baalgorithm as well- both for consumption and creation. Content creators and consumers alike are subject to the opaque oracular judgements. Some content creators reverse engineer the algorithm and find great success, just as those who sacrificed the right combination of cattle and other goods saw great harvests and riches. One can only imagine the TedX speeches from Canaanites who confirm if you just get up at early tide (modern 5:30 AM) and grind all day (wheat, of course), then you to like them could obtain much silver coin.

Baalgorithm is both pernicious and malicious. Its intent is harm and its effect is harm. See this quotation from Gloria Mark, chancellor’s professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine:

So back in 2004, we found the average attention span on any screen to be two and a half minutes on average. Throughout the years it became shorter. So around 2012 we found it to be 75 seconds.

This is with logging techniques. This is an average. And then in the last five, six years, we found it to average about 47 seconds, and others have replicated this result within a few seconds. So it seems to be quite robust. Now, another way to think about this result is the median. The median means the midpoint of observations. The median is 40 seconds. And what this means is that half of all the measurements that we found were 40 seconds or less of people's attention spans. Now obviously because we're talking about averages and medians, sometimes people do spend longer, but quite a good bit of the time, their attention spans are much shorter and with an average coming to 47 seconds.

To quote Stafford Beer, “[t]he purpose of a system is what it does.” Perhaps we cannot attribute all of this degradation in attention to Baalgorithm, but I think it would be naive to not see his (its?) hand in it. Chamath Palihapitiya, former vp of user growth at facebook told students at Stanford: “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works.” Even the priests of Baalgorithm apparently must watch as it consumes more.

How can one combat this resurrected god? How can we regain our attention and our ability to pay attention to what we want? Social media breaks are great, but even better is to purposefully cultivate a practice of gathering attention. That is simply my way of describing meditation. Awareness, attention, focus, concentration- all of these can come by way of meditation. This is the only engagement that allows for disengagement.

Take some time today to be an iconoclast. Fight a god who is actively harming your well-being.