Out of the Redzone

This goes way back for me. I grew up with Commodore 64s and early 1980s hacking groups. And we had a whole different way of interacting online, right? Because online wasn't a thing in the 80s. You had kind of bulletin board systems and stuff. And so life was separate back in the day from what you did on the computer.

There was a whole historical societal movement shift when smartphones came out in the 2000s. You know, one second its a "normal" society and 7 years later, I kid you not, you have people walking down the street with their heads in their phones walking into manholes.

Right? I mean, this is all well known. I did not expect how quickly people brains would just go the way of the dodo. I was out of college by that time. I was in the business right at web 1.0, the first bubble. I was in web design, UX design, streaming - had a whole agency in New York making flashy interfaces. Doing streaming before netflix existed. I remember oneday I was tasked over at a news station to handle the streaming for the Columbine massacre. What a day that was. Later, I became a founder of a startup that aggregated social media posts and put out news. I was overexposed to the somed scene, why i shorten the phrasing by the way. So, you know, I was in the culture witnessing society become more and more dependant. And the companies becoming less and less accountable to what was happening to people. It all took a toll.

I think it's pretty messed up. I think the companies that control it are not being regulated. And the whole generation that grew up with it have completely destroyed their minds, their souls. But theres soooo many books on that. And I really set out to not tell that same story and offer just raw technical instructions for folks dealing with their mental faculties and screens.

I think it's too late. I think America has shown that it has no interest in regulating jack squat. Lobbyists for the big tech have bot farms so you can't even talk about it online without 100 divisive anonymous commentors saying theres no problem. So theres problems on top of problems.

First of all, I think individuals have to do something. I think it's up to the individual 100% because it's out of control. Companies have no regulation and the mental grip that they have on people is now extending the generation that was addicted to it into their adulthood.

A lot of it has to do with things that they don't want to deal with. Because the reason why they're in it in the first place, the reason why they're doomscrolling is very hard to deal with for them.

You can't really explain to an addict that they're addicted. You have this epidemic of lonliness, this dissolution of families, this accountability sinkhole in politics all leading to this light show behind your phone. So the book is not written in a way that is directly addressing your question. Or even those other bigger questions. I'm sure a ton of books attempt to solve everything. This is a field manual for when you're in the middle of it all and need to pull out tools right away. That's why I called it a first-aid kit for social media.

I wrote this book to provide methods and language to describe whats going in the body and brain when you're on social media. It's technical - not advisory, not political, not an overarching commentary on humanity in the 21st Century. I really made sure it was written in a way that if the person feels like they have a problem and they found the book, then there are solutions for them. Teachers can use it to design classes and exercises around the ideas even. So, it teaches readers how to create their own system within the research not cliche tips to quit and go to a digital detox retreat.

I had different approaches. I mean, initially, you know, the first book was kind of a pop culture solution to the problem.

I just felt like in order to do a pop cultural solution, you know, you have to address different ages and different genders. You know what I mean? Like Urban Outfitters books. And in order to do that, I should have a technical book that teaches that book how to write the other niche systems. Meaning, I wanted to make sort of like a comprehensive technical book and then do the other stuff later.

Everything is technical about social media addiction. From the way you talk about it to the way the reader understands it.

I don't use the word addiction. People are in denial. And society is complicit. You remember when cigarettes were acceptable, smoking cigarettes everywhere was just accepted? That required society level big laws to regulate and not make normal. So I had to create a new word for this condition first.

Well the word exists in football and gambling, ironically. It's condition that combines all of the research on social media that shows the cognitive sort of cost because there's attention switch costs, memory stuff, psychological stuff. Right? So for doomscrolling for example, there's attention system damage done to the prefrontal cortex and according to some other research on brainrot there decay of areas of the brain. Real deterioration. But at the same time, there's also non-physical aspects like getting goal disorientation and these other things that happen from those effects. But it all equals energy loss of the individual who keeps on doing the scrolling despite their best interests. And so there's so many different things that equal, you know, this end state. So I decided to call that final state, the Redzone, an end state that combines all this other conditions. You know, it's an emergent phenomenon.

Everything. I mean, the decontextualization. First of all, right. So when you're scrolling and you're seeing content from all different subjects, but you're also seeing video associated with it. So the brain is struggling to comprehend context. So what happens is it becomes overloaded and gets decontextualized.

Yeah, there's a lot. But, you know, the first step is understanding the impulse to go to social media. But, you know, you're talking about a very big topic right now. You want a quick answer. There is no quick answer.

It gets into impulses. It gets into understanding your impulses. Nobody can do that. That's the Zen meditation. That's a Buddhist, right? Dzogchen type meditations. I don't know if anyone in the culture understands these meditation techniques. It was the function of religion before social media to regulate the populations impulses. What do you think the function of religion is for a population? To train them to regulate their impulses which is quite opposite of what social media has done.

I asked you what you think the function of religion is in society because I'm trying to lead you to answering why would a person need to control their impulses on social media, right? This is a personal question everyone needs to ask themselves when they feed the darker patterns online. I discuss these patterns scientifically in the book. They are invisible forces people would rather not speak about.

But I'm also saying that social media has become a type of religion that has no control because there's no community, really. It's all behind a screen, and everybody's by themselves talking to bots creating a false sense of reality to them. Right? You know what I mean? So, what kind of religion is that? It's a false idol.

Again, you're asking for a quick answer. You're talking about how would somebody break free of a false idol that has false idols in it? Because social media and doomscrolling is a series of false idols. Sometimes hundreds of other false idols emit from the false idol.

Who am I talking to? Am I talking to a teenage girl? Am I talking to a 30-year-old man? You know? That's the first step. Understanding who is it that I'm talking to. What's their relationship with the device?

Right. If you're a therapist, if you're somebody practitioning my system, that would be the first thing you have to do is understand who you're talking to. You know, teenagers on social media, they tend to not think outside of themselves. They think everything is them, right? They have no sense of larger identity. So, if you're dealing with a teenager, you know, that's one set of things you have to do.

But there's also this other idea of extended adolescence in Americans. Americans lacking accountability in general, you know. So, the case could be made if you have a grown man that's addicted to TikTok, right? Like, do you understand how problematic that is?

Again, we have to drill down now. What is the teenager into? What are they looking at, first of all? What is influencing them? And how are they becoming drained?

The idea is there's extremist content, and there's content that is manipulating teenagers. Right. So, you have to teach them, as an individual, you have to give them some degree of, you know, instruction on how to interpret these factors and persuasive factors so that they don't become apathetic and, you know, think poorly of themselves because they're stuck in a competitive environment. And, you know, comparison thinking, social media tends to put teenagers in a need for validation loop.

First of all, that man would have to come to the book, right? He would have to find out for himself that he has a problem. If you ask a grown man who's addicted to TikTok if he's addicted to TikTok, he'll tell you he doesn't even have the app. A lot of people are just lying, by the way.

Well, it's short and to the point. Like a user manual.