Physic defense in the digital age

A framing

Society writ large has choosen convience of information. It's a reasonable choice on the face of it, the internet provides a direct link between the individual and a huge body of the works of humanity. It provides a link between the minds of all invididuals throughout the world. However for the most part, that information flows in one direction, from the world into the mind of the individual: from the macro to the micro. And with access to rare books once only available in locked rooms of scattered physical libraries across the world, comes also advertisements, social media, and weapons of manipulation and psychic control.

That the internet is used to manipulate people isn't an original observation, indeed I think many of the things I say here have been said enough that me or anyone else saying them again is at least somewhat trite, but I want to emphasize the gravity of the situation. There is a war on. And the attacks of the enemy aren't just paltry psychic jabs that can be easily ignored. No matter how much better you think you are than others who have fallen into some internet echo chamber: You are not immune. This is an active and violent war being waged against our psyches, and exposure to the enemies' weapons will result in psychic damage.

Consider this, if you grew up persistently watching advertisements, perhaps on TV, perhaps online, then you probably can hum various jingles and can recognize various iconography of products quite instantly. These advertisements weren't just attempts to get you to buy something; they have implanted these symbols in your psyche, and you can't just get them out. Often, they are stuck there for life.

And yet, advertisements are merely the most obvious way in which we are under attack. More so than their desire to brand your psyche, they want your attention, and further still they want your power. Media, and especially social media, is designed principally to grab your attention, keep it, all while projecting some series of mental images into your brain. The aspect of attention is shewn in the way it is presented, for example videos consistently autoplaying, and the easy way with which you can scroll, swipe or click to the next blip of content. There is a the dichotomy of content length, with some sites— quintessentially Tiktok— catering to short form content that can be browsed at any time, while Youtube favors longer form content that you can put on for perhaps hours without thinking about it. Both fill separate niches, but both are attempts to maximize the amount of content you consume.

And what is conveyed by these platforms? In this day and age the creation of the media has become a gig economy. While there are salaried propagandists, too much media needs to be created to maintain the flow of consumptives for that to be economical at scale. And for many of these platforms, those who control them are more concerned with the "success" of their platform. They care about the power it can exert, but less so what how that power manifests. So then content is often whatever gets the most eyes, what captures the attention the most. And so it often leans on emotion, rage, fear, humour, etc, all fine things when they are not weaponized to hijack your attention.

All of this is the work of algorithmic optimization. A complex algorithm, written both in computer code, the corporate goals, and people's minds, that spans across a wide network of the media landscape and the internet. It is optimizing not just for our attention, but for the control of our psyches, it is optimizing for power. And it is the enemy of every individual, or just about every at least. I'll admit a few exceptions. Killing it is desirable, but so long as our society is structured hierarchically and is structured to encourage individuals to optimize for their own power over others, it is how that our technology will be utilized. There is a society in which our technology can be deployed for the benefit of all and not their detriment, but until then it is necessary to equip ourselves for war. To defend ourselves against the siege on our minds that will continue so long as we continue to exist within society.

Tools for digital physic defense

Below are some tools and methods I propose for defending yourself in this digital age. Different people find different things addictive, more readily able to consume their attention. While no one, and I mean NO one, is immune to attack, I don't want to present here a prescriptive list of methods. Adaption is necessary. Despite an innate primitivist desire in many of us and at least for me a hesitant and critical admiration of Mr. Kaczynski, there is no going back. Not at least without a global, civilization-shattering event that would leave billions dead. I don't recommend that path. If we are to survive we must know how to live among the digital strategically.

Install an ad blocker

For web browsers, an ad blocker is essential and uBlock Origin is what I recommend. It is open source, performs fast, and for the most part just works.

One important thing to note is that Google Chrome and browsers based on it (notably spell Opera and Edge) will soon no longer support v2 manifest extensions, which as a results limits some features of uBlock Origin. You can read more details on the uBlock's website. I use Firefox which supports v2 manifest extensions and has no intention of dropping support for them.

Brave is recommended by some as well, which has a built-in ad blocker and other privacy features and thus does not require a separate ad-blocker extension.

SponsorBlock

If you watch youtube videos, then an ad blocker will not block sponsored content. However there is the crowd-sourced extension SponsorBlock that combats these sponsored segments of videos.

Ad blocking on mobile

There are ad blockers you can install on your phone as well, however many mobile web browsers do not allow you install extensions or only a few extensions, including ad blockers. On Android, Firefox again comes to the rescue, where Firefox Mobile allows you to install uBlock Origin along with many of the other extensions I mention.

Ad blocking DNS servers

Among the more difficult ads to block are those shown on more locked down devices, such as "smart" TVs. A blanket way to block ads across your home network is to configure your router to use DNS server that blocks advertisers' domain names, so the devices doesn't know where to get its ads from. This isn't always a perfect solution (sometimes the device or a particular app comes with its own domain servers preconfigured), but it does a halfway-decent job.

This requires some technical know-how. You need to log into your router and change its DHCP setting to use a specific static DNS server rather than obtain one automatically. This option can be somewhat hidden on some routers. This is controlD's ad and malware blocking DNS server you can 76.76.2.2 use, or here is a list of different DNS servers you could try.

If you need help locating the setting, message me or leave a comment. If I get enough info on different routers' settings I'll make a separate more comprehensive article on how to set this up.

Addictive sites

LeechBlock is a browser extension that allows you to configure websites to block from yourself. If you find yourself doom scrolling on a particular site, you can use LeechBlock to block it all the time or at particular times of the day or week, or only allow yourself a set amount of time per day on particular sites. This still does require some self discipline, as you can go back into the configuration and turn it off whenever you'd like, although you can set a password or have yourself type out a phrase before doing so to put a little bit of extra mental weight before the config page. But overall it can be very helpful, especially if you find yourself, as I have sometimes, just unconsciously navigating to some site when bored and looking at a phone or computer.

Spam in searches

There has become a large increase of automatically generated sites that just have AI crap on them or poorly presented junk aggregated from other sites that tends to come up in searches regardless of what search engine you use these days. One way to counter this is the extension uBlacklist which allows you to blacklist websites so that they won't show up in searches. A good premade list is this one. In order to subscribe to it, go into the preferences for uBlacklist, scroll down and click "Add a subscription" and copy in the url for the blacklist.

Another method is to simply limit the scope of what you are searching for. On most search engines you can limit the results to a particular domain with `site:example.com` or even to a top-level domain such as `site:*.edu`. Despite reddit being a stronghold of the enemy and definitely having some corporate actors on it, if I am looking for advice on what particular product to buy or similar, I find limiting my search to reddit and finding a post where someone asked for advice on that to generally be more helpful than whatever list of five or ten amazon sponsored links that generally show up otherwise.

Grayscale

By putting everything in your phone on grayscale, your dampen the weapons of psychic attack that the enemy has at its disposal. When things look less engaging, it is easier to choose actively what to engage in. A friend of mine recommended this recently and it's helpful. On Android, you can change this in the Accessibility settings under Color and motion then Color correction.

Social media and the modern community

Moving away from social media entirely is perhaps good, but in so far as it has become essential for human connection, I do find maintaining some presence necessary. In a society where so many communities have dissolved into consumption, we to try to maintain those we still have, build new ones, and generally foster human connection where we can, even if that is within platforms controlled by the enemy.

Using distributed, federated social media platforms (such as Mastadon as opposed to Twitter/X, or diaspora as opposed to facebook) is an approach as well. This tends to give you finer control over what content you would like to see and what you would like to exclude, but these services are generally designed to replace existing services that are designed to zap your attention and must still be approached cautiously. However, using them does also take some power away from the platforms they are trying to replace.

Boredom

I think it is important to become comfortable with "boredom", with being alone with yourself, not continuously consuming something at every given moment. With one's phone in their pocket, how many reflexively pull out their phone while sitting on the toilet? Has it become impossible to go a few minutes without being plugged in?

Another example of this is the subreddit /r/showerthoughts. The idea being to post what interesting thoughts you come up with while in the shower. This is predicated on the idea that the shower is the only place that you can come up with these thoughts. Why? Well, you can't bring your smartphone into the shower. One can maybe play music, but for the most part in the shower people are forced to be alone with their thoughts. Is the shower really the only time that we should be having free-flowing, imaginative thoughts? Well, I don't think so. But those in power have a vested interest in that not happening, in people being only receptive, not creative, as the only way active social change happens is through creativity.

So then, it is important to be okay with being "bored" at times, to be okay with not riding a wave of media consumption at every moment. Being comfortable with being bored is the first step towards using that energy that would otherwise go into sating a need for consumption creatively and freely.

Final note

As someone who has ADHD, these weapons of the enemy have a particularly amplified effect. It is all more important for those of us with ADHD, which is chemically related to dopamine disregulation, to defend ourselves even more stridently, for we are predisposed to be victims of these attacks. But regardless, remember no one is immune, we all have within us chemical pathways that reward certain behaviors, chemical pathways that evolved over eons, way before the internet which came into widespread use no more than 30 years ago (which is astounding given how immensely it has overhauled our society) and way before it could adapt to our new ways of thinking, our new way of highly-interconnected ways of being.

This is an incomplete list, I will update it when I discover more tools and strategies for this war. If you have any suggestions, please leave a comment or get in touch with me.