The internet is turning us into sociopaths.
For those not familiar with the reference, I do not mean “sociopath” as used in the common vernacular. I mean sociopath as popularized by Venkat Rao in his series of blog posts on The Gervais Principle. In a follow up post Venkat characterized the sociopath as follows:
First, sociopaths are driven by unsentimental observation of external realities, no matter how unpleasant. Second, they use the information they acquire through reality-grounding in skilled ways. Third, their distrust of subsuming communities and groups leads them to adopt personal moralities. Whether good or evil, the morality of a sociopath is something he or she takes responsibility for.
Finally, and most importantly, sociopaths do not seek legitimacy for their private morality from the group, justify it, or apologize for it.
I built on that idea by writing: We Are All Sociopaths Now! (Why the Conventional Path is No Longer an Option). That post analyzed a growing trend towards unconvential and highly personal life choices. It did not however, explain how a given individual comes to accept the sociopathic choice. How does a person who grows up hearing all the traditional messages and learning traditional values develop the wherewithal to make highly unconventional and independant decisions?
It Starts With Attention Scarcity
In The Power of Pull by John Hagel, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison, we are told:
The pace of life in the Big Shift requires that we manage the scarce resource of attention if we are to avoid becoming overwhelmed with knowledge flows and interactions with people.
Deciding how to allocate our attention becomes both a challenge and an opportunity. (pg 172)
The world is changing quickly and that means more challenges and opportunities that demand our attention than we know what to do with. The key point in the quote above for our purposes is in the word “allocate”. Scarcity, of any sort, forces you to allocate – forces you to make choices, embrace some demand and neglect others. On what basis are we to conduct this allocation?
The only conceivable answer is that each individual must make independent choices. Individuals must develop their own personal standard and exercise their own judgement in order to dynamically allocate attention on the fly.
The skeptic might suggest that people simply abdicate these decisions to their peers, the prevailing culture, or some other source of authority. To some extent this is true, but abdication of personal judgement is becoming increasingly difficult.
When I was younger, if I found an author I liked, I would try to read every book by that author. When I first had regular access to the internet, I found a set of websites I enjoyed and read everything they published every day. Today such a strategy would be impossible. I don’t read everything from almost any source. Even if I check a given website almost daily I am forced to exercise discretion and read only the most interesting or relevant articles. There are simply too many cultures, too many peers, and too many authorities to allow anyone but the most isolated individual to blindly follow only a small handful.
Training Sociopaths
Choosing what we pay attention to is the first step towards choosing our unique life paths. Until recently this wasn’t particularly necessary, and in that environment traditional, stable institutions thrived. Again from The Power of Pull:
In the past, our personal ecosystems were largely given to us as a byproduct of our other experiences. We we born into a specific geography, and most people lived in the same place throughout their lives. Our networks of friends and associates were primarily driven by this initial accident of birth and key life experiences – where we went to school, where we worked, and where we worshipped. (pg 170)
Today, however, the small decisions eventually lead to bigger decisions. The small decisions – should I accept this friend request? – shape our networks. They shape the information we receive and the environments we are exposed to. As we make more of these small decisions our paths start to diverge from the “conventional” ever so slightly, and that divergence forces us to exercise further personal judgement.
Compounded over time, these decisions become our personal moralities and ethics…our own personal standards of behavior.
At this time one year ago I was preparing to start business applications. At the same time I started this blog. Over the course of several months it became apparent to me that I would never make it through business school. I had been exposed to too much freedom, taken too much initiative and demonstrated too much self-direction. Spending two years learning what other people thought I should learn became an impossibility. I had gone sociopathic…or embraced what was always there.
If you can choose not to read everything on your favorite blog or decide that you don’t have time to watch tonights’ episode of your favorite show, then eventually you will find yourself deciding just as easily that you don’t need every piece of the standard curriculum, or that you don’t need to follow the standard formula for “success”.
There is an inevitability of pull even for the unwitting participant. He might not like it, but the small decisions made everyday are continually reshaping his environment, constructing his future reality, and influencing his future decisions.
Embracing The Power of Pull
An interesting thing happens when we pursue our passions: We actually seek out more challenges. Rather than viewing them as sources of stress, we view them as opportunities to get better faster. We want to push ourselves to the next level, and we get restless if we remain at the same level too long. No matter what the area of work, there are some people who actually are quite passionate about what they do. They can’t wait to get to work and test themselves. (pg 166)
Compare this with what many of us are doing online. We are excited to check our favorite sites and to catch up with our networks. We are not burdened with requirements to do what someone else thinks is important. We are free to pursue those sources that appear most rewarding and meaningful based on our own personal sensibilities.
Most readers of this blog are already media sociopaths. We have little regard for what content we should be consuming. We consume the media that meets our personal standard.
But that is only the beginning. Any disruption occurs first where the barriers to entry are lowest. The barriers to entry for media are about as low as they can get. But, as collaborative platforms become more robust the opportunities for participation and creation will become more apparent, and decisions previously made will lead naturally to these opportunities:
Something else interesting happens when we connect with our passion. We cannot remain silent. We become more visible to others as we talk to and engage with others around our passion. Word spreads, and we begin to attract others who share our passions and who experience a similar need to connect with others around these passions. We shape serendipity by pursuing our passion, because reaching out in this way enhances our findability and draws people to us from the most unexpected quarters. (pg 169)
This is where we want to be. The cost is giving up the safety of the status quo. The upside is that you have probably already done this. You have already smartly made a few small moves. Own it, embrace it, and allow those small moves to compound. I will conclude by allowing the authors to expound on what is at stake:
One way or another, we will need to pursue our passion as our profession. Until and unless we do that, we will remain vulnerable to focused competition from those who are pursuing theirs. And even if we can prevail without passion, we will lead lives filled with stress and pressure that sooner or later will become intolerable. (pg 166)
photo courtesy of renaissancechambara
