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Comment by titzer | Hacker News Reader

By this point in humanity's development, their brains had developed the ability to automatically block the parts of reality screaming for their attention, results of an economic system based on coercive consumption. Attention grabbers bifurcated into subtle, nefarious actors intent on slipping past in-brain ad-blocking and the shouters, turning up the volume and animations to make ads impossible to not see. People were subtly crippled, partially blind, now. Yet it was, after all, the mind's defense mechanism against an increasingly hostile environment trying to rob it of its most precise resource: attention.

That was, of course, until they banned psychic violence in the "Goddamn, get out of my brain" amendment in the late 21st century.

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I won't lie, the fact that my brain seamlessly adblocks pages at no cost to myself mostly strikes me as cool. Like ideally you wouldn't have to, but God knows I'm half blind with everything I ignore regardless (including headers which seem irrelevant, most introductions, every third word, etc), so like who cares.

Yup; same here. It started with the earliest intrusive ads. At this point you could display a big purple banner on my screen and then 60 seconds later break into my office, put $60million on the desk, a gun to my head, and ask the content of the banner to keep the money and not get shot, and you'd likely have to shoot me.

I'd like to have an eye tracking study done on my viewing because the brain has a separate center that controls direction of gaze that is not part of the visual cortex that processes sight. With a normal human subject looking at a normal scene, an eye-tracking study will reveal in a few seconds the outlines of everything in the scene, trees, doors, windows, people, etc. because the eye tracks the interesting parts and edges.

Also relevant is the fact that only a tiny section at the center of the field of vision is actually in any kind of focus - you cannot read anything resembling normal sized type with your peripheral vision.

There's also the phenomenon of 'blind sight' where with people who are cortically blind, i.e., their eyes and optic nerves work, but their visual cortex doesn't (e.g., due to head injury to that part of the brain) When shows a panel of vertical or horizontal stripes in a forced choice test (i.e., they can answer "vertical" or "horizontal" but not "I don't know"), they answer correctly at rates much higher than chance (iirc from courses a decades ago, ~70%). It was thought that they might be unconsciously extracting the H/V information from the area that still controlled the gaze direction.

I'm wondering how many of us have 'ad-blindness' that isn't just filtering our visual input, but is actually guiding our gaze away from intrusive content so we literally never see it because the focal area never rests on it.

Anyone more up to date on neuroscience have any info?

Yes. Eyetracking is rather useless as what we see depends on the task we have to perform. We filter out what we don't need and don't even register it consciously. As such, general eye tracking studies can only tell you so much... Case in point: dancing gorilla awareness test, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo.

I should have been more clear.

Yes, filtering inputs is important and happens at every level of the sensory, nervous, and brain systems. I'm describing two substantially different levels of filtering and the dancing gorilla test isn't the one I'm focused on here, as it's the high-level attention filtering, as the gorilla is surely not filtered out by the subconscious eye motions (i.e., never seen), but filtered out by the higher-level attention mechanisms. I expect that much ad-blindness is indeed these high-level mechanisms.

What I'm wondering is if after decades of avoidance training, the separate gaze-orientation center (I forget it's proper name right now) which is subconscious and separate from the visual cortex, is trained enough to minimize the eye's gaze in the annoying areas such that the focus point never lands on them and they never get the opportunity to be read (and ignored by the higher level mechanisms). Eye tracking studies using actual eye tracks and not merely heatmaps would tell us the difference - if the tracks still follow the edges, bright spots, etc. into the adverts, then all the 'blindness' is cortical, but if the eye tracks avoid the ad zones, it's been trained down to a lower level.

Ah, I see. I think you are correct on that one. One could even say 'banner blindness' was was caused google to be successful in the beginning. Then, after a decade or so, people also became google ads blind. As a result the google ads became increasingly more like organic search results, until now, where you almost an't see the difference.

> where you almost an't see the difference.

Which is 100% an intentional dark pattern designed to maximize profits for the ad economy by tricking you into looking at something you don't want to look at. If users liked ads and found them useful, their brains wouldn't automatically learn to tune them out. On the contrary, if ads were so valuable to users, it would be a plus to make it easier to see them!

I mean, search engines throw an absolutely enormous amount of computational power at "organically" discovering, classifying, indexing, and searching the entire internet for the most relevant and useful results, and then the dollar machine instantly demotes them below paid placement. The cognitive dissonance is astounding.

> the fact that my brain seamlessly adblocks pages at no cost to myself

I wouldn’t be so sure it’s at no cost, it seems possible that parsing/blocking a lot of that stuff causes some kind of mental/sensory strain or fatigue.

Absolutely for me. I feel a lack of focus when I have to block it on my own.

It didn't for me 10 years ago but now it does.

I've had my coworkers sharing their screens for a presentation and chrome will pop up ads on their screen in front of 20 people.

(and the fact that I remember it was chrome... ugh)

lol. The auto-block sometimes misfires, though!

I recently emailed a museum to ask about tours since they didn't have any information on their website. They replied with links to all the information on their website, that was in literal plain sight, but that I totally and completely missed because my brain just straight adblocked them. I almost had to force myself to "see" them. They just so closely matched that ad spam you see at the bottom of news sites and blogs that I'd just keep skimming past them.

It might be worth telling them if you haven't

Pour one out for those with ADHD who aren't able to do this and haven't installed an adblocker.

Actually I have ADHD and I suspect I mentally ad block even more than most people. They are given 0 attention and focus because they are a dumb boring thing

Interesting, this is the opposite of the folks I know with ADHD. I suppose it is a pretty varied condition, united by inability to control attention.

I have difficulty blocking out the sound from ads which have audio, and they seem to bother me noticeably more than they bother most people, but visual ads I just tune out altogether.

I doubt it's as cost-free as you imagine. Rather than regale you with an ADHD perspective, I'll just say you're probably still reading it but just not thinking about it consciously. I would make a small bet that it's easier to prime a person with targeted advertising if they generally don't pay attention.

It's somewhat automatic, but definitely not cost-free. Spend awhile with uBlock Origin and optionally something like PiHole, and you'll be amazed at how much less exhausting reading online is.

Is there a point to PiHole if your uBlock Origin works?

I read web content via all sorts of apps that aren’t web browsers (mail, rss reader, various electron junk, not to mention mobile apps that are simply skins over web pages). A browser plug-in doesn’t help for those cases.

To me, the security implications of a compromised uBlock on my browser with access to everything seem worse than a compromised pihole on my network.

Am I wrong on this? Honestly not so sure.

uBlock Origin catches almost all of it, but PiHole catches the rest. Also great for devices which cannot run an ad-blocker. (Mobile apps, smart TVs, etc)

My experience using tools to remove unnecessary / intrusive webpage elements (directly through the Element Inspector, via CSS managers such as Stylus, or the uBlock Origin element-blocking tool.

Even non-advertising elements such as social-media icons, related articles lists, sidebars, and the like. The more the display is limited to simply the text I intend to read, the less stress and distraction I feel.

Virtually all studies of multitasking show that multitaskers both overestimate their abilities and their performance is negatively affected by the attempt.

Ignoring intrusions is a task.

When you try to add something to your amazon shopping cart, you frequently get an "extended warranty" popup. If you just close the window/tab, the item silently doesn't make it to your shopping cart.

I don't know how many things go unpurchased because of this.

You could say almost the same thing walking through an ancient Bazaar as sellers yell advertisements at you for their wares.

Especially if the Bazaar sellers followed you throughout the day through your work and leisure time.

And took notes on your personal life and tried to sell you things they'd specifically think you'd want.

And traded notes with other sellers.

It's not uncommon in smaller rural villages to have sellers slowly drive through the streets and yell that they are selling things.

Right, but it probably sucked. We heavily romanticize it today, but we romanticize all sorts of things that were actually not so great.

Like the middle ages. All of it sucked.

wrong. some of it sucked maybe even the majority of it (if you insist) but most of it is not all of it.

The Black Death sucked.

Most of the middle ages probably wasn't that bad, but the civilization-destroying plague destroyed civilization, and Renaissance-era propagandists exploited the living memory of the plague to make themselves look better.

The one constant throughout time is that things sucked if you were poor and rocked if you were rich.

I'd rather be middle class in a developed country now than any king 200 years ago. No amount of wealth could have gotten me modern medicine, especially anesthesia(!). Even stuff that's now trivial like pretty fresh tropical fruit or good food from other countries in general would have been very hard to come by. I have way more knowledge and entertainment at my finger tips than any medieval king could have ever dreamed of.

To each his own. But look at all the wonderful things that medieval kings commissioned to keep themselves occupied. Art, music, cathedrals, palaces, sports, plays, libraries, etc. The impact of a (generous) medieval king in terms of things others could eventually enjoy far outpaces this age's netflix consumption.

Ask Henry VIII if he wouldn't give all that up for some gout medication.

That the same Henry VIII who shut down all the monasteries, which for most of the population were the only source of anything resembling medical and social care? Karma's a bitch.

Tell me you've never had medical problems without explicitly saying you've never had medical problems

IMO it's an interesting topic if the kings were in fact "generous" when they commissioned these things. I think there is an argument that these investments were mostly for their own legacy and that the resources could have been spent more efficiently to raise everyone's standard of living or reduce poverty. IMO just spending every cent possible on research to get non-terrible medicine would be far and away the highest priority. But of course I only say that because I know from today's perspective what is possible.

Poor people today live better than the medieval rich people.

Nah, throughout most of history, things sucked if you were rich, and sucked even more if you were poor.

Generally agree, but humanism and spaces between words are pretty okay.

One time HN linked an article romanticizing pickpocketing, with the expected reaction from me:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6065434

Wait until you find out about bank heist films?

In fairness, in those cases, when they romanticize the thieves, they usually try to make clear that they're only taking the bank/casino's owners and are careful not to hurt anyone.

HN never relents on its cultish techno-optimisms.

The sellers don't attempt to follow you around until you die.

This started becoming common in shopping malls at some point during the aughts or 2010s.

Usually accompanied by large in-corridor vendor displays which further obstructed already-crowded walkways.

I stopped going to malls.

High-street shopping districts still don't affect me to the same viscerally-negative degree. Even those which seem to be fairly consciously emulating and attempting to create a mall-like atmosphere. There's something about the open-air nature, and the fact that sounds attenuate rather than echoing off hard surfaces from all sides.

In NYC you're mostly trained just to ignore people trying to get your attention. Or at least I was. I assume ignoring banner ads is a similar phenomenon.

Or the same about YouTubers, I'm fascinated that my kids don't find the constant yelling and over emoting annoying or at least suspicious.

Yeah, if you live in a city, you're conditioned to ignore people trying to get your attention. Nothing is free. Don't believe it. I remember one time my little brother from my tiny hometown was visiting me in LA and I warned him to ignore the guy with the CDs. Don't let him put it in your hand and avoid eye contact. Told my sister the same thing but she didn't believe me and lost 20$ to a shitty mixtape in a millisecond. Those guys are slick. haha

It happens to this day in many parts of the world (like mine).

It was sort of acceptable before the sellers in the Bazaar did a mind-melt that made them all effectively the same person.

You can't say the same thing about the Bazaar because that's why you went to the Bazaar. The shouts are what's going to be directing your entire journey. That's why ads aren't annoying in a trade magazine, because the ads are probably the reason you bought the trade magazine; the articles are commentary on the ads.

Accurate. And in a trade magazine, most the ads are making a value proposition of some sort; the ones that are purely based on emotional appeals tend to end up as industry memes, synonymous with vacuity.

Yup. A trade magazine ad is 100x more likely to be an undecorated copy of a datasheet than some vague emotional bullshit.

That's exactly how it feels for me to look at the magazine rack in a drugstore, except that little to none of it is interesting.

Existence by David Brin carried similar concepts. Augmented Reality infested with ads, where the kids in the know all ran blockers and basically opted out of a varying levels of consensus reality.

Too bad it's too long for r/WritingPrompts, would be an excellent starting point to draft a dystopian story from.

I was totally expecting it to be a quote from a Gibson novel or something.

I fed that comment to Sudowrite and here is where the AI went with it:

----------

As the struggle for survival had escalated over the past few millennia, the human brain had developed a miraculous defense mechanism: the psychic immune system. Simply said, the psychic immune system regulated the production of thoughts and emotions to a sustainable level. But with the new law came a new synthetic freedom to attack the underlying problem of an economy based on coercive consumption. Marketers and advertisers, wielding their mental weaponry, had been on the offensive, attacking minds of the world's citizens unabated. Psychic immune systems, no matter how strong, were helpless against the onslaught. Now that the psychic immune system had been weakened, everyone was a potential target for propaganda and mind control. In the following chaos, advertising mutated into a new form. The ban on psychic violence was not comprehensive, and included exemptions for images used in the furtherance of scientific, educational and artistic works. To survive, the advertisers had to learn to speak the language of art. They were the only ones left with the knowledge to speak it.

> The ban on psychic violence was not comprehensive, and included exemptions for images used in the furtherance of scientific, educational and artistic works. To survive, the advertisers had to learn to speak the language of art.

I'm impressed by the AI. It's actually what would happen if this law was introduced. There would be exceptions, and the advertisers would find ways to exploit them.

Heh, there’s a part of Better Call Saul where an attorney is trying to get an artistic exemption to apply so a bank’s gaudy logo/statue can be bigger than normally allowed.

AI might be able to warn us about our own societal patterns - a good 'what if' machine...

"So that's what things would be like if I'd invented the fing-longer"

you can enjoy The City & the City by China Miéville then

> late 21st century

I hope we don't have to wait that long :/

This would be a good idea for a speculative fiction novel, about how constant access to the internet could drive our evolution.

Quote from a novel? Not one Google knows!

You might enjoy “Hell’s Pavement” by Damon Knight.

> psychic violence

Ironically, worse than the deluge of advertising described in this comment is the attempted redefinition of language for political agendas as exemplified in this comment.

Both are a form of psychic warfare - except that while I have seen non-intrusive and useful forms of advertising (i.e. product discovery, not trying to brainwash me into believing that Coca-Cola isn't unhealthy), I have never seen a non-malicious instance of this kind of hostile language redefinition.

> hostile language redefinition

par for the course, and embedded in all political discourse.

Recently we started calling anyone proposing higher taxes a socialist, which indicates total illiteracy, as it has no bearing on centrally planned economy

Laws that stop business defrauding customers are called 'consumer protection' and 'red tape', but when we protect business from individuals it's called being tought on crime.

When you make an extra copy of a song, you commit intellectual property theft, and the state can prosecute you for free and put you in jail, and you are a criminal.

When a company does not provide warranty you paid for, its called a business dispute and you have to hire your own lawyer.

How would you characterize a powerful force that sucks you into an illusion and bends your will to its agenda?

Feel free to wax florid and metaphorical.

The Walt Disney Company

> When you make an extra copy of a song, you commit intellectual property theft

Don't forget "piracy"--associating copying information with looting a ship and killing everyone on board. I'd love to see an end to this ridiculous modern usage of this word.

> Recently we started calling anyone proposing higher taxes a socialist, which indicates total illiteracy, as it has no bearing on centrally planned economy

This too is ironically it's own redefinition because originally (and still to many socialists today) socialism means workers' ownership of the means of the production, which undemocratic centrally planning states never were and never could be.

The reason people associate socialism with taxes and a centrally planned economy is because that's the only popular socialism.

Anarcho-socialism rejects statism (totally agreeable) but doesn't offer a credible alternative. That's why common people don't even think about anarchy when you talk about socialism.

In a centrally planned socialist economy, the people in power can steal resources from the workers (like all the governments of the world do nowadays) and exercise power.

In anarcho socialism the power would be decentralised and distributed among democratic groups of workers. Why would the workers even bother to take all these decisions? They're not gaining power (or very little, due to the rightful decentralised nature of power in anarchy) nor currency.

The assumption is that workers are perfect human beings and don't need incentives do to the right thing, which is a pipe dream.

Unless you have a powerful organization that prevents others from taking power, a powerful organization will always form that takes power.

> socialism with taxes and a centrally planned economy

Taxes have nothing to do with socialism and have existed in Feudalism, in ancient Egypt and in every 'capitalist' state. Just because you collected money, does not mean you need to centrally plan how to spend it - carbon dividend would tax things that produce CO2, and distribute it equally to all citizen. Someone who produces no CO2 would get paid, and someone who produces the average amount would see no change.

I have no problem with central planning being associated, it was a key feature of socialist states. But Central planning means government sets prices on Salami, like USSR did, and I never came across anyone in the West proposing that.

At most someone advocates for some infrastructure, and they get called a socialist. But then, why does no capitalism society privatise the police, the army, the navy, the judges that sit in court, the federal reserve, the public library and the patent office?

If the accuser does advocates for privatising them, the rest of society will call him a nutcase and move on with their lives.

So he must instead make up excuses, of various levels of absurdity, for why free market can't be trusted with managing elementary building blocks of society here, but it's socialist to suggest government should step in over there.

The only solution is to Stop accusing everyone of being a socialist in disguise and learn from history and other countries: we have tried societies without government-managed police and courtsm, the results were terrible. We have tried private prisons, and government-managed consumer goods, also terrible.

This is clearly conscience-assuaging rationalization. You must be in marketing.

But ya, "psychic violence" hits the nail on the head nicely.

This is pretty absurd for two reasons.

The poster was clearly writing a jocular, one-sentence sci-fi story to express how they felt violated by the constant vieing for their attention. That's why it's _set in the future_ and regarding a _fictional constitutional amendment_. Making up words is a genre trope of sci-fi.

The second is that languages just change and people make up words. This isn't unique to the political arena and isn't necessarily malicious. Every term you have ever used exists because someone needed it, didn't have it, and so they made it up. You'll need to actually argue that introducing a term is harmful or deceptive in the particular instance that it happens.

This is pearl-clutching to portray people you disagree with as being shrill and ridiculous and not worth listening to. It's a bad faith tactic which you should desist from.

ETA: Because I seem to be earlier in the sort order, I want to point out that there is a much more important third reason is a sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32016181

why do you get to say "psychic warfare" but "psychic violence" is unacceptable?

I was shocked that there were five comments saying something other than this before yours.

It's like how the people who talked about safe spaces and triggering being dumb were triggered by every single commercial, tv show, movie, news report, and passing conversation and begging for the stuff that triggered them to be removed.

"Go woke, go broke" is something said by people who are threatening to boycott businesses because of their triggering content.

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