- nexa - server-nexa.polito.it

Che c’entra il Bitcoin con le rivolte in Kazakistan e gli scontri in piazza
by don Luca Peyron Jan. 10, 2022

Jan. 10, 2022

Molto interessante dl ttps:// www.repubblica.it/tecnologia/2022/01/10/news/che_c_entra_il_bitcoin_con_le_… _________________________ don Luca Peyron Direttore Ufficio per la Pastorale Universitaria Arcidiocesi di Torino www.universitari.to.it via XX settembre 83, Torino tel. 011 5156239

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A New Future for GnuPG
by Giacomo Tesio Jan. 10, 2022

Jan. 10, 2022

Salve Nexa, cosa succede quando un Governo ha le competenze necessarie per scegliere il software libero? It has been quite some time since my last status report on GnuPG. I have been quite busy working on the project but unfortunately rarely active on the usual channels. So, here is a new report telling what we did over the last two or three years. [...] It turned out that the software used in Germany to protect restricted data at the VS-NfD level, called Chiasmus, showed its age. For example, the block length of 64 bits (like IDEA or 3DES) is not anymore secure for data of more than 150 MiB. Also the secret encryption algorithm has not anymore the confidence people used to have in it and due to lacking hardware support it is quite slow. A new call to bid for a replacement of that software was issued and we also with Intevation were granted the contract. Our solution was to update GnuPG and its frontends Kleopatra and GpgOL. After some thorough evaluation of our software (working title Gpg4VS-NfD) and the usual bureaucratic we received a first approval in January 2019. [...] Since summer 2021 the phones of our sales team didn't stop ringing and we could bring in the fruits of our work. We were not aware how many different governmental agencies exist and how many of them have a need to protect data at the VS-NfD (restricted) level. And with those agencies also comes a huge private and corporate sector who also have to handle such communication. [...] We estimate that a quarter million workplaces will be equipped with GnuPG VS-Desktop and provide the users state of the art file and mail encryption. Our longer term plan is to equip all public agency workplaces with end-to-end encryption software - not only those with an immediate need for an approved VS-NfD solution. This should also fit well into the announced goal of the new German government to foster the development of Open Source. Kudos to all supporters For many years our work was mainly financed by donations and smaller projects. Now we have reached a point where we can benefit from a continuous revenue stream to maintain and extend the software without asking for donations or grants. This is quite a new experience to us and I am actually a bit proud to lead one of the few self-sustaining free software projects who had not to sacrifice the goals of the movement. Those of you with SEPA donations, please cancel them and redirect your funds to other projects which are more in need of financial support. The Paypal and Stripe based recurring donations have already been canceled by us. All you supporters greatly helped us to keep GnuPG alive and to finally setup a sustainable development model. Tratto da https://gnupg.org/blog/20220102-a-new-future-for-gnupg.html Giacomo

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Sorveglianza europea
by Vincenzo Mario Bruno Giorgino Jan. 10, 2022

Jan. 10, 2022

Traggo il brano sotto da https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/10/a-data-black-hole-europol-ord… ...A month after the data supervisor publicly admonished Europol, the agency came back with a question: if it wanted to train algorithms on the data it had already been admonished for retaining, could it start the data protection impact assessment process for this without EDPS oversight? The request makes it clear that the algorithms, which included facial recognition tools, would not be designed nor used to retrieve sensitive data such as health status, ethnic background, sexual or political orientation, even though, as Europol admitted, such data would inevitably be processed by the tools: “We recognise that the produced results will contain sensitive data and its processing will be in line with Europol Regulation.” .... Buona lettura.

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Fwd: Dilettanti allo sbaraglio!
by Angelo Raffaele Meo Jan. 10, 2022

Jan. 10, 2022

Trovo giuste alcune affermazioni, ma la conclusione In un paese dove quasi il 90% degli over 12 è vaccinato, se il vaccino serve a proteggere solo per qualche mese, non ha senso renderlo obbligatorio per poter lavorare e lasciare a casa la gente senza stipendio! CUB Polito sinceramente mi spaventa. Cosa ne pensate? Raf -------- Messaggio Inoltrato -------- Oggetto: Dilettanti allo sbaraglio! Rispedito-Data: Mon, 10 Jan 2022 10:41:41 +0100 Rispedito-Da: d000704(a)polito.it Data: Mon, 10 Jan 2022 10:41:02 +0100 Mittente: cub-sur(a)polito.it Dilettanti allo sbaraglio Non siamo virologi né scienziati, tantomeno di quelli che cantano le canzoncine per far vaccinare i bambini, e per questo non ci avventuriamo in analisi “scientifiche”. Non abbiamo certezze e neppure soluzioni da proporre.Siamo persone che cercano di pensare. E come dice un vecchio adagio, chi pensa non crede e chi crede spesso non pensa. Siamo anche consapevoli di trovarci di fronte a una pandemia associata a una infodemia, cioè alla circolazione di una quantità eccessiva di informazioni, per cui ogni voce finisce nel caos generale. Non di meno ci sentiamo di dire qualcosa. Almeno su un punto, quello che più ci allarma: molte e molti nostri colleghi rischiano di essere sospesi senza stipendio. Dopo mesi passati a tamponarsi ogni due giorni per il green pass, tra poco, se non si vaccineranno, non potranno più lavorare. Fino a quando… non si sa.Siamo sicuri che sospendere i lavoratori non vaccinati sia la strada giusta per affrontare questa fase della pandemia?Una soluzione adottata solo in Italia. Unico paese, nemmeno nella supermilitarizzata Israele. Senza dimenticare che abbiamo una % di vaccinati più alta di Francia, Germania, GB, Austria, Israele… Chiunque di noi ha parenti/amici/conoscenti che nonostante siano vaccinati si sono ammalati di COVID-19 in queste settimane. In genere senza necessità di ospedalizzazione, ma comunque, come ammesso dal prof. Galli “È stata una bella batosta”, nonostante avesse già ricevuto la dose booster. Quindi questi vaccini, utili a evitare la malattia grave, non riescono a bloccare efficacemente il contagio. Per mesi invece ci è stato raccontato che con i vaccini si sarebbe tornati alla normalità, che chi era vaccinato sarebbe stato libero dalle restrizioni (25/11/2021 Draghi: "Per i vaccinati sarà un Natale normale").Così non è stato, non per colpa di chi non si vaccina, ma perché si è puntato esclusivamente sui vaccini, riducendo drasticamente il lavoro da remoto, non facendo nulla per migliorare i trasporti, le classi pollaio, il tracciamento (quando i casi erano poche migliaia); non si è implementata un’efficace politica sui tamponi – soprattutto nelle scuole – mascherine FP2, la medicina territoriale, per non parlare dell’inquinamento…Se il PIL deve crescere e l'economia continuare a girare sui binari di sempre (magari tornando pure al nucleare… “verde"?!) alla fin fine non si possono che adottare pannicelli caldi. Oggi chi paga questi errori siamo tutti noi, tri-vaccinati ancora alle prese con malattia e restrizioni e i lavoratori e le lavoratrici che per mille ragioni non vogliono vaccinarsi. In un paese dove quasi il 90% degli over 12 è vaccinato, se il vaccino serve a proteggere solo per qualche mese, non ha senso renderlo obbligatorio per poter lavorare e lasciare a casa la gente senza stipendio! CUB Polito

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[WEBINAR GI-STS] Intelligenza artificiale e sistemi d’arma autonomi - con F. Giannotti e G. Tamburrini - coordina G. Colombetti
by Diego.Latella Jan. 10, 2022

Jan. 10, 2022

[Con preghiera di diffusione; e Buon Anno] D. Latella =========================== ANNUNCIO WEBINAR =========================== Intelligenza artificiale e sistemi d'arma autonomi Seminario on-line aperto al pubblico MERCOLEDÌ 19 Gennaio 2022 alle 16:00 (Official language: Italian) Coordina Giuliano Colombetti (CNR-IBF. GI-STS) 16:00 Saluti Istituzionali Antonello Provenzale (Presidente - Area della Ricerca di Pisa del CNR) 16:15 Stato dell'arte in Intelligenza Artificiale. Potenzialità e limiti delle tecnologie dell'Intelligenza Artificiale Fosca Giannotti (Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa; CNR/ISTI) 16:45 La militarizzazione dell'Intelligenza Artificiale, le armi autonome e la pace internazionale Guglielmo Tamburrini (Università degli Studi di Napoli "Federico II") 17:15 Discussione Il webinar è organizzato dal Gruppo Interdisciplinare su Scienza, Tecnologia e Società (GI-STS) dell'Area della Ricerca di Pisa del CNR In cooperazione con Areaperta - Area della Ricerca CNR di Pisa Caffè della Scienza "N. Badaloni" - Livorno Centro Interdisciplinare Scienze per La Pace dell'Università di Pisa Istituto di Biofisica del CNR Istituto di Fisiologia Clinica del CNR Istituto di Informatica e Telematica del CNR Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie dell'Informazione ``A. Faedo'' del CNR La Nuova Limonaia Laboratorio Informatica e Società del CINI Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs Unione degli Scienziati Per Il Disarmo e con il patrocinio della Rete Università per la Pace Per ulteriori informazioni---incluso il link per la partecipazione all'evento---si rimanda alla pagina "Events" (http://gists.pi.cnr.it/events.html )del sito web del Gruppo Interdisciplinare su Scienza, Tecnologia e Società (GI-STS) dell'Area della Ricerca di Pisa del CNR,(http://gists.pi.cnr.it ). =========================== For more information---including the link for participation---please refer to the "Events" page (http://gists.pi.cnr.it/events.html ) in the web site of the Gruppo Interdisciplinare su Scienza, Tecnologia e Società (GI-STS) dell'Area della Ricerca di Pisa del CNR (http://gists.pi.cnr.it ). -- Dott. Diego Latella - Senior Researcher CNR/ISTI, Via Moruzzi 1, 56124 Pisa, Italy (http:www.isti.cnr.it [1]) FM&&T Lab. (http://fmt.isti.cnr.it) CNR/GI-STS (http://gists.pi.cnr.it) https://www.isti.cnr.it/People/D.Latella - ph: +390506212982, fax: +390506212040 =================== The quest for a war-free world has a basic purpose: survival. But if in the process we learn how to achieve it by love rather than by fear, by kindness rather than compulsion; if in the process we learn how to combine the essential with the enjoyable, the expedient with the benevolent, the practical with the beautiful, this will be an extra incentive to embark on this great task. Above all, remember your humanity. -- Sir Joseph Rotblat I don't quite know whether it is especially computer science or its subdiscipline Artificial Intelligence that has such an enormous affection for euphemism. We speak so spectacularly and so readily of computer systems that understand, that see, decide, make judgments, and so on, without ourselves recognizing our own superficiality and immeasurable naivete with respect to these concepts. And, in the process of so speaking, we anesthetise our ability to evaluate the quality of our work and, what is more important, to identify and become conscious of its end use. […] One can't escape this state without asking, again and again: "What do I actually do? What is the final application and use of the products of my work?" and ultimately, "am I content or ashamed to have contributed to this use?" -- Prof. Joseph Weizenbaum ["Not without us", ACM SIGCAS 16(2-3) 2--7 - Aug. 1986] Links: ------ [1] http://www.isti.cnr.it

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Memento | 147° Mercoledì di Nexa | 12 Gennaio 2022
by Nexa Media Jan. 10, 2022

Jan. 10, 2022

Gentilissimi, vi ricordiamo che *mercoledì **12 gennaio**,**dalle ore 18.00 alle ore 20.00*, si svolgerà il 147° Mercoledì di Nexa, con un incontro dal titolo: /*"What if? Usare il futuro come strumento"*/. Ospiti: *Alberto Robiati* (Forwardto), *Claudio Marciano* (Università di Torino) e *Laura Sinagra Brisca* (IAAD) Sarà possibile partecipare al seminario connettendosi al seguente indirizzo: https://didattica.polito.it/VClass/NexaEvent Maggiori informazioni sull'incontro sono disponibili alla pagina: https://nexa.polito.it/mercoledi-147 Cordiali saluti,   -- Anita Botta Communication Manager Nexa Center for Internet & Society Politecnico di Torino – DAUIN Corso Duca degli Abruzzi, 24 - 10129 Torino _web:_ https://nexa.polito.it/ _mail:_anita.botta@polito.it <mailto:anita.botta@polito.it> tel: 011 090 7219

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Nomi a dominio
by don Luca Peyron Jan. 10, 2022

Jan. 10, 2022

Un pezzo quanto mai discutibile che dice, ahimè, quanto la comunicazione giornalistica talora difetti di cultura giuridica... Il tema fu l'oggetto della mia prima nota a sentenza da giovane laureato, era il 1997. Buona lettura dl https://www.repubblica.it/tecnologia/blog/strategikon/2022/01/05/news/la_qu… _________________________ don Luca Peyron Direttore Ufficio per la Pastorale Universitaria Arcidiocesi di Torino www.universitari.to.it via XX settembre 83, Torino tel. 011 5156239

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Dev corrupts NPM libs 'colors' and 'faker' breaking thousands of apps
by Giacomo Tesio Jan. 9, 2022

Jan. 9, 2022

Users of popular open-source libraries 'colors' and 'faker' were left stunned after they saw their applications, using these libraries, printing gibberish data and breaking. Some surmised if the NPM libraries had been compromised, but it turns out there's much more to the story. The developer of these libraries intentionally introduced an infinite loop that bricked thousands of projects that depend on 'colors and 'faker'. The colors library receives over 20 million weekly downloads on npm alone, and has almost 19,000 projects depending on it. Whereas, faker receives over 2.8 million weekly downloads on npm, and has over 2,500 dependents. # Open Source Revolution? The developer behind popular open-source NPM libraries 'colors' (aka colors.js on GitHub) and 'faker' (aka 'faker.js' on GitHub) intentionally introduced mischievous commits in them that are impacting thousands of applications relying on these libraries. Yesterday, users of popular open-source projects, such as Amazon's Cloud Development Kit (aws-cdk) were left stunned on seeing their applications print gibberish messages on their console. These messages included the text 'LIBERTY LIBERTY LIBERTY' followed by a sequence of non-ASCII characters Initially, users suspected that the libraries 'colors' and 'faker' used by these projects were compromised [1, 2, 3], similar to how coa, rc, and ua-parser-js libraries were hijacked last year by malicious actors. But, in fact, it was the dev behind colors and faker who appears to have intentionally committed the code responsible for the major blunder, as seen by BleepingComputer. The developer, named Marak Squires added a "new American flag module" to colors.js library yesterday in version v1.4.44-liberty-2 that he then pushed to GitHub and npm. The infinite loop introduced in the code will keep running indefinitely; printing the gibberish non-ASCII character sequence endlessly on the console for any applications that use 'colors.' Likewise, a sabotaged version '6.6.6' of faker was published to GitHub and npm. "It's come to our attention that there is a zalgo bug in the v1.4.44-liberty-2 release of colors," mocked the developer. "Please know we are working right now to fix the situation and will have a resolution shortly." Zalgo text refers to certain non-ASCII characters that appear glitchy. The reason behind this mischief on the developer's part appears to be retaliation—against mega-corporations and commercial consumers of open-source projects who extensively rely on cost-free and community-powered software but do not, according to the developer, give back to the community. In November 2020, Marak had warned that he will no longer be supporting the big corporations with his "free work" and that commercial entities should consider either forking the projects or compensating the dev with a yearly "six figure" salary. "Respectfully, I am no longer going to support Fortune 500s ( and other smaller sized companies ) with my free work. There isn't much else to say," the developer previously wrote. "Take this as an opportunity to send me a six figure yearly contract or fork the project and have someone else work on it. Interestingly, as of today, BleepingComputer noticed that the README page for the 'faker' GitHub repo was also modified by the developer to make reference to Aaron Swartz by stating: "What really happened with Aaron Swartz?" Swartz was an American programmer, entrepreneur, and renowned hacktivist who, following a legal battle, committed suicide. In an effort to make information freely accessible to all, the hacktivist downloaded millions of journal articles from the JSTOR database present on the MIT campus network, allegedly by rotating his IP and MAC addresses repeatedly to get around the technological blocks put in place by JSTOR and MIT. In the process of doing this, Swartz may have run afoul of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and faced criminal charges, with penalties of up to thirty-five years in prison. [...] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/dev-corrupts-npm-libs-colors… L'articolo continua citando (in modo abbastanza capzioso) passaggi di un dibattito via twitter che mostra sviluppatori dall'imbarazzante (in)coscienza politica. In realtà, su Twitter ed ancora di più sul Fediverse, la maggior parte degli sviluppatori sostenevano l'azione di protesta di Marak Squires. Personalmente ritengo (e spero) che questo tipo di cyber-proteste, creative e non violente, diventerà la norma: nessun sistema informatico intrinsecamente fragile (come quelli basati su NPM) ne sarà esente. Giacomo

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Se l'agenzia delle entrate tratta i dati sanitari
by Mauro Alovisio Jan. 9, 2022

Jan. 9, 2022

Gent.mi segnalo articolo di interesse sulle conseguenze del Decreto Capienze https://privacychronicles.substack.com/p/se-lagenzia-delle-entrate-tratta?t… Cordiali saluti Mauro Alovisio

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Your attention didn’t collapse. It was stolen | Psychology | The Guardian
by Alberto Cammozzo Jan. 9, 2022

Jan. 9, 2022

we now live in a perfect storm of cognitive degradation <https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/jan/02/attention-span-focus-screen…> When he was nine years old, my godson Adam developed a brief but freakishly intense obsession with Elvis Presley. He took to singing Jailhouse Rock at the top of his voice with all the low crooning and pelvis-jiggling of the King himself. One day, as I tucked him in, he looked at me very earnestly and asked: “Johann, will you take me to Graceland one day?” Without really thinking, I agreed. I never gave it another thought, until everything had gone wrong. Ten years later, Adam was lost. He had dropped out of school when he was 15, and he spent almost all his waking hours alternating blankly between screens – a blur of YouTube, WhatsApp and porn. (I’ve changed his name and some minor details to preserve his privacy.) He seemed to be whirring at the speed of Snapchat, and nothing still or serious could gain any traction in his mind. During the decade in which Adam had become a man, this fracturing seemed to be happening to many of us. Our ability to pay attention was cracking and breaking. I had just turned 40, and wherever my generation gathered, we would lament our lost capacity for concentration. I still read a lot of books, but with each year that passed, it felt more and more like running up a down escalator. Then one evening, as we lay on my sofa, each staring at our own ceaselessly shrieking screens, I looked at him and felt a low dread. “Adam,” I said softly, “let’s go to Graceland.” I reminded him of the promise I had made. I could see that the idea of breaking this numbing routine ignited something in him, but I told him there was one condition he had to stick to if we went. He had to switch his phone off during the day. He swore he would. When you arrive at the gates of Graceland, there is no longer a human being whose job is to show you around. You are handed an iPad, you put in little earbuds, and the iPad tells you what to do – turn left; turn right; walk forward. In each room, a photograph of where you are appears on the screen, while a narrator describes it. So as we walked around we were surrounded by blank-faced people, looking almost all the time at their screens. As we walked, I felt more and more tense. When we got to the jungle room – Elvis’s favourite place in the mansion – the iPad was chattering away when a middle-aged man standing next to me turned to say something to his wife. In front of us, I could see the large fake plants that Elvis had bought to turn this room into his own artificial jungle. “Honey,” he said, “this is amazing. Look.” He waved the iPad in her direction, and began to move his finger across it. “If you swipe left, you can see the jungle room to the left. And if you swipe right, you can see the jungle room to the right.” If you read your texts while working, you lose that time, but also the time it takes to refocus afterwards, which is a lot His wife stared, smiled, and began to swipe at her own iPad. I leaned forward. “But, sir,” I said, “there’s an old-fashioned form of swiping you can do. It’s called turning your head. Because we’re here. We’re in the jungle room. You can see it unmediated. Here. Look.” I waved my hand, and the fake green leaves rustled a little. Their eyes returned to their screens. “Look!” I said. “Don’t you see? We’re actually there. There’s no need for your screen. We are in the jungle room.” They hurried away. I turned to Adam, ready to laugh about it all – but he was in a corner, holding his phone under his jacket, flicking through Snapchat. At every stage in the trip, he had broken his promise. When the plane first touched down in New Orleans two weeks before, he took out his phone while we were still in our seats. “You promised not to use it,” I said. He replied: “I meant I wouldn’t make phone calls. I can’t not use Snapchat and texting, obviously.” He said this with baffled honesty, as though I had asked him to hold his breath for 10 days. In the jungle room, I suddenly snapped and tried to wrestle his phone from his grasp, and he stomped away. That night I found him in the Heartbreak Hotel, sitting next to a swimming pool (shaped like a giant guitar), looking sad. I realised as I sat with him that, as with so much anger, my rage towards him was really anger towards myself. His inability to focus was something I felt happening to me too. I was losing my ability to be present, and I hated it. “I know something’s wrong,” Adam said, holding his phone tightly in his hand. “But I have no idea how to fix it.” Then he went back to texting. Johann Hari at his home in London. Johann Hari at his home in London. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer I realised then that I needed to understand what was really happening to him and to so many of us. That moment turned out to be the start of a journey that transformed how I think about attention. I travelled all over the world in the next three years, from Miami to Moscow to Melbourne, interviewing the leading experts in the world about focus. What I learned persuaded me that we are not now facing simply a normal anxiety about attention, of the kind every generation goes through as it ages. We are living in a serious attention crisis – one with huge implications for how we live. I learned there are twelve factors that have been proven to reduce people’s ability to pay attention and that many of these factors have been rising in the past few decades – sometimes dramatically. I went to Portland, Oregon, to interview Prof Joel Nigg, who is one of the leading experts in the world on children’s attention problems, and he told me we need to ask if we are now developing “an attentional pathogenic culture” – an environment in which sustained and deep focus is harder for all of us. When I asked him what he would do if he was in charge of our culture and he actually wanted to destroy people’s attention, he said: “Probably what our society is doing.” Prof Barbara Demeneix, a leading French scientist who has studied some key factors that can disrupt attention, told me bluntly: “There is no way we can have a normal brain today.” We can see the effects all around us. A small study of college students found they now only focus on any one task for 65 seconds. A different study of office workers found they only focus on average for three minutes. This isn’t happening because we all individually became weak-willed. Your focus didn’t collapse. It was stolen. When I first got back from Graceland, I thought my attention was failing because I wasn’t strong enough as an individual and because I had been taken over by my phone. I went into a spiral of negative thoughts, reproaching myself. I’d say – you’re weak, you’re lazy, you’re not disciplined enough. I thought the solution was obvious: be more disciplined, and banish your phone. So I went online and booked myself a little room by the beach in Provincetown, at the tip of Cape Cod. I announced triumphantly to everyone – I am going to be there for three months, with no smartphone, and no computer that can get online. I’m done. I’m tired of being wired. I knew I could only do it because I was very lucky and had money from my previous books. I knew it couldn’t be a long-term solution. I did it because I thought that if I didn’t, I might lose some crucial aspects of my ability to think deeply. I also hoped that if I stripped everything back for a time, I might start to be able to glimpse the changes we could all make in a more sustainable way. In my first webless week, I stumbled around in a haze of decompression. Provincetown is a little gay resort town with the highest proportion of same-sex couples in the US. I ate cupcakes, read books, talked with strangers and sang songs. Everything radically slowed down. Normally I follow the news every hour or so, getting a drip-feed of anxiety-provoking facts and trying to smush them together into some kind of sense. Instead, I simply read a physical newspaper once a day. Every few hours, I would feel an unfamiliar sensation gurgling inside me and I would ask myself: what is that? Ah, yes. Calm. Later, I realised when I interviewed the experts and studied their research that there were many reasons why my attention was starting to heal from that first day. Prof Earl Miller, a neuroscientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, explained one to me. He said “your brain can only produce one or two thoughts” in your conscious mind at once. That’s it. “We’re very, very single-minded.” We have “very limited cognitive capacity”. But we have fallen for an enormous delusion. The average teenager now believes they can follow six forms of media at the same time. When neuroscientists studied this, they found that when people believe they are doing several things at once, they are actually juggling. “They’re switching back and forth. They don’t notice the switching because their brain sort of papers it over to give a seamless experience of consciousness, but what they’re actually doing is switching and reconfiguring their brain moment-to-moment, task-to-task – [and] that comes with a cost.” Imagine, say, you are doing your tax return, and you receive a text, and you look at it – it’s only a glance, taking three seconds – and then you go back to your tax return. In that moment, “your brain has to reconfigure, when it goes from one task to another”, he said. You have to remember what you were doing before, and you have to remember what you thought about it. When this happens, the evidence shows that “your performance drops. You’re slower. All as a result of the switching.” This is called the “switch-cost effect”. It means that if you check your texts while trying to work, you aren’t only losing the little bursts of time you spend looking at the texts themselves – you are also losing the time it takes to refocus afterwards, which turns out to be a huge amount. For example, one study at the Carnegie Mellon University’s human computer interaction lab took 136 students and got them to sit a test. Some of them had to have their phones switched off, and others had their phones on and received intermittent text messages. The students who received messages performed, on average, 20% worse. It seems to me that almost all of us are currently losing that 20% of our brainpower, almost all the time. Miller told me that as a result we now live in “a perfect storm of cognitive degradation”. For the first time in a very long time, in Provincetown I was doing one thing at a time, without being interrupted. I was living within the limits of what my brain could actually handle. I felt my attention growing and improving with every day that passed, but then, one day, I experienced an abrupt setback. I was walking down the beach and every few steps I saw the same thing that had been scratching at me since Memphis. People seemed to be using Provincetown simply as a backdrop for selfies, rarely looking up, at the ocean or each other. Only this time, the itch I felt wasn’t to yell: You’re wasting your lives, put the damn phone down. It was to yell: Give me that phone! Mine! For so long, I had received the thin, insistent signals of the web every few hours throughout the day, the trickle of likes and comments that say: I see you. You matter. Now they were gone. Simone de Beauvoir said that when she became an atheist, it felt like the world had fallen silent. Losing the web felt like that. After the rhetorical heat of social media, ordinary social interactions seemed pleasing but low volume. No normal social interaction floods you with hearts. I realised that to heal my attention, it was not enough simply to strip out distractions. That makes you feel good at first – but then it creates a vacuum where all the noise was. I realised I had to fill the vacuum. To do that, I started to think a lot about an area of psychology I had learned about years before – the science of flow states. Almost everyone reading this will have experienced a flow state at some point. It’s when you are doing something meaningful to you, and you really get into it, and time falls away, and your ego seems to vanish, and you find yourself focusing deeply and effortlessly. Flow is the deepest form of attention human beings can offer. But how do we get there? I later interviewed Prof Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in Claremont, California, who was the first scientist to study flow states and researched them for more than 40 years. From his research, I learned there are three key factors which you need to get into flow. First you need to choose one goal. Flow takes all your mental energy, deployed deliberately in one direction. Second, that goal needs to be meaningful to you – you can’t flow into a goal that you don’t care about. Third, it helps if what you are doing is at the edge of your abilities – if, say, the rock you are climbing is slightly higher and harder than the last rock you climbed. So every morning, I started to write – a different kind of writing from my earlier work, one that stretched me. Within a few days, I started to flow, and hours of focus would pass without it feeling like a challenge. I felt I was focusing in the way I had when I was a teenager, in long effortless stretches. I had feared my brain was breaking. I cried with relief when I realised that in the right circumstances, its full power could come back. At the end of every day, I would sit on the beach and watch the light slowly change. The light on the cape is unlike the light anywhere else I have ever been and in Provincetown, I could see more clearly than I ever had before in my life – my own thoughts, my own goals, my own dreams. I was living in the light. So when the time came to leave the beach house and come back to the hyperlinked world, I became convinced I had cracked the code of attention. I returned to the world determined to integrate the lessons I had learned in my everyday life. When I was reunited with my phone and laptop after taking a ferry back to where they were stashed in Boston, they seemed alien, and alienating. But within a few months, my screen time was back to four hours a day, and my attention was fraying and breaking again. In Moscow, the former Google engineer James Williams – who has become the most important philosopher of attention in the western world – told me I had made a crucial mistake. Individual abstinence is “not the solution, for the same reason that wearing a gas mask for two days a week outside isn’t the answer to pollution. It might, for a short period of time, keep certain effects at bay, but it’s not sustainable, and it doesn’t address the systemic issues.” He said that our attention is being deeply altered by huge invasive forces in wider society. Saying the solution was to just adjust your own habits – to pledge to break up with your phone, say – was just “pushing it back on to the individual” he said, when “it’s really the environmental changes that will really make the difference”. Nigg said it might help me grasp what’s happening if we compare our rising attention problems to our rising obesity rates. Fifty years ago there was very little obesity, but today it is endemic in the western world. This is not because we suddenly became greedy or self-indulgent. He said: “Obesity is not a medical epidemic – it’s a social epidemic. We have bad food, for example, and so people are getting fat.” The way we live changed dramatically – our food supply changed, and we built cities that are hard to walk or cycle around, and those changes in our environment led to changes in our bodies. We gained mass, en masse. Something similar, he said, might be happening with the changes in our attention. I learned that the factors harming our attention are not all immediately obvious. I had been focused on tech at first, but in fact the causes range very widely – from the food we eat to the air we breathe, from the hours we work to the hours we no longer sleep. They include many things we have come to take for granted – from how we deprive our children of play, to how our schools strip learning of meaning by basing everything on tests. I came to believe we need to respond to this incessant invasion of our attention at two levels. The first is individual. There are all sorts of changes we can make at a personal level that will protect our focus. I would say that by doing most of them, I have boosted my focus by about 20%. But we have to level with people. Those changes will only take you so far. At the moment it’s as though we are all having itching powder poured over us all day, and the people pouring the powder are saying: “You might want to learn to meditate. Then you wouldn’t scratch so much.” Meditation is a useful tool – but we actually need to stop the people who are pouring itching powder on us. We need to band together to take on the forces stealing our attention and take it back. This can sound a bit abstract – but I met people who were putting it into practice in many places. To give one example: there is strong scientific evidence that stress and exhaustion ruin your attention. Today, about 35% of workers feel they can never switch off their phones because their boss might email them at any time of day or night. In France, ordinary workers decided this was intolerable and pressured their government for change – so now, they have a legal “right to disconnect”. It’s simple. You have a right to defined work hours, and you have a right to not be contacted by your employer outside those hours. Companies that break the rules get huge fines. There are lots of potential collective changes like this that can restore part of our focus. We could, for example, force social media companies to abandon their current business model, which is specifically designed to invade our attention in order to keep us scrolling. There are alternative ways these sites could work – ones that would heal our attention instead of hacking it. Some scientists say these worries about attention are a moral panic, comparable to the anxieties in the past about comic books or rap music, and that the evidence is shaky. Other scientists say the evidence is strong and these anxieties are like the early warnings about the obesity epidemic or the climate crisis in the 1970s. I think that given this uncertainty, we can’t wait for perfect evidence. We have to act based on a reasonable assessment of risk. If the people warning about the effects on our attention turn out to be wrong, and we still do what they suggest, what will be the cost? We will spend less time being harassed by our bosses, and we’ll be tracked and manipulated less by technology – along with lots of other improvements in our lives that are desirable in any case. But if they turn out to be right, and we don’t do what they say, what’s the cost? We will have – as the former Google engineer Tristan Harris told me – downgraded humanity, stripping us of our attention at the very time when we face big collective crises that require it more than ever. But none of these changes will happen unless we fight for them. Just as the feminist movement reclaimed women’s right to their own bodies (and still has to fight for it today), I believe we now need an attention movement to reclaim our minds. I believe we need to act urgently, because this may be like the climate crisis, or the obesity crisis – the longer we wait, the harder it will get. The more our attention degrades, the harder it will be to summon the personal and political energy to take on the forces stealing our focus. The first step it requires is a shift in our consciousness. We need to stop blaming ourselves, or making only demands for tiny tweaks from our employers and from tech companies. We own our own minds – and together, we can take them back from the forces that are stealing them. The above is an edited extract from Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention by Johann Hari, published by Bloomsbury on 6 January.

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