Red Hot Cyber
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Olivia Terragni : 4 January 2025 17:50
Author: Ashleigh Crause
Is our Obsessive use of technology making us insensitive? “Technology – Ashleigh Crause tells us – is, by far, one of the most amazing inventions to date”. Although all this comes at a price, naturally. I would like to quote, before you read what Ashleigh writes, the words of Mike Featherstone: “individuals in California don’t even meet on the sidewalk anymore, but when they do it they look at everything through a square screen”. Yes, it must be like this I think, through that interface we are able to transform the concept of biological organism and physical reality into a hardware problem, a kind of a physical reality that can be composed but that is dispersed within the network borders, where everything is immaterial and where when we don’t like something we can always disconnect ourselves. So we become artificial, we behave like machines, we let ourselves be eroded by technology and we become insensitive, while the Fermi paradox reminds us that no, or very few, civilizations escape the self-destructive capacity of technology.
Ashleigh Crause – author of thefollowing article – thinks about the direction we’re heading in. Happy reading.
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Ashleigh Crause is a cybersecurity researcher, writer, and OSINT investigator. She is the founder of Dead Cyber Society, a support group dedicated to helping victims of cyber-related abuse. Based in the UK, Ashleigh spends her free time studying computer law and psychology to deepen her expertise in the field.
On the 22nd of December 2024, a young woman was set ablaze on a New York subway train. Meanwhile, her murderer sat on a bench on the platform, opposite the part of the train where his victim stood burning in the entryway, as onlookers took out their phones to record and police stood idly by, watching.
How did this happen? You would expect this to be the question of the onlookers, instead, this was a question asked by most online users who witnessed the gruesome footage, footage so callously recorded for likes and views.
How is it that people have become so disconnected from humility and so psychologically removed that everyday citizens can stand and witness an act so horrible, you would only expect it to happen in the worst of war zones? Is it reasonable to ask ourselves if our overwhelming exposure to technology has caused humanity to become desensitized and detached from its inherent nature to help, nurture, protect, and do what is right?
What would play such a huge part in this disconnect?
A Queen’s University behavioral expert found that brain patterns are similar whether we are performing an action or watching someone else perform it. Our increased technological consumption plays a significant role in programming our daily mental disconnects when it comes to viewing media that once shocked us but is now becoming normalized.
Neurosciences have been proving this theory for years. That is why everyday users should be more cautious about what they consume on the internet. However, one could argue, that maybe we prefer the disconnect, as it lessens the impact of the horror and the fear that follows.
After all, games like Doom, America’s Army, Full Spectrum Command, and other game titles were used by the US Military to program desensitization into soldiers, and it was very successful. Let us not forget that they also use VR (virtual reality) games such as Virtual Vietnam.
It is important to note that these same tactics are also used to treat PTSD in soldiers. This highlights how effectively they impact the brain, especially since our own military employs them for training purposes.
Could this explain why the police who were present at the subway station witnessing the murder appeared nonchalant and just wandered around like it’s any other day? In the footage that has been circulating on social media, it doesn’t seem like the police were phased at all, in spite of their motto to serve and protect the community.
This is very similar to a type of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) that most therapists use to treat Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), which involves a constant mental replay of the events that traumatize us until it no longer affects us. This therapy is called Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR).
I underwent EMDR therapy myself for eight weeks to treat severe PTSD. The effects not only desensitized me to the event and to witnessing similar events, but they also caused physical reactions during treatment, including dizziness, nausea, vomiting, and disorientation. All of these reactions were triggered by the simple movement of a pen.
Both work in similar ways, and you don’t leave your chair. Let that sink in for a moment, then think about the overwhelming advertisements users are confronted with every day, each contending for your attention and interaction. How often do you see the same ad across your scrolling adventures?
I studied these advertising mechanics when I was learning about social media management. Advertisements are tailored to appeal to individual users’ personal browsing behavior and, by extension, to unique psychological profiles. Most users are generally aware of this. Your scrolling, tapping, and clicking habits are being psychologically evaluated behind the scenes.
Technology is, by far, one of the most amazing inventions to date. However, the extent of its psychological impact on our daily usage suggests that we still do not fully understand its effects on how our brains process information. I do not say this lightly but with the acknowledgment that even the most renowned experts admit they do not completely understand how our brains work.
As humans, we are drawn to the seductive nature of desensitization. This is a fair statement because, when you consider the decades during which the information highway was still being developed for everyday users, and how society has technologically and sociologically evolved due to our ease of perpetual access to information, we have arrived at a new era where normalizing what was once abhorrent has become our reality. But at the cost of our humanity.
After all, how beautiful must life be if we feel nothing negative, right? However, our curiosity about the macabre is evident in our questions, such as: ‘How was she still standing? And ‘Why is the assailant casually sitting on the bench, watching his victim burn?’
Due to the fact that horrific imagery is pushed into users’ line of sight daily, especially media uploaded by users showing wartime casualties, the effects are arguably similar in nature to the EMDR therapy practices involving the pendulum motion of the pen to normalize traumatic events, leading to an increase in technological desensitization. Eventually, the shock and horror are no longer a reaction, just another “such a sad story” in that temporary moment of information absorption and then we scroll on to the next title to feed on. The world seems to have become a very dark place. As a people, it seems we no longer know how to be effectively “human”, even while we tend to agree on concepts like human rights and justice. But can desensitized users genuinely care about social impact issues like these? Most users seem to care singularly about making a spectacle of themselves, gaining views and likes, just like the person who recorded this young woman’s last moments before being burned to death.
If any of these factors are an indication of where collective humanity is heading, it’s not unfair to assert that those who witnessed her death while recording the event were most likely celebrating their viral video rather than reflecting on the gravity of what they witnessed.
Is this what we have become?
Just another cog in the digital machine.
After all, there is no need to supply without the demand.
Olivia Terragni