Caribbean Underdevelopment and the Attention Economy

I recently watched a Ted Talk by Dino Ambrosi in which he did a time allocation in months for an 18-year-old who is expected to live until ninety. According to Ambrosi and 18-year-old who will live until ninety has 864 months remaining in their life. He breaks down these 864 months giving time allocations to sleep, work and school, cooking and eating, bathroom hygiene, driving, and chores and errands. Ambrosi goes on to argue that of the remaining 334 months of free time left, the average individual will spend 312 months immersed in screen time.

The statistics he quoted were intriguing because his arguments underscored how intensive social media immersion could be negatively impacting both personal and national development in the Caribbean. Sadly, the trend of massive social media engagement could not have come at a worse time for us here in the Caribbean, and for our family on the continent of Africa and the rest of the Black Diaspora.

At precisely the same time when the descendants of those who trafficked in the blood sweat and tears of our ancestor are circling their wagons in preparation for their last stand as per Jean Raspall ‘The Camp of the Saints’ we the children of our oppressed ancestors have become the willing victim of zombie and doom scrolling on social media. Our intellectual surrender has become so complete that it makes the old colonial censorship seem more like a humanitarian gesture.

As I write these words, millions of people of African ancestry in the Caribbean, on the continent of Africa and in the Black Diaspora are staring at electronic screens as though drawn by some malevolent and Machiavellian pied piper who has somehow figured out just what it takes to keep us staring at the screen. It is almost as if our technological gadgets have opened Pandora’s box, releasing a mad magician who is obsessed with capturing our attention around the clock.

The cell phone has become as ubiquitous as are global price spikes in oil and diesel. Young people sleep with their cell phones under their pillows. We touch our cell phones more often than we touch our partners. It is usually the first thing we touch in the morning when we awake and it is one of the last things we touch before we go to bed at night. The cell phone has become a gateway to love, sex, friendship, learning, and a host of other desirable activities. It has become our companion, our spiritual mentor, and a replacement for intimacy, connection, presence, and life itself.

When we signed on the dotted line, accepting conditions which we did not read and which were written in a legalese so obscure that it baffled even the more astute legal minds in our midst, we literally committed ourselves to a Faustian deal in which we became the product sold by the social media companies. The buying and selling of human souls are back writ large and we all are loving it this time around.

Instead of reading great Black authors, or learning to code, or learning a trade that will put thousands of dollars in our credit union accounts, daily, we are spending hours watching people eat, have sex, seek love, dance and argue about how many holes a drinking straw has. While we are gorging ourselves at the entertainment and information troughs that social media has evolved into, the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world are becoming rich enough to spot God a loan.

Paradoxically, even though social media has exposed us to so much information, intelligence and IQ seems to be on the decline globally. A number of countries in the European Union have reported that since 1975, there has been a noticeable decline in IQ scores. This decline which has been dubbed as the Reverse Flynn Effect, is also noticeable in North America and other parts of the world. Heavy or passive social media consumption has been linked to this decline.

It seems as though our generation generally has become over informed but severely under-educated. We get opinions from New York, validation from the UK, and business advise from influencers in Dubai, none of whom know the price of a flying fish in Barbados. Every hour a carpenter spends posting stuff on social media is an hour not spent in perfecting his craft and building stuff that will add to his real wealth.

Because of social media we are more connected to strangers a million miles away than we are to our neighbor who lives at the bottom of our gap. We know more about Trump and American politics than we do about what is happening in our constituencies. We are vocal on social media about issues in other countries but refuse to attend a town hall to discus the life threatening and car suspension destroying pot holes in our roads.

Social media algorithms are not interested in Caribbean development. Mark Zuckerberg does not give a flying expletive about Caribbean and African countries becoming wealthy, self-sufficient, or sovereign. A focused, productive, wealthy Caribbean is bad for business. A distracted insecure, consuming Caribbean that needs to buy a new wardrobe for every social media post is however great for the monetary bottom line.

Please don’t get me wrong. I am not asking you to throw your phone in the sea. The Caribbean Sea already have too much garbage in it anyway. What I am asking is that for just one hour a day you just let your phone sit silent in a corner of your choosing. People will not think that you have died even though some may start thinking about how many likes they could get from a post about your funeral. In the stillness of that hour pick up a book, learn a skill. Plant something. Talk to a neighbor and if you really get desperate talk to your spouse.

As you begin to detox, graduate to something more advance. Observe a Sabbath from social media. Take a whole day off from social media. Spend a little bit more time reading, planting, and talking with actual people face to face. When or if we reach the ninety-year mark Dino Ambrosi mentioned in his Ted Talk, I guarantee that no one will be talking about your social media post that went viral for two seconds in 2020. Your children and grandchildren will be more interested in what you built, what you owned, and definitely what you left them in the will.

The choice we face as a nation and as a region is stark and simple. We can be a people who stare at screens for hours each day. We can be a people who make content and then sit back anxiously waiting for likes and approval from people who would not know us from a can of paint if they passed us in the street tomorrow, or we can be a people who make history. We can’t do both at the same time. Our social media timeline can wait but our posterity and our nation cannot.

Lenrod Nzulu Baraka is the founder of Afro-Caribbean Spiritual Teaching Center and the author of The Black Paradigm: Challenges and Possibilities.