15 Minute Cities for the Brain

I’ll sit with a book awhile, but if I hear my master’s call – the beep of an incoming text – I’ll drop it like a hotcake. The younger generation don’t even do as much. Many of them have given up entirely the notion of reading a book. They are fully committed to the screen life. Even the toddlers. I recently heard a young mother lamenting that when they drop their child off at day care, the child cries hysterically; not because of the impending separation from loving parent, but from ‘nanny’ – the iPad that dutifully accompanies them everywhere, including the car trip to day care.

Books provide us with endless worlds of imagination and knowledge, and the internet-powered screen was touted to do the same. But in reality it seems to be doing the opposite: turning us inward, channelling us into algorithmically curated content, creating small little worlds for us.

In a way, we become ‘captured,’ by means of our own choices. Take one of my favourite pastimes, cooking. In my hunt for online recipes, I am now presented with roughly the same half dozen or so cooking sites. And I don’t for one minute believe that Suzy from themediterraneandish.com is so enormously popular that she appears for everyone, a global cooking genius. No, I’m a special customer, apparently, simply because I have used her recipes before, perhaps only once. That’s all it takes to be marked and plopped into a category. This may seem harmless, but it gives me the probably-false impression that Suzy’s site is a well-recognised and tested site, which has the effect of making me content with my choice and happily looking no further. Similarly, when I search for an item of clothing to buy, my options now seem restricted. All is Temu. Previously, I would have been given a plethora of choice from reputable brands that I knew already – Sportscraft, Myer, Sussan, etcetera. Am I now supposed to think that this Chinese manufacturer is making the only suitable black pants in the world? Why aren’t I being shown more likely options for me?

It makes one cynical and jaded. It is clear that the results of searching on the internet are highly engineered. It’s almost as though the money to be made by others is what’s leading us. Those who pay to play are all that we see. I have tried using search engines apart from Google, but they are mostly worse. Some sites that I know to exist are not even findable on some engines. Perhaps they have an exclusivity deal with Google. Whatever the case, it makes for a lower quality and less free internet. Less a pathway into the real world and increasingly a sneaky capture into a fake, curated one.

What we are being led towards feels like a 15-minute city for the brain. The topics one is ‘given’ to think about – on various platforms I am unsubtly encouraged to get the latest vaccine while being shown ‘news’ articles with a socially progressive bent, such as transgenderism and climate action – and the stores one is ‘allocated’ to buy from, while easily accessible, are limiting. It is clear that the space has been hijacked for political and economic purposes.

This is also the risk with the real life and much-hyped 15-minute city. Though marketed as making people’s lives better, it comes with the potential to usher in a ‘new normal’ lifestyle: no cars, limited travel, less freedom. Still, these theoretically idyllic neighbourhoods with conveniently close facilities are at least real. When it comes to the 15-minute city for the brain, I am less sure. It seems to be part of a fake world; one that still has real parts, but which require more effort to access and which some may never find. It’s a bit like being placed in a modern-day Plato’s cave, subsisting on an inaccurate representation of reality.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) portends to make things worse. While no doubt good for saving time on menial tasks, its more advanced functionality has the potential to be engineered in such a way that it will either tell us what we want to hear, perhaps endorsing false ideas we may hold or explore, or it will, like the Google search, lead us to a preconceived conclusion for reasons unknown – commercial or social – that others have determined. Some may call me cynical or overly worried, but AI’s power is objectively threatening to the future shape of human ethics, in a similar but more intense way than medical advancements have been.

On a lighter note, but still worrying, the internet’s algorithms and AI capabilities also threaten to lead us down a path of homogenisation. We risk losing our ‘naturally formed’ identity – in a variety of areas, such as national, sexual, individual – in favour of a curated or invented identity (Furries, anyone?), either because we lose our agency in terms of making our own free choices or because we are being fed a constant diet of politically correct fads and falsities. We may not even realise this is happening, instead falling into a false sense of reality, believing that what we are viewing and spending our time on represents a natural, common pathway for humans. We may in time be less exposed to, and thus at risk of forgetting, or at least discarding, our long-held views and values. This is to say, we become less locally influenced – by family and community – and more globally influenced. More homogenised.

But it seems we’re all quite pliable. We go willingly into our 15-minute cities. It’s just easier to entertain oneself when the sort of content you are being offered is more or less in line with your taste and your longings. You could progress quite quickly from watching a one-off video of a pug dog frolicking on the lawn to an unhealthy diet of crazy canine capers without much resistance. Next thing you know, you’ve ‘forgotten to have children,’ as the saying goes, and you’re instead buying a baby bouncer from Temu for your dog because you have been trained to believe that this is a normal and common choice to make.

But we must resist! Let your brain wander outside of its artificially built 15-minute city. Pick up that book again. Spend more time living in the real world – the one directly around you, though it be challenging and full of heartache – than in the online one that you can’t verify and can’t build your life on.