What is Invisible Environment?
A Mission Statement for a Writing Experiment
It feels appropriate to outline the motives behind this blog.
First, it is an experiment. This past work week, I’ve woken up early each day to write and publish something before my day job. This I see as twofold. First, it is to develop the habit of writing and have a self imposed affordance landscape that incentivizes me to write each day. For a long time I told myself that this blog would solely be dedicated to long form, researched essays. This now seems like a lofty goal to attain without writing discipline, akin to running a marathon with no preparation or training. Writing everyday makes me feel as though I am a writer, and so setting my sights on longer form articles then seems less daunting.
Secondly, I want to see what personal transformation can take place with a dedicated writing routine. Of course it would be cool if the blog increased in readership, but ultimately that does not matter. Writing everyday is a preparation for opening. I’m curious who I could be, and what my experience of reality could be if I committed my thoughts to a page each day.
Why the name Invisible Environment?
While studying Cognitive Science at the University of Toronto, it became increasingly clear to me how much our cognition is influenced by our environment, both physical and cultural. It sets up a “choice architecture”, as the dystopian Nudge unit proponents would put it, or affordance landscape as I would prefer to call it. The society in which we exist is constructed mostly from the top-down, meaning whether we are aware of it or not, our choices are always being steered in one direction or another by outside forces.
I do not profess to be any authority in the field of cognitive science. I hold only a bachelors degree in Cognitive Science and Psychology. This blog is not about my credentials.
I came into academia with the intention of staying a long time. After a solid decade of hedonistic and self-loathing alcoholism, I got sober. I went to school to provide some structure and to satisfy my renewed curiosity for life.
In early 2020, in the third year of my degree, an event happened to all of us that changed the choice architecture of society, and hence changed all of our cognitive landscapes. At first, I fell prey to the panic. Embarrassingly, I have to admit that I washed my groceries at one point. Luckily, I was able to snap out of it before the mass societal enforcement of medical intervention.
It was my opposition to a risky and unneeded medical intervention that filtered me out of academia.
I was working hard to prepare for graduate school applications. I had landed a dream job, working part-time at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) in Toronto. It was a particularly proud moment as some years earlier I had been a client, seeking relief from alcoholism. I also regularly attended 12-step meetings hosted on one of their campuses.
I was working as a research assistant for a lab dedicated to studying dialectical behaviour therapy for the treatment of borderline personality disorder. Of course, as the world had moved online at that time, it was a remote position.
All was going well until the roll out of the medical intervention. I had already had my concerns about taking it. But I was weighing my options, reading the literature from the online medical journal repository I had access to through the university.
I was on the fence, as were many of the people I knew at the time.
Then something changed. It became utterly unacceptable to have any doubts.
This was one of the loudest alarm bells for me. Science was built on the foundation of inquiry and reevaluation. This was not science we were witnessing. It was a global hysteria and narrowing of choices towards making the one, and only, “correct” decision.
As mentioned, my job was remote. So I was quite taken aback when I was told that my refusal to take the medical treatment was to result in my termination. This made no sense. I worked from a desk in my bedroom. This was not in the interest of public health. This was a purity test.
I lost all faith in institutional academia at that point and made the decision to go another path with my career. And I am so glad that I did. It has opened up so many beautiful experiences that I am ultimately grateful that I was pressured out of an institutional academic life.
But I refuse to not have an intellectual life.
And so this is what Invisible Environment is to me. My intellectual life. The main focus will be on the mechanisms of society that led to the conditions that allowed for the demonization of medical choice and freedom. These mass psychological forces have always been there. All I aim to do is illustrate to what extent they exist so that we might have a say in how we build our local cognitive environments such that we do not fall prey to mass psychological tactics that sway us towards ends that are not in our best interest.
If this all sounds like a conspiracy theory, one need only look at what psychological professionals, public relations specialists, and governments are saying out loud. The book Nudge by Thaler and Sunstein professes to help us design paternalistic state “choice architectures” that nudge us towards making better, healthier decisions. Governments around the world have installed Nudge units to orchestrate your choices while giving you the appearance of making the decision for yourself. This would be all well and good if we assume their benevolence in the construction of these choice architectures, but know this is not the case. Instead, corporations hire lobbyists to ensure that their choices are front and centre.
There is no secret conspiracy to change your choices, it’s a completely open conspiracy. These professionals do not think that society is intelligent enough to make their own choices and so we must be saved by the intelligence of the elite. You just have to listen to the self-appointed arbiters of truth to know what their aims are:
“If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without them knowing it.”
-- Edward Bernays
Source : "Propaganda". Book by Edward Bernays (p.71), 1928
This feels like something we used to know. But from 2020 onward I watched almost everyone forget it.
The aim of this blog is to focus on the decentralization of “choice architecture”. We all exist in an environment that incentivizes choices in one direction or another. Ideally, you will participate in the construction of your environment (your affordance landscape) such that you make choices that benefit you over shareholders and state officials.
I spoke in this essay about the decentralization of the money layer of our cognition through Bitcoin. I believe that altering our monetary system will alter our affordance landscape, and that this will trickle into other aspects of our environments and orient us towards better affordances. But Bitcoin is only one tool in this process. Building bottom-up communities with choices oriented towards the sovereignty of the individual and group will allow us to take back control of our lives.
The structure of this blog will involve regular, off the cuff entries on what strikes me during the week. On the weekends I will work on the longer form articles. These essays will be published as they are finished, however many Saturdays and Sundays that takes me. The first of which will focus more deeply on Edward Bernays and his book Propaganda which was touched on in this entry.
I suppose that covers the “Why” of this writing experiment and the general direction it will take for the near future. I aspire to the lofty goal of constructing a cognitive cathedral that will last me through my lifetime, and beyond. If you are taking the time to read along, I thank you and I deeply appreciate you.