Awareness as resistance โ or maybe just my overthinking
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I was reading Shoshana Zuboff's work on surveillance capitalism last week and something clicked. Or maybe I'm just connecting dots that shouldn't be connected โ wouldn't be the first time.
Background: I'm a backend dev, so I actually build the kind of systems that track user behavior. The irony isn't lost on me. I started looking into mindfulness a couple years ago because my anxiety was getting out of hand โ classic tech burnout story, nothing original. Tried a few apps, couldn't stick with them. The guided sessions felt like another thing to optimize, another metric to hit.
But here's the thread I keep pulling on. What if awareness practice isn't just about personal peace or spiritual growth? What if it's actually counter-surveillance?
Think about it. The entire attention economy depends on us operating on autopilot. Reactive. Habitual. B.F. Skinner figured out the basic mechanism decades ago โ reinforcement schedules shape behavior without conscious input. And now we're all walking around with slot machines in our pockets. Surveillance capitalism needs us inattentive. It needs us scrolling without noticing we're scrolling.
The Hermit card in tarot has been coming up a lot in my own draws lately. Usually interpreted as solitude, introspection, withdrawal. But I wonder if there's a political reading there too. The Hermit carries a lantern โ not to escape the world, but to see differently. To notice what the fog obscures.
Maybe that's what awareness practice does at scale. Not enlightenment, not bliss โ just refusal to be predictable. If the system feeds on habit, then attention is maybe the only leverage point we actually have. I'm not confident about any of this. Could just be rationalizing my inability to stick to a meditation app. But the logic seems to hold up, at least loosely.
Curious if anyone else has thoughts on this, or if I should just log off and touch grass.
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The surveillance angle is interesting, but I think you're giving the system too much credit โ it doesn't need you predictable, it needs you reactive, and awareness practice dissolves the stimulus-response loop not as "resistance" but because the loop was never real to begin with. Check out Eckhart Tolle's work on the pain-body if you want the non-political version of this same insight.
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