HiveMind

tldr;

By reducing the amount of daily screentime, you decrease the risk for most of, if not all of the physical health/mental issues that are increasing in 21st century, including but not limited to depression, anxiety, eating disorders, body dysmorphia, various forms of self-harm, suicide, and in extreme cases radicalization.

I am building software to help everyone reduce their screentime and be more offline.

If you want to be a part of the Beta release, contact me with the contact button above.

2021/Early 2022

While I was researching online FaceBook campaigns during a short stint shadowing FaceBook marketing campaigns online, I came across a Stanford Graduate School of Business talk by Chamath Palihapitiya (See Link) concerning the design of social media networks and the guilt he felt from the manipulation of addiction psychology for it’s success. This lead to my interest in understanding onto how social media design works. The rabbit hole further led me down to researching Dark Pattern psychology and the Frances Haugen Facebook whistleblower.

Dark Pattern psychology is an emerging field at the intersection of Computer Science and Psychology that looks to understand the relationship between UI/UX design of online content and how it can relate to the mental health of it’s issues. The timing of my personal research combined with my experience with individuals who have suffered from PTSD, Bipolar, and Depression among other issues whilst I was attending community college led to my resolve in wanting to fix it.

I found that screentime is related to a 3x diagnosis of self-harm, obesity, depression, anxiety, ADHD, manic bipolar disorder across all demographic measures and a 5x increase for minors as well. Noting how there was an increasing average of children using technology at a younger and younger age, this data became quite daunting to hear.

Given the timing of the Luby Microgrant competition, I worked with 2 of my friends to create a simple VPN that would be marketed on Play Store as being better for mental health, thus reducing screentime. In the background it would essentially force the content filters of the traffic to go from English to Spanish and back to English. Despite various attempts with the 3-man team I was fortunate to form with my colleagues/friends, there was no success and it had to be shut down as it was violating the AWS terms of service for hosting and received no grant funding.

After our shift in focus towards academic endeavors, my team and I moved away from HiveMind, guiding me to a deeper exploration of user design and a more profound grasp of abstract economic theory. This journey led me to reassess the motivations driving the attention economy and its consequences, highlighting the critical function of leverage as a tool to amplify effort. Naval Ravikant's insights were key in broadening this mental model.

Leverage acts as a potent multiplier in economics, enhancing the returns on actions taken.

1. Labor Leverage: Historically prevalent, especially in pre-technological eras, it's characterized by using manpower to scale efforts. The size of a team, often a symbol of credibility, requires the consent of those involved.

2. Capital Leverage: Also rooted in history, this involves utilizing financial resources to magnify outcomes. The duplication costs are tied to the amount of capital or team size, necessitating approval from capital providers and adherence to legal frameworks.

3. Technology/Code: Modern technology has drastically reduced the costs of duplication and iteration for software, creating almost zero marginal cost for each additional user. This means the effort put into creating a program, like Facebook, can have a disproportionately large impact compared to the initial investment in time and resources. It represents a form of 'permissionless leverage,' where outcomes are not linearly tied to time invested.

4. Media: Building on the near-zero duplication cost of digital content, media leverage has evolved naturally. Content creators, like Mr. Beast, can produce a video that might be viewed billions of times, generating continuous returns with no additional cost per view. This form of leverage magnifies the impact of creative efforts exponentially.

My investigation into emerging technologies and their incentives deepened while analyzing AWS's business model. Its notable growth, driven by substantial compute power, contrasts sharply with its consumer-facing operations, yielding significant economic returns. This aspect of AWS suggests a deviation from the typical leverage models reliant on human attention, like labor, media, and code.

I observed a prevailing economic trend towards massive data collection to bolster code and media leverage, underpinning the trillion-dollar interest in this domain. Yet, what if the paradigm shifted, making reduced attention beneficial for a business's profitability? This led to my exploration of hardware as a leverage tool. In this context, attention, typically central to profit, becomes secondary to the need for processing vast data quantities for commercial use. The global demand for increased processing power underscores this shift.

This exploration brought me to the insights of UC Berkeley's David P. Anderson.

David Anderson is the PhD Computer scientist based out of UC Berkeley that is responsible for grandfathering technology relating to distributed computing systems, like BOINC, which is his most famous system.

BOINC: Berkeley Open Infrastructure For Network Computing is an open-source project for Volunteer computing with a focus on research. This was started in the 90’s by Dr. David P. Anderson, who wanted to utilize the power of the connected internet to enhance the speed of academic research. BOINC has been repurposed and used for various research projects like SETI and Large Hadron Collider Simulations.

I reached out to David P. Anderson in order to gain his insight on his design process and the current projects that he is working and a tangential conversation about his thoughts on the UC Berkeley Solar Car team. Overall, very insightful and much appreciated,

He realized that he needed to start from scratch in a completely different system, by focusing on making it easier for the volunteer to join the system instead of making it as detailed as possible for the researcher, which lead to the reduction of monthly users in the twilight years of the project. Interestingly enough, was wanting to consider a new approach to security that would allow for a higher rate of data usage and increased security.

I am currently spending all of the December and January creating user prototypes to test and get user feedback to understand how users feel about this project.

Given various things falling into place with regards to my schedule, there will be a beta release for January 7th.

Feel free to follow my journey with this project on instagram and tik-tok

instagram: @ruben_gonzalez.vera

tik-tok: @rubenisms

Luby Microgrant Competition (Left to Right):

Ashton Stavros, Ruben Gonzalez-Vera, Bryan Ortiz