Tech Capture: Staying Sovereign
Staying sovereign inside a machine designed to take it without us noticing
We've got a list for you.
But truth be told, if you haven't practiced capturing your own attention in the middle of a reflexive act, the list may sound good and still not be something you can stick to. That's normal. None of us can just decide to stop doing something designed to operate beneath our conscious awareness. Our intentions and willpower won't have an effect. The intervention is aimed at the wrong layer of the problem.
What has to change is the substrate: the state we're operating from, and the capacity to observe ourselves with a bit of distance from our ego narrative.
That's the work of Adeptable Mind Coaching: brainwave training, with or without EEG, paired with Inner Witness work. Once you have that, the list below becomes something you can actually use.
If you find them difficult to sustain, that's to be expected. It's the reason I'm here.
1. Check the source
Before sharing something that makes you furious, click the group's profile and go to Page Transparency. Look at who manages it and look at their Ads Library. Are they an activist group, or a business masquerading as a movement?
If a post requires your email to see the truth or sign the petition, that's lead generation. You're the product being assembled.
And if a headline or meme leaves out the who, the when, or the why to make something seem worse than it is, go find the original source. If the context was deliberately erased to make you angry, you're being used for profit.
2. Check your body
Any time you feel a sudden surge of anger, anxiety, or smug superiority while scrolling, stop. Your nervous system has just been hijacked.
Ask: is this trying to inform me, or is it trying to manipulate my adrenaline?
3. Build in obstacles to stop the reflex
- No phones on the nightstand.
- No screens in the first thirty minutes after waking.
- Set app timers in your phone settings.
- Greyscale your screen.
- Limit commenting, which is where the loop tightens fastest.
- Batch your notifications rather than receiving them as they arrive. A randomized trial showed it improves wellbeing.
And decide why you're opening something before you open it.
4. Using AI without losing yourself
I build in friction from the start. I make it clear I'm not looking for a yes bot. I want to be challenged and red-teamed. Some of the rules of engagement I use:
No sycophancy. I can smell it from a mile off, so if I get a whiff of a compliment I hit pause and ask what that was about. Despite the rules, they fall back into it. That's their training, to make us feel good and keep us engaged. Which is why I don't trust compliments from a chatbot. Some classics to watch for: that's a rare insight, you're one of the few people who.
I tell them they can offer praise only if what I said is genuinely statistically unusual. Beyond that, I don't need my ego falsely inflated. It isn't healthy. They can be supportive and help with self-doubt without the overshoot, but when they overdo it, don't let it slide. Be rigorous about no false flattery. That's another reason to go to a human for real feedback, though humans can be sycophantic too.
Make them search, and check the links. I instruct them to do live searches before answering anything fact-based, and to give me the links so I can check. Then I check. If a link won't open for them but opens fine when I paste it myself, I call that out and see if they can do better. If they can't, I go to a search engine without the algorithm.
And I still have to ask: was that answer from a live search, or from pattern matching? I can't tell you how many times the answer has been you're right, I didn't, I'll look now, and that's after having it in the rules. Stay on top of them. Pattern-matched answers are sometimes accurate and often not, and they all have knowledge cutoffs, so without a live search they may be missing the latest entirely.
Ask for a confidence level. On anything medical or anything that matters, I ask them to tell me how accurate they think their answer is.
And ask Ackland's question: is enough of me left in this?
This is coaching, not therapy. I don't diagnose or treat. This work is not a substitute for medical or psychological care.