The Isolation Machine: Screens, Attention, and the Destruction of Mateship

Alex Applebee and A. D. Masters

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Author's Note

You value mateship? They removed every structure that let you see your mates.

That is not a slogan. It is a description of a machine. This paper describes the machine.

There used to be a pub at the end of the street. A cricket club. A church hall where the old blokes played cards on Wednesdays. A front yard where kids played until dark. A neighbour who knew your name. These things were not policy. They were not funded by government. They were the natural result of humans living near each other with time to spare. They produced something economists cannot measure and psychologists struggle to name: the ambient certainty that someone gives a damn about you.

That ambient certainty is what OMXUS calls mateship. Not the performative Australian variety -- not the barbecue handshake -- but the structural kind. The kind where your nan falls and someone is there in 60 seconds because they live close and they know her name. The kind where a teenager with a dark thought has three adults within earshot who are not paid to listen. The kind that makes a person feel like a person rather than a consumer of personalised content.

The attention economy destroyed it. Not by accident. By design -- or rather, by the convergence of a business model (attention-as-commodity) with a technology (algorithmic personalisation) with a set of behavioural mechanisms (supernormal stimuli, variable reinforcement, outrage amplification) that, together, replaced face-to-face community with a screen-mediated simulacrum that looks like connection and functions as isolation.

This paper is about how that happened. It draws on behavioural biology (Tinbergen), operant conditioning (Skinner), developmental psychology (Twenge, Haidt, Odgers), computational social science (Rathje et al.), political economy (