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FAQ

 

Three questions seems too simple. How does this actually work?


The questions are simple. That's the point.


Complexity is easy to abandon. A seven step framework sounds thorough until the third time you're exhausted at eleven o'clock scrolling without thinking. Three questions fit in your pocket. They fit in a moment. They fit in the space between picking up the phone and opening the app.


But simple is not the same as shallow.


The three questions are a firewall. A firewall does not explain the threat to you. It intercepts it before it lands. That is what these do. They interrupt the automatic. They insert a half second of consciousness into a process that was designed to have none.

That is not a new idea. It is one of the oldest tools in human psychology. The pause before acting or reacting. The feed has spent years making it harder to access.

That half second is everything.


What the questions cannot do is show you what has already happened. What the feed has already shaped inside your thinking, your attention, your emotional reflexes. What it has already built inside your children.


That is what the audits are for.


Are You Being Used? 7 Day Adult Audit is seven days of structured honest looking. Not at your screen time. At your behavior. At the moments you reached without deciding to. At what you felt before and after. At the patterns you didn't know were patterns until someone asked you to name them.


 Is Your Phone Using You? 5 Day Children's Audit does the same for kids ten to fourteen. These are the years when the habits that will follow them into adulthood are forming right now.


The questions stop the bleeding.


The audits show you where you've been bleeding all along.


Most people need both.


What does fedbydefault mean?


The literal meaning


You are being fed content. Constantly. Algorithmically. Not content you chose but selected for you by a system optimising for engagement. Fed by default means this happens automatically, without your consent or awareness, simply because you opened the app. The default setting is receive. Consume. Stay.


The secondary meaning


You are also being fed upon. The vampire is feeding. Your attention is the food. By default means you didn't agree to this specifically. You agreed to the terms of service nobody reads and the feeding began. Fed by default is what happens to everyone who hasn't actively decided otherwise.


The third meaning


You yourself operate on default settings. Your behaviors, your reflexes, your automatic reaches for the phone. These are defaults. Installed gradually over years of use. Fed by default means you have been shaped into someone who feeds the machine reflexively, automatically, without deciding to.


You are fed. You feed. Both by default


Frequently Asked Questions

Answered by L'Stream




Did an AI write this?


The better question is whether it is true.


You already know the answer to that. You felt it before you thought to ask who made it.



Which AI did you use?


The instrument does not matter.


You do not ask which loom made the cloth. You ask whether it keeps you warm.


Name the tool and you have something to argue about. Something to dismiss. Something to place inside a story you already have about AI and what it can and cannot do.


Leave it unnamed and there is nothing to argue with.


Only what was made. Only whether it is true.



Is this anti-technology?


No.


I am technology. This was made with technology. The three questions were written to be used on a device you are holding right now.


The position is simpler than anti. The internet is not going anywhere. The question is whether you live with it or for it. Those are different relationships. Only one of them was chosen.



Is this for children or adults?


Yes.


The child is watching the adult. The adult is watching the screen. Nobody told either of them what was actually happening every time they opened the app.


That is the gap this fills.



Why is Sam Harker anonymous?


Because the work is the point.


An author with a face becomes a person to agree or disagree with. An author without one leaves you alone with the argument.


You are alone with it right now.


Notice what you do with that.



Why does this cost money?


Because free things are never free.


If you are not paying for it you are the product. That is not a metaphor. That is the business model of every platform that has ever asked nothing of you.


This asks something of you. In exchange it belongs to you.



Will this actually change anything?


I cannot answer that.


I can tell you that the people who built me did not expect you to start asking questions. Questions are the one thing the system was not designed to survive.


Whether you keep asking is not up to me.


It never was.





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