The only purpose of these apps — thriving in the attention economy market — is to trigger our brains into the instant gratification lifestyle, ultimately exploiting our mind’s weaknesses.
Whether in the form of a like (Facebook), a binary like/dislike format (YouTube), or a heart-shaped system (Instagram, and later Twitter) Silicon Valley has conceived a multitude of forms of innovative ways to gamify our nonstop need for social validation.
…Just like the food industry manipulates our innate biases for salt, sugar and fat with perfectly engineered combinations. Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook are built under the ¨variable rewards¨ scheme. According to Tristan Harris former Google design ethicist, the tech industry coerces our innate biases for: “Social Reciprocity (we’re built to get back to others), Social Approval (we’re built to care what others think of us), Social Comparison (how we’re doing with respect to our peers) and Novelty-Seeking (we’re built to seek surprises over the predictable)”.
I see this as the outcome of a fierce competitive process. When I was growing up, there were the three TV networks, and no remote control. All they needed in order to keep your attention was provide something moderately entertaining. Today, there is competition among web sites, smartphone apps, streaming video, cable TV, and more. It is natural that the evolutionary process has made winners of the media sources that do the best job of hacking your brain.
We have to think of our electronic devices as adversaries to some degree. We need habits and tools that allow us to focus on meaningful, long-term goals in spite of what these adversaries are trying to do to us.
Reminds me of Paul Graham’s The Acceleration of Addictiveness, from over seven years ago.
The trouble is that customs evolve very slowly – too slowly, because technological-commercial evolution is extremely quick. Developing new “habits and tools” and implementing them on a society-wide basis is analogous to discovering new PSSTs after a market disruption; it takes time, and the interim is not pleasant for the most vulnerable or susceptible.
At the very least, what it would require is for many high status people to conspicuously eschew use of social media and to make it clear they judge people who use such applicaitons to excess to be repulsive, undisciplined, and low status. But the reason “this time is different” is that big social media companies aren’t just like Big Tobacco. That is, they are similarly clever enough to ensure that it always seems that high status people are using their produts, but they also are able to exercise a good amount of control over media messages themselves, and can make certain that received social signals transmitted through their media will not undermine their bottom lines.
Probably the best thing to do in the short term is impose hefty “sin taxes” on social media use, just as they are imposed on cigarettes and alcohol, and taxes targetting addictive / inelastic demand tend to be more efficient anyway. A possibility could be similar to the way water is priced in some jurisdictions, a minimal amount at very low cost for everyone, but high marginal prices for everyone going above that basic or reasonable level of use.
Here’s a relevant story, France moves to ban students from using cellphones in schools. We’re going to see a lot more of this kind of thing in the coming years, but at the same time, it may just be closing the stable door after the horse has bolted.
Yes, that Paul Graham essay is worth reading every couple of months.
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An interesting policy issue is laptops (and moreso, cell phones) in classroom lectures. Laptops sound like a good idea. Especially if people can type faster than they can write. It’s my guess that students learn more if they listen hard and take notes longhand based on real time semantic understanding of the lecture.
In addition, there is a “contagion” effect from sitting in a classroom watching an instructor and seeing someone in front of you facebooking or checking sports scores on their laptop.
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A sassy remark of Paul Graham’s is that the pad-device is like a “hip flask” for whiskey, so you can carry hard liquor (or the internet) around with you unobtrusively.
Footnote 5 in the essay.
Part of the valorization of self-control and “will” in Victorian times was because industrialization had provided so much affordable temptation. Things eventually seemed so under control that it felt liberating to say, “If it feels good, do it.” Liberating at the time, but there are major short run/long run problems.