As requested by the Kossack Lovejoy, I’m posting a link to a Guardian piece we both thought was worth more visibility than the link I gave in a comment response I myself made.
The Guardian piece detailed how some of Silicon Valley’s smartest and brightest are now very concerned about how “our minds are being hijacked” by our Smartphones, and how our politics, and even the way we engage with life itself, are being determined by the “attention economy,” which itself is based on advertising.
One such technician is Justin Rosenstein. You probably haven’t heard of him. But you have heard of the “Like” button, right? He invented it. And Gchat, too; both while he worked at Google. They seemed like brilliant and inspired ideas at the time. But now, ten years later, Rosenstein has resorted to buying a new iPhone and instructing his assistant to set up parental controls so that he can’t download any apps.
There is growing concern that as well as addicting users, technology is contributing toward so-called “continuous partial attention”, severely limiting people’s ability to focus, and possibly lowering IQ. One recent study showed that the mere presence of smartphones damages cognitive capacity – even when the device is turned off. “Everyone is distracted,” Rosenstein says. “All of the time.”
But those concerns are trivial compared with the devastating impact upon the political system that some of Rosenstein’s peers believe can be attributed to the rise of social media and the attention-based market that drives it.
Drawing a straight line between addiction to social media and political earthquakes like Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump, they contend that digital forces have completely upended the political system and, left unchecked, could even render democracy as we know it obsolete.
Rosenstein and other industry creatives, like Leah Pearlman and Tristan Harris who have grown critical of the tech industry, are at pains to point out that so many of the addicting features that they helped create or promote were created with the best of intentions. But like so many of humanity’s sea change creations, there is always the shadow side. And the Devil, as always, is on hand to collect his due. Enter Vladimir Putin, aided and abetted by his eager assistants, especially (though not entirely) in the Republican Party.
Tristan Harris, who has been branded “the closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience” is a former Google employee. He finds the level of psychological power the tech industry has acquired, by developing their ability to understand and target users, a staggering threat, possibly a death threat, to democracy.
The techniques these companies use are not always generic: they can be algorithmically tailored to each person. An internal Facebook report leaked this year, for example, revealed that the company can identify when teens feel “insecure”, “worthless” and “need a confidence boost”. Such granular information, Harris adds, is “a perfect model of what buttons you can push in a particular person”.
Tech companies can exploit such vulnerabilities to keep people hooked; manipulating, for example, when people receive “likes” for their posts, ensuring they arrive when an individual is likely to feel vulnerable, or in need of approval, or maybe just bored. And the very same techniques can be sold to the highest bidder. “There’s no ethics,” he says. A company paying Facebook to use its levers of persuasion could be a car business targeting tailored advertisements to different types of users who want a new vehicle. Or it could be a Moscow-based troll farm seeking to turn voters in a swing county in Wisconsin.
Harris maintains that “the dynamics of the attention economy are structurally set up to undermine the human will.” Democracy is a collective expression of that will. How much of our collective will are the tech giants like Apple, Facebook, Google, etc., already undermining? And if we’re not paying attention, Harris asks, how will we know when our democracy has been completely eroded? And if we don’t know that, how do we know it hasn’t already happened?
Shortly after reading the Guardian piece, I read another one along similar lines, which I’ll throw in for free. It talks about how White Supremacy groups are making effective use of YouTube to recruit more haters for their cause. Apparently ISIS is not the only recruitment agency for haters. It seemed germane to add the link here, because the main story is about tech gone wrong.
One of these days, I hope to find a wonderful, feel-good story to share. These days, though, they’re thin on the ground. I’ll get back to you.