Well, there's a really common misconception
that technology is neutral and it's up to us to just choose how to use it. And so we're sitting there and we're scrolling
and we find ourselves in this kind of wormhole and then we say, “Oh man, like, I should
really have more self-control." And that's partially true, but what we forget
when we talk about it that way is that there's a thousand engineers on the other side of
the screen whose job it was to get my finger to do that the next time. And there's this whole playbook of techniques
that they use to get us to keep using the software more. Was design always this manipulative? It wasn't always this way. In fact, back in the 1970s and the early '80s
at Xerox PARC when Steve Jobs first went over and saw the graphical user interface, the
way people talked about computers and what computers were supposed to be was a “bicycle
for our minds” that, here we are, you take a human being and they have a certain set
of capacities and capabilities, and then you give them a bicycle and they can go to all
these new distances, they're empowered to go to these brand-new places and to do these
new things, to have these new capacities. And that's always been the philosophy of people
who make technology: how do we create bicycles for our minds to do and empower us to feel
and access more? Now, when the first iPhone was introduced
it was also the philosophy of the technology; how do we empower people to do something more? And in those days it wasn't manipulative because
there was no competition for attention. Photoshop wasn't trying to maximize how much
attention it took from you—it didn't measure its success that way. And the Internet overall had been, in the
very beginning, not designed to maximize attention, it was just putting things out there, putting
things out there, creating these message boards. It wasn't designed with this whole persuasive
psychology that emerged later. What happened is that the attention economy
and this race for attention got more and more competitive, and the more competitive it got
to get people's attention on, let's say a news website, the more they need to add these
design principles, these more manipulative design tactics as ways of holding onto your
attention. And so YouTube goes from being a more neutral,
honest tool of just, “Here's a video,” to, “Oh, do you want to see these other
videos? And do you want to auto-play the next video? And here's some notifications…” These products start to look and feel more
like media that's about maximizing consumption and less like bicycles for our minds. And I think that's such a subtle an important
thing to recognize, is that more and more of technology is really not on our team to
help us spend our time the way we want to, it's more on the team of maximizing how much
time we spend on the screen. Right now, the only way to succeed in the
app store is by proving you're really good at getting people's attention. And so by making attention the currency of
success it forces all of these good-hearted, good-intentioned people who make apps or make
media sites, to do things they don't want to do just because they have to get attention. You have mediation apps that have to send
you all thee notifications and add streaks and do all this game-y stuff just to get you
to use it the most, as opposed to having the phone itself recognize that there's parts
of your life where mediation might want to be at the top of the list for you, because
you're defining that, and so that meditation app could win for the right reasons, not for
the wrong reasons. So we always worry about new technologies
when they first appear. When people started bringing out the newspapers
on the subway people worried, “Oh my god, people are going to stop talking to each other
on the subway!” And then TV showed up and people worried,
“Oh my god, people are going to spend all this time at home!” And the radio—we always worry, and then
somehow it seems to turn out okay. Back in the 1970s people were at home on the
telephone and calling each other all the time, we thought, “Oh the kids these days, what
are they doing to their minds?” So now it's tempting to say, “Well now the
kids these days they're on Snapchat, and therefore we survived all those other technology transitions,
nothing really bad happened, so maybe it's all okay, this is just kids being kids in
a new way.” And I want to talk about why that's not true
and why this is different. What's different is that, let's say—let's
take that telephone example: in the 1970s if someone picked up a telephone to go call
their friend and they spent time gossiping on the telephone, we could do that, that's
fine. But the telephone wasn't updated every day
with new manipulative design principles to be better and better at seducing you into
calling your friends. So what's different with Snapchat is that
there are a thousand engineers every single day who work on the product to actually find
new ways not to just get you to use it but to kind of tap you both on the shoulder and
try to get you into a reciprocity relationship where you owe someone else a response. In fact they have a feature in Snapchat called
Snapstreaks. And Snapstreaks count the number of days in
a row you've sent a message back-and-forth with someone. So if I have a best friend and we've been
chatting every day for a hundred days I see a little fireball and the number 100 next
to it. And what that does is, they've just created
something now I don't want to lose because I have a streak going, I've got a hundred
days and now if I don't send them a message tomorrow I'm going to lose the whole thing. And when you're a kid actually this has a
really big impact on you. I'm not making this up. There's a woman named Emily Weinstein at Harvard
who studied the effects of Snapchat and Snapstreaks on kids by accident—it emerged in her interviews. And she found out that kids, when they go
on vacation they have to give their password to up to five other friends to actually have
them send messages while they're gone on vacation because they're so worried about losing their
Snapstreaks. In fact a lot of kids, they wake up and they
see these 30 contacts with different streaks and they have to just take pictures of floors
and ceilings just to kind of get through all these Snapstreaks so they don't lose any of
them. So we have to ask, when Snapchat is designing
a feature like Snapstreaks, are they doing that because they most want to help kids empower
them to live their lives or are they doing that because it's really good at getting their
attention? And when we're parents and we see kids using
it this way we have to recognize there's something very different going on here. This was not true in the 1970s when we had
a neutral telephone that we would choose to use when we wanted to use it. There are now a thousand people behind our
new telephone, which is say, Snapchat, that's being designed and updated every day to be
more compelling at addicting and holding onto people's attention. And it's not good for us. I think we can all feel it. We become more and more on the treadmill to
the number of likes or feedback we get, basically, from social media and start tying our own
approval, our own self-worth to how much attention we get from other people. I mean, even for me I notice that if I post
something it does affect me whether or not I have a lot of likes or few likes. And it's hard to really, if you think about
it and get to the sense of, “My self-worth is completely independent of that.” That's a subtle thing to hold and developmentally,
children are more vulnerable to their self-worth being externalized like this. And the problem is that there's always been,
as well, ways of externalizing our self-worth in terms of how much money we have in our
bank account or in terms of how many friends we have, but now the externalization of our
self-worth is controlled by a handful of companies whose goals are different than our goals. They're not evil companies, they just have
the different goal of maximizing attention, and our goals are not that. But the problem is that their goals become
our goals. This is what's actually so dangerous, is that
their goals of engaging us the most by having us care about likes become our goals. We actually wake up in the morning as a sovereign
human beings and we start caring about the number of likes we got, as if that's our goal
in life. That becomes our goal. And it's as if we've been infected, it's as
if they've drilled a hole in the back of our head and now they've injected the virus and
now we walk around searching for feedback using social media. And they won, if that happens. And again, it's not because they're evil but
they're in a different game, they're trying to maximize attention. But we have to ask a much deeper question,
which is: what do we want in our lives and what is our self-worth actually tied to? And maybe it's being virtuous or being a good
friend or caring about what matters or living by our values. There's a whole bunch of things that we can
define for ourselves, and I think the less people have to find their own values the more
vulnerable they are to someone else coming in and giving them their values. And to fix that we're going to need to talk
about different kinds of metrics, different ways of measuring success and monetizing success. So instead of making more money the more time
we get, we instead make more money the more we've helped you in your life.
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