The Social Dilemma
Wednesday
30 September 2020
It’s easy today to lose sight of the fact that these tools (social media) actually have created some wonderful things in the world. That they’ve reunited lost family members. They’ve found organ donors. I mean, there were meaningful, systemic changes happening that were positive! But we were naive about the flip side of the coin.
“Snapchat Dysmorphia” a disease which now happening with young patients in America wanting surgery so they can look more likely they do in filtered selfies.
But what’s wrong in the tech industry right now?
When you look around you, it feels like the world is going crazy. Never before in history have 50 designers with 20-35 year old white guys in California made decisions that would have an impact on two billion people.
What I want people to know is that everything they’re doing online, is being watched, is being tracked, is being measured. Every single action you take is carefully monitored and recorded. Exactly what image you stop and look at, for how long you look at it. And yes, seriously, for how long you look at it.
They have more information about us. It is unprecedented than has ever been imagined in human history.
On the other side of the screen, it’s almost as if they had this avatar voodoo doll-like model of us. All of the things we’ve ever done, all the clicks we’ve ever made, all the videos we’ve watched, all the likes, that all gets brought back into building a more and more accurate model. The model, once they have it, they can predict the kinds of things that person does. They can predict what kind of videos will keep you watching. They can predict what kinds of emotions tend to trigger you.
At a lot of technology companies, there’s three main goals.
- Engagement goals, to drive up your usage, to keep you scrolling.
- Growth goals, to keep you coming back and inviting as many friends and getting them to invite more friends.
- Advertising goals, to make sure that, as all that’s happening they’re making as much money as possible from advertising.
Persuasive technology is just sort of design intentionally applied to the extreme where we really want to modify someone’s behaviour. We want them to take this action. We want them to keep doing this with their finger (scrolling). We’re just zombies, and they want us to look at more ads so they can make more money.
You pull down and you refresh, it’s gonna be a new thing at the top. Pull down and refresh again, it’s new. Every single time. Which, in psychology, we call a positive intermittent reinforcement. Every time you see your phone there on the table, and you just look at it, and you know if you reach over, it just might have something for you, so you took and open it. That’s not by accident, that’s a design technique.
“Let Ben know that Rebecca is typing so we don’t lose him”
That’s how they make us can’t stop get engaged with the phone.
Social media is a drug. The number of teenage girls out of 100,000 in USA admitted to a hospital every year because they cut themselves or otherwise harmed themselves. Gen Z, the kids born after 1996 or so, those are the first generation in history that get on social media in middle school. A whole generation is more anxious, more fragile, more depressed. This is the real change in a generation.
Even knowing how these tricks work, I’m still susceptible to social media. I sill wasn’t able to control my usage. So that’s a little scary.
When you go to Google and type in “Climate Change is” you’re going to see different results depending on where you live. In certain cities, you’re gonna see it autocomplete with “climate change is hoax.” And in the other cases, you’re gonna see “climate change is causing the destruction of nature.” And that’s a function not of what the truth is about climate change. They’re ruining the fabric of democracy, people can’t tell what’s true. All of the searching result is based on these computer calculating what’s perfect for each of us. And then if you start watching one of those videos, then it will recommend it over and over again.
There’s a study, an MIT study, that fake news on Twitter spreads six times faster than true news. They’ve created a system that biases towards false informations. Not because they want to, but because false information makes the companies more money than the truth. The truth is boring.
Marco Rubio once said, “We are a nation of people that no longer speak to each other. We are a nation of people who have stopped being friends with people because of who they voted for in the last election. We are a nation of people who have isolated ourselves to only watch channels that tells us that we’re right.
It’s easy to say then in our mind, to think.
“Okay , so, there I am with my phone, scrolling, clicking, using it. Then, where’s the existential threat?”
Okay, there’s the supercomputers. The other side of the screen, pointed at our brain got us to watch more videos. It’s not about the technology being the existential threat. But it’s the technology’s ability to bring the worst in society and the worst society being the existential threat.
Do you see it in the same way as mine?
Or am I overreacting to a situation that I don’t know enough about?
When we are using the like button, our entire motivation was, “can we spread positivity and love in the world?” But the reality was today teen would be getting depressed when they don’t have enough likes.
I think we need to accept that it’s okay for companies to be focus on making money. But what’s not okay is when there’s no regulation, no rules. Because not everybody recognises that this is a problem.
It might sound strange, but this is my world, this is my community. I don’t hate them. I don’t wanna do any harm to Google of Facebook. I just want to reform them so they don’t destroy the world. You know? I’ve uninstalled a ton of apps from my phone that I felt were just wasting my time. Only the necessary ones since my university still use the platform to share announcements. And I’ve turned off notifications on anything that vibrating my leg with information that wasn’t timely and important to me at the moment.
Do not use search engine that restore your search history.
Never accept a video recommend to you on Youtube.
Always choose. That’s another way to fight.
There’s a tons of Chrome extensions that remove recommendations.
Before you share, fact-check first, consider the source. If it seems like it’s something designed to really push your emotional buttons, remove it. Essentially, you vote with your clicks.
