HOW THE TECH GIANTS HAVE BECOME NEW DOPE PEDDLERS
Silicon Valley’s giants used decades of research to make their products biochemically addictive – in the same way nicotine or heroin make their users hooked. So how can anyone argue that controlling these devices is ‘a parenting issue’?
ITS true name is 3,4dihydroxyphenethylamine, but that’s quite a mouthful, even for neuroscientists – so it’s usually just called ‘dopamine’. It was first recognised in the human brain in 1957, though there is some debate about who got there first – a researcher called Kathleen Montagu in London, or a team led by Nobel Prize-winner Arvid Carlsson in Sweden.
Over time, the scientific world’s views of dopamine has evolved, as has our understanding of what exactly it does for the brain. It used to be thought of as the ‘pleasure chemical’; nowadays, it’s regarded more as the ‘learning chemical’.
What we do know for sure, though, is that dopamine is the secret of addiction. Dopamine is what makes smokers crave nicotine, or cocaine-users seek out their next hit. Dopamine is what makes rational people throw away money, friends, family, relationships – even their own lives – in the quest for another fix.
And dopamine is what technology firms are using – very deliberately, at great expense and following years of scientific research – to make smartphones addictive.
‘These things are explicitly designed to maximise how much you use it and for how long,’ neuroscientist and computer programmer Ramsay Brown told the Irish Daily Mail this week. ‘That is the design goal. A computer programmer who understands how the brain works knows how to write code that will get the brain to do certain things.’
And Brown should know. He is the co-founder of Dopamine Labs, a California-based company that designs code to give any app the same addictive power that Facebook, Snapchat and others have spent millions to perfect. Brown uses his knowledge of addiction to create ‘healthy’ apps, which help users study, diet or even walk after surgery. He refuses to work with gambling apps, addictive social media platforms and cash-grab games.
But he knows exactly what the social media firms are doing – and so do they.
‘I don’t think the people that run these companies are evil people,’ he says. ‘However, they are all facing extremely strong incentives from their investors, from the venture capital community, from their stakeholders in some cases, and they will never not be until they change their business model. They are under pressure to hook kids – that’s how it works.’
It is a statement so shocking that it is worth repeating: ‘They are under pressure to hook kids.’
What this means is profoundly important to understanding the dangers of smartphones for children. Far from being just another toy, which a child can either play with or not, these apps are in fact devices which are being used to create a chemical addiction in children’s brains as powerful as any drug.
‘There are several tools they can use,’ Brown says of the tech companies. ‘There are several different ways they can design their apps that make them more persuasive. I don’t work for them, I have no insider knowledge of their meeting notes or their design goals but I do know some of the things that are common knowledge in the industry. Sean Parker, a founding president at Facebook, has gone on the record and said that he and [Mark] Zuckerberg and Kevin Systrom, the guy who founded Instagram, are master manipulators of these techniques.
‘They know exactly how to use them and exactly what they want to do with them.’
Last year, Parker – the billionaire early Facebook investor and Napster founder – said Zuckerberg knowingly created a monster with addictive social media. Speaking at an event in the US, Parker pulled back the curtain on Facebook’s early days, saying it was designed to consume people, rather than for people to consume.
‘God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains,’ he said.
Parker explained that when Facebook was being developed, the objective was: ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?’ It was this mindset that led to the creation of features such as the ‘like’ button, which research showed would give users ‘a little dopamine hit’ to encourage them to upload more content.
It’s this dopamine effect, one that is common to other types of addictive products, that keeps drawing the user back. The minute you take a drug, drink alcohol or smoke a cigarette, all of these experiences produce dopamine, which is a chemical that’s associated with pleasure. Mobile phone apps work on the exact same premise, producing the exact same chemical reaction. When you get a like on social media, you get a dopamine ‘hit’.
Dopamine, therefore, is one reason why many of us can’t resist scrolling down and checking Facebook, or indeed setting up the notifications on the device so it ‘pings’ with delight – and that’s one reason why they are addictive.
‘There are optimal ways to say to people, “Hey, you should come back into the app right now”,’ explains Brown. ‘All of these techniques – about when to show the likes, about when to show the push notifications – are constantly being mathematically optimised, with the end purpose of finding out the right times to tell you, so you are more likely to come back. This is a big piece of how addiction works.’
Peddling this addiction is big business. More explicitly, it made Sean Parker and his tech-world colleagues absurdly rich. Facebook is now valued at a little more than half-a-trillion dollars. Global revenue from smartphone sales reached $435billion last year.
Now, like Parker, some of the early executives of these tech firms look on their success as tainted. Former Google product manager Tristan Harris is one of several techies who has spoken out about what has been going on in Silicon Valley. ‘All of us are jacked into this system,’ he said. ‘All of our minds can be hijacked. Our choices are not as free as we think they are.’
According to Harris, Silicon Valley is engineering your phone, apps and social media to get you hooked. He is one of a small circle of tech insiders who have publicly acknowledged that the companies responsible for programming phones are working hard to get you and your family to feel the need to check it constantly. Some programmers call it ‘brain hacking’, and the tech world, says Brown, would probably prefer you didn’t hear about it.
‘Brain hacking is the colloquial term we use for persuasive technology,’ he said. ‘There are many ways you can build these apps that can become habit-forming or addictive. There are about 15 other patterns or design tools you can use to increase how often someone will use an app. The term is a bit futuristic and frightening but we do that on purpose to draw people’s attention to what’s going on.
‘This time last year, no one understood that they were being actively persuaded by their technology. That is on purpose – it’s no accident. It’s not like people are weakwilled or lazy; they are actively subject to massive experimentation and augmentation at the hands of tech companies.’
NOWHERE is the dawning awareness of the problem with smartphones more acute than in the California idylls that created them. Last year, as ex-employees of Google, Apple and Facebook, including former top executives, began raising the alarm about smartphones and social media apps, in particular the effects on children, the addictive nature of mobile technology came into focus. In April 2017, the CBS programme 60 Minutes ran a segment looking at the issue. That was followed by the comedian Bill Maher making it the subject of one of his HBO commentaries.
‘The tycoons of social media have to stop pretending they’re friendly nerd-gods building a better world, and admit they’re just tobacco farmers in T-shirts selling an addictive product to children,’ he said.
‘Because let’s face it, checking your “likes” is the new smoking. Apple, Google, Facebook? They are essentially drug dealers.’
In the industry, they prefer to call it persuasive techniques. In reality, they are tricks used to get users addicted. So how do they do it?
‘The one that my company is leading the edge on is something called “variable reinforcement”,’ said Ramsay. ‘This is the idea that if you perform a behaviour and the consequence of the behaviour is fun or exciting or pleasurable, or you didn’t expect that to happen, your brain changes just a little bit, it rewires just a little but, to cause you to perform that behaviour more frequently.
‘This isn’t magic, it’s not sorcery, it’s just part of how the brain works. It’s a chemical reaction.’
The trick goes back to the Skinner experiments. In the 1950s, BF Skinner, a Harvard psychologist made a box and placed a hungry rat inside it. The box had a lever on one side and when the rats pressed it they got a pellet of food. Skinner then decided to alter the experiment. By varying the reward when they pressed the lever – sometimes they would get a large pellet, sometimes a small pellet and sometimes nothing at all – he found that the mice pressed the lever compulsively.
The concept, known as ‘variable reinforcement’ or ‘variable rewards’ by app designers, is one that can also be applied to humans. The secret? Not rewarding all actions, but doing so randomly. Bizarrely, having a less predictable outcome – will I get what I’m hoping for? – is actually more enjoyable. This is because our brains are wired to search endlessly for the next reward. Our dopamine system works to keep us searching through desire. The hunt itself is rewarding, and it explains why so many of our favourite mobile apps and social networks are so addictive.
In today’s modern era, where people, especially young children, are increasingly attached to their smartphones, we’re the rats, and Facebook likes are the reward. And it is reinforced by another trick used by designers to keep us hooked – infinite scrolling.
‘It’s in most major social apps,’ said Ramsay. ‘This is a particularly pernicious one because not only is there a large and finite quantity of stuff to show you, but the brain has not evolved to responsibly handle the idea of an infinite quantity of behaviour. Narrowly, this is how it works. Your brain evolved for you to start a behaviour, do the behaviour and then finish. In real life, you feel hungry, you start a meal, you eat the meal and then the meal is done. There is a completion. That’s the way your brain is wired. Starts and ends.
‘The brain needs this. It allows us to organise behaviour. The biggest persuasive technologies we see at persuading people to stay on the smartphone for as long as possible inside apps is that you don’t allow the behaviour to end – then people will just keep doing it.
‘What we have found is that if the brain doesn’t receive a stop signal, you just keep repeating the behaviour.’
The tricks don’t end there. According to industry insiders, it is well known that Instagram dripfeeds likes to certain users who don’t use the photo-sharing app often enough. The strategy is that the user will be disappointed with the amount of likes they received on a particular post and keep checking if they’ve got more. In the same vein, push notifications play on human weakness.
‘The push notifications on phones are not accidental,’ said Ramsay. ‘They come from a long tradition in computing about saying, “Hey, this is helpful, we should alert people”. But they are largely now subject to mathematical optimisation. By not enabling you, or keeping you informed or up to date, the end goal is “get them back into the app”. Why? Because the apps that are the most hooking or addictive have the strongest financial incentive to keep you using them as long as possible.’
App designers know that once the icons start flashing onto your lock screen, you won’t be able to ignore them. It’s also why Facebook switched the colour of its notifications from a mild blue to attention-grabbing red.
IF we have lost control over our relationship with smartphones, it is by design. In fact, the business model of the devices demands it. Because most popular websites and apps don’t charge for access, the internet is financially sustained by eyeballs. That is, the longer and more often you spend staring at Facebook or Google, the more money they can charge advertisers.
To ensure our eyes remain glued to our screens and smartphones, internet giants have become virtuosos of persuasion, cajoling us into checking them again and again, and for longer than we intend.
The revelation of how cynically app desgners have worked to make their products biochemically addictive will come as a terrifying shock to many parents, though it will help explain why half of all parents in a recent US study said that regulating children’s screen time was a ‘constant battle’.
But these revelations are also a definitive answer to anyone who thinks that the way to tackle smartphones is for parents to be a bit firmer with their children. In effect, trying to tell your child to stop using their phone is like trying to tell a heroin addict to stop using drugs.
In the past, society found that the only way to stop such products taking over our lives was to outlaw them, as we did with drugs such as heroin and cocaine.
And with other addictive drugs such as nicotine and alcohol, we at least banned children from using them until they were old enough to make adult choices.
Now, as we start to learn how these products have been engineered to be every bit as chemically addictive as those drugs, we face a choice: do we just allow them to take over our children’s brains so they can make even more money? Or do we say ‘stop’, and fight back to protect our children?
‘We have revealed how habits work,’ Brown warned. ‘We have built technologies that induce habits. This will continue... this is the new normal.’
And for anyone still deluded enough to think the tech world will police itself, his conclusion is simple – and chilling: ‘These technologies will not stop.’