How Silicon Valley hooks us
Tech engineers who helped make Facebook and Twitter so addictive are unplugging from the internet, said journalist Paul Lewis, concerned that their creations are hijacking users’ minds.
USTIN ROSENSTEIN HAD tweaked his laptop’s operating system to block Reddit, banned himself from Snapchat, which he compares to heroin, and imposed limits on his use of Facebook. But even that wasn’t enough. In August, the 34-yearold tech executive took a more radical step to restrict his use of social media and other addictive technologies. Rosenstein purchased a new iPhone and instructed his assistant to set up a parental-control feature to prevent him from downloading apps. He was particularly aware of the allure of Facebook “likes,” which he describes as “bright dings of pseudo-pleasure” that can be as hollow as they are seductive. And Rosenstein should know: He was the Facebook engineer who created the Like button in the first place. A decade after he stayed up all night coding a prototype of what was then called an “awesome” button, Rosenstein belongs to a small but growing band of Silicon Valley heretics who complain about the rise of the so-called attention economy: an internet shaped around the demands of advertising. These refuseniks are rarely founders or chief executives, who have little incentive to deviate from the mantra that their companies are making the world a better place. Rosenstein’s colleague, Leah Pearlman, then Instead, they tend to have worked a rung a product manager at Facebook, announced or two down the corporate ladder: designers, the Facebook “like” in a 2009 blog post. engineers, and product managers who, Now 35 and an illustrator, Pearlman, too, like Rosenstein, several years ago put in has grown disaffected with “likes” and place the building blocks of a digital world other addictive feedback loops. “One reason from which they are now trying to disentangle I think it is particularly important for us themselves. to talk about this now is that we may be
the last generation that can remember life Rosenstein, who also helped create Gchat before,” Rosenstein says. during a stint at Google and now leads a
O San Francisco–based company that improves NE MORNING IN April this year, office productivity, appears most concerned designers, programmers, and about the psychological effects on people tech entrepreneurs gathered at a who, research shows, touch, swipe, or tap conference center on the shore of the San their phone 2,617 times a day. Francisco Bay. They had each paid up to
$1,700 to learn how to manipulate people There is growing concern that as well as into habitual use of their products, on a addicting users, technology is contributing course by Nir Eyal. to 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 upended the political system and, left unchecked, could even render democracy as we know it obsolete. Eyal, 39, the author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, has spent several years consulting for the tech industry, teaching techniques he developed by closely studying how the Silicon Valley giants operate. “The technologies we use have turned into compulsions, if not full-fledged addictions,” Eyal writes. “It’s the impulse to check a message notification. It’s the pull to visit YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter for just a few minutes, only to find yourself still tapping and scrolling an hour later.” None of this is an accident, he writes. It is all “just as their designers intended.” Eyal wanted to address the concern that technological manipulation was somehow harmful or immoral. He was dismissive of those who compare tech addiction to drugs. “We’re not freebasing Facebook and injecting Instagram here,” he said. He flashed up a slide of a shelf filled with sugary baked goods. “Just as we shouldn’t blame the baker for making such delicious treats, we can’t blame tech makers for making their products so good we want to use them,” he said. Without irony, Eyal finished his talk with some personal tips for resisting the lure of technology. He told his audience he uses a Chrome extension, called DF YouTube, “which scrubs out a lot of those external triggers” he writes about in his book, and he recommended an app called Pocket Points that “rewards you for staying off your phone when you need to focus.” Finally, Eyal confided the lengths he goes to protect his own family. He has installed in his house an outlet timer that cuts off access to the internet at a set time every day. “The idea is to remember that we are not powerless,” he said. “We are in control.” But are we? If the people who built these technologies are taking such radical steps to wean themselves free, can the rest of us be expected to exercise our free will? Not according to Tristan Harris, a 33-yearold former Google employee turned vocal critic of the tech industry. “All of us are jacked into this system,” he says. “All of our minds can be hijacked. Our choices are not as free as we think they are.” Harris, who has been branded “the closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience,” insists that billions of people have little choice over whether they use these nowubiquitous technologies, and are largely unaware of the invisible ways in which a