Of Course It's Addictive
Two recent court cases helped prove what we should all already understand - that these companies deliberately build addictive technology.
Context: Facebook and YouTube have finally been held to (small) account for the addiction loops they’ve built into their platforms.
Next time you’re on an airplane, pay attention to the people around you when you land. Listen for the chimes. The dings. The cacophony of a plane’s worth of electronics reconnecting with their terrestrial brethren. Witness the gaggle of humans grasping at their devices to top up on all the updates they may have missed since being in the air. You are, more than likely, a member of that gaggle (silly goose).
How about your last experience being on public transportation? Did you notice how many people were dug into their phones scrolling endlessly through a feed of short form videos? Surely there is some educational merit to some of the content that they’re being served, but one of Gen Z’s crowning achievements is their coining of the term brain rot to describe the average content that your average person is seeing. It is an apt term. The content certainly feels like it is rotting my brain, and yet I still engage with it.
How about your attention span - is it feeling particularly healthy these days? Are you getting fidget-ey when you’re half way through a feature length film? Do you have some TV show playing in the background while you tap on your phone? Are you struggling to read books or concentrate because of the constant stream of interruptive notifications and digital slop flowing out of the screen you’re reading this on and weaving itself through that beautiful, irreplaceable harness of consciousness that sits between your ears?
That’s the whole point.
On a recent flight I watched the woman sitting in front of me using her phone. What I witnessed was compulsion. First she opened WhatsApp to look at messages and profile updates. Then it was Instagram. Then it was TikTok. Then it was Facebook Messenger. Then back to WhatsApp and the cycle repeated itself. Over and over and over again, oftentimes with no new data in any of the apps. Each cycle took less than a minute. She would do this for ~10 minutes at a time, take a bit of a break, and then return.
Separately, a good friend of mine admitted that he’s no longer able to watch movies because he lacks the attention span. I felt camaraderie in this admission of addiction.
This is the state of the world that social media companies have built. These experiences aren’t outliers. They’re average.
Can we thus agree to call a spade a spade? These companies intentionally build digital nicotine because it’s deeply profitable. They have teams with KPIs and OKRs that intend to win the battle for every precious minute of your life in the "attention economy." Many members of the tech community revel in their ability to attract and addict users through product loops that exploit the darker aspects of our human psyche. They strategize on how to hook users when they’re young, because brands cement themselves in the subconscious of those people as they graduate into adulthood. Nikita Bier, for example, has built his career on mastering and evangelizing loops that trigger humans’ "lizard brains." His opinions are oft cited as gospel for how social apps must be built.
There will never be a consumer product that takes off purely for political reasons—like “being censorship resistant” or “decentralizing banking”
— Nikita Bier (@nikitabier) June 12, 2023
Think of consumers as lizard brains: they mindlessly tap on rectangles on a screen for basic needs—like making money or finding a date
A proud discovery
Was addiction the officially-stated goal? No - engagement was. But when you combine cadres of brilliant people, hundreds of billions of dollars in investment, and a goal of increasing engagement it should surprise no-one that the result is addiction, distilled. Social media has pointed that machine at the brains of children.
I am, in some small part, responsible for all of this. In my 16 years in the tech industry I have worked at two social media companies - the space where driving engagement is most acutely the core business strategy. I’m not the one that made the product decisions nor was I the one to implement the features (my time was spent attempting to protect users of the platforms) but still I was complicit. I was one small cog in a machine that wires its users’ brains for compulsive behavior under the flag of fostering connection and community.
Are you feeling more connected?
Are you feeling a deep sense of community?
I, for one, am not.
May the scales continue to fall from our eyes as society comes to grip with the seeds that social media has sown, may these court cases be the sharp edge of a large wedge that (finally) brings these companies to bear, and may my fellow tech workers wake up to the responsibility that we share in the world that we’ve built.
Amen ◻