In his essay How Technology
is Hijacking Your Mind—from a Magician and Google Design Ethicist, Tristan
Harris explains various ways the internet and your smartphone are
infiltrating your brain and soul—not unlike the horrifying and famous chest
busting scene in Alien, in that at first everything about your smartphone
seems harmless or okay— until it’s 3 AM and you’re laying fetal position in
your bed messaging fourteen different strangers on a dating app the same sad message.
Or more generally, Harris shows how designers intentionally build their sites
and apps in order to manipulate users “attention economy.” Harris also points
out that sometimes this is not an intentional manipulation but sometimes just
a byproduct of the technology.
Hijack#1: “if you control the menu, you control the choices.”
I found this one especially prescient and insidious— because by presenting a
menu to a user, it provides an illusion of
free choice. The idea is similar to a consumer haunted house in which
individuals are allowed to wander to a certain extent but eventually, they are
herded toward the same exact destination. In the internet, this is likely a
sales door. Harris’ more disturbing point here is that oftentimes technology
will entirely subjugate an individual’s larger possible meta menu. For example,
when I spend ten minutes disappointedly scrolling through Netflix’s shitty list
of movies, I have already assigned my brain an internal selection of “I need to
find a movie” rather than “I need to find something to do”—effectively ruling
out any possibility of getting my lazy ass to go exercise.
Hijack #2: “put a slot machine in a billion pockets.” The
core ingredient of slot machines? Intermittent variable rewards, in which
users actions are only occasionally paired with a result. So every time you pull
your phone from your pocket, you’re cranking the lever on the slot machine,
waiting to see if you’ve received a new message, a new email, a new post. Harris
says the average person checks their phone 150 times a day. These are not 150
conscious choices, but more like 150 moths drawn to 150 slot machines.
Hijack#5: “social reciprocity (tit for tat).” This seems
like an extremely tricky one. Not too long ago, people had to go to concentrated
lengths in order to contact you. They had to lick a stamp and drop a letter in
a box somewhere. Maybe they had to use a rotary dial. Now—people can send you a
break up message at a stoplight. My mom,
now that’s figured out how to use text messages, can check in with me whenever
she’s mildly bored. And guess what, I can’t ignore my mom. Social reciprocity
at its finest. The opposite of this is having a text message conversation with
a narcissist. By my non-scientifically proven estimations, it takes ignoring
at least 9-12 consecutive text messages before a severe narcissist understands
that the conversation was already terminated 2 and a half hours ago.
Hijack#6: “bottomless bowls, infinite feeds, and autoplay.”
So apparently a professor at Cornell by the name of Brian Wansink designed an
actual experiment in which he was able to trick people into eating a
never-ending bowl of soup, leading them to eat 73% more calories on average.
Before I go any further, can we pause for a moment and try to imagine what a
sick fuck this Brian Wansink is or what is must be like to be his wife? Or how
about this never-ending bowl of soup, was there a mini-trap door with a chef Boyardee
tube, can someone please tell me how this was actually accomplished? Maybe,
just maybe, can Brian Wansink end world hunger and poverty? I digress. When it
comes to the internet, the bottomless bowl is seen in the infinite scrolling
page. Why does Twitter’s feed provide a never ending litany of offensive and
awful 140 character thought bubbles from complete strangers? Because you’re an
idiot, and you keep scrolling.
Throughout Harris’ essay, he points out several areas where
a hypothetical Design Ethicist could come in and fix all these problems. My one
concern - until reading Tristan Harris’ essay, I had never once in my life
heard of a Design Ethicist. Is this an actual real job at places other than Google?
I guess previously when I thought of a Design Ethicist I thought of the people
who installed wheelchair ramps on buildings. Harris writes, “Imagine if web
browsers and smartphones, the gateways through which people make these choices,
were truly watching out for people and helped them forecast the consequences of
clicks.” I hope so Mr. Harris. And does this mean I won’t need to clear my
internet history?
https://journal.thriveglobal.com/how-technology-hijacks-peoples-minds-from-a-magician-and-google-s-design-ethicist-56d62ef5edf3