I was listening to the Sam Harris Podcast this morning on my way to work. He was speaking with the American computer scientist Jaron Lanier on the topic of our modern digital lives. The whole episode was entertaining and insightful, but it was near the end when Jaron made a statement that blew my mind. The common one-liner goes something like this:
“With social media, advertising companies are the real customers. You are the product”
Jaron Lanier pointed out that this isn’t technically correct. To be more precise:
“Your loss of free will is the product”
“Drive purchasing decisions” is just a euphemism for psychological manipulation. To the advertising industry, the human psyche is an open-book. If we really value our freedom and independent thought, then perhaps it behooves us to minimize our exposure.
Social media services, like Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, Tiktok, are not “free-to-use”. You pay for it with your information. This is not a novel statement. In fact, this line of thinking has become quite unoriginal and borderline hackneyed.
Everyone - even to those who are inextricably addicted to social media - will agree that less usage would improve their quality of life, but perhaps less people agree on the severity of the situation. We pay with a lot more than our information.
I fully believe social media will become the “smoking” of 21st century. The future generations will look back in amusement at our open embrace of these technologies. They will scoff at the parental irresponsibility of giving toddlers ipads, at the opioid-on-demand, addictive nature of some the apps.
I am no luddite. Everything in moderation as the saying goes. There is no doubt many good that has come out of social media, but just look at the growing list of negatives. It has destroyed our attention span, disrupted our dopamine circuit to make us depressed and unmotivated, enabled harmful and unrealistic social comparison that robs us of happiness. It has amplified misinformation and conspiracy thinking, greatly reinforced political division and tribalism. Lastly, it has created a crisis in our epistemology where truth is subjective, experts not worth listening to, and institutions degraded.
More importantly to me, it is algorithmically manipulating us, robbing us of our privacy (a la Cambridge Analytica), and sapping over 600 hours of our lives each year. What would you have done with those 600 hours? Perhaps learn a new language? Learn a new musical instrument? Hike the Appalachian trail?
If our life experience is indeed equal what we have paid attention to, then social media, algorithmically tuned to capture the most of our time and attention, is literally robbing us of our lives.
You might think you are personally immune to ads, that you are rational and educated enough to make independent choices, devoid of any outside influence. That’s pretty delusional. If anything, it counts as a double win for the advertising industry.
Great ads are stealthy. They embed themselves into the corners of our subconscious mind. Then one day, it ever so slightly tips the scale and influences our decision one way rather than another. Worse yet, ads don’t even have to be stealthy to work. Ads that are unabashedly obtrusive works just the same.
I think this idea is perfectly captured in the Movie “Inception”. For those unfamiliar with the movie, it is about professional “dream thieves” armed with a fictional device that allow them to infiltrate another person’s dream, or subconsciousness. From there, they can either extract secret information, or plant dangerous ideas.
The movie follows Cobb (played by Leonardo DiCaprio), an experienced dream thief, who assembles a crew to infiltrate the mind of an heir to a multi-billion dollar national corporation. Their mission is to destroy the future of this corporation.
Strip away the mind-bending action sequences and the spectacular performances, their sole objective is to plant a single idea. “Don’t follow in your father’s foot steps, build something new for yourself!” I thought this was just hilarious! When looked at in isolation, it seems like a relatively harmless, perhaps trite message that one could get from a shitty self-help CD. But this seemingly innocuous idea is able to bring down a multi-national corporation.
So the next time you see an advertisement, think of it as Leonardo DiCaprio trying to plant ideas into your subconsciousness.
Quoting Tim Wu in his book, “The Attention Merchants”:
If we desire a future that avoids the enslavement of the propaganda state as well as the narcosis of the consumer and celebrity culture, we must first acknowledge the preciousness of our attention and resolve not to part with it so cheaply and unthinkingly as we so often have. And then we must act, individually and collectively, to make our attention our own again, and so reclaim ownership of The very experience of living.