No matter how much you earn you are still a slave.

A slave with many masters.

Enslaved by free stuff.

And sold to a myriad of buyers.

Image credit: Paul Downey

I wrote a piece last week on the idea of embracing the rush of our lives and how it’s a human condition. While to some degree I do think it’s a sign of our times and not altogether negative, I do see the impact it has made.

In school I read about the effects of coffee on the industrial revolution. The idea was that the widespread use of the stimulant allowed shift workers to operate all hours of the day and night.

Of course, we, in the modern day, have benefited on the backs of their labor; however, we have also learned from the negative aspects of that society. At least in this country, we no longer employ children, we have tougher safety laws, and regulation.

Back to my point of embracing rushing, I was wrong to take it on from a single standpoint. Through this past week I have searched out resources to learn more about the effects of our gadget driven world and what it has gotten us.

I titled this post “Start with why” and it’s a rip off from a great book of the same name by Simon Sinek.

That book focuses on sales and challenges sales people to start by asking why someone would want to buy their product/service and then shape a solution around that.

However, he also speaks about the current state of our society and it’s character.

If we could sum up the modern First World in one word it would be addiction and not just to drugs.

Many in my generation are addicted to our phones, our streaming services and our reliance on same day delivery. We can order anything, watch any show and contact any person in the world. In an odd twist of fate I can get live tweets from our current president and tweet him back.

As a current digital addict I tend to look at others and see it as normal.

When I am at the park I tend to not use my phone and see that others are. As a result I figure I must be balanced.

However, first thing in the morning I check my phone and look at my notifications. If you were to follow me on a social network you would see that I don’t post a ton. In reality I tend to not think I have much to say that is important for the world to know and I limit my posts for food recommendations while in new cities.

However, I check all the networks multiple times a day. I get updated on the latest coffee from the person I had 10th grade English with and also get to see the latest from our President.

It’s an odd time to be alive.

Why do we do this?

One reason is dopamine. It is the same drug that opiates release and it’s triggered naturally when we see activities or people responding to our posts. That’s why we look to see the comments, the likes and the re-shares.

It’s also why we tend to get worse over time with our usage. We need more and more dopamine to feel good.

I wrote all of this to say one thing.

Maybe we shouldn’t always embrace the rushing and start with the why.

Why are we doing this; who do we care about; why are we not happy.

Image credit: Ksayer1

I’ve been ranting for years about the negative effects of social media and how it lends itself to insecurity, FOMA, jealously, etc., how it enables trolls, kills empathy and, worse, its unmitigated, conscious focus on addicting its users in exactly the same way heroin addicts.

Of course, I’m not the only one; psychiatrists and psychologists, educators, parents, and a host of pundits have weighed in.

Everyone knows that actions speak louder than words, so it is telling that the biggest names in tech kept tech away from their kids and far away from the schools they attend.

This in spite of giving millions in cash and product to enable schools to embrace tech.

Since it’s proven that screens kill empathy, not to mention engagement, their actions will give their own kids a major advantage in adulthood, since empathy and critical thinking will be at a premium.

If the hypocrisy doesn’t encourage you to seriously limit screen time, no matter the howls of outrage, perhaps the new voices condemning the addiction and warning of the dangers will carry far more weight.

Why?

Because they are the people who helped create the problems, starting with Tristan Harris, a former in-house ethicist at Google.

“The largest supercomputers in the world are inside of two companies — Google and Facebook — and where are we pointing them?” Mr. Harris said. “We’re pointing them at people’s brains, at children.”

The new Center for Humane Technology includes an unprecedented alliance of former employees of some of today’s biggest tech companies. Apart from Mr. Harris, the center includes Sandy Parakilas, a former Facebook operations manager; Lynn Fox, a former Apple and Google communications executive; Dave Morin, a former Facebook executive; Justin Rosenstein, who created Facebook’s Like button and is a co-founder of Asana; Roger McNamee, an early investor in Facebook; and Renée DiResta, a technologist who studies bots, and Chamath Palihapitiya, a venture capitalist who was an early employee at Facebook, said in November that the social network was “ripping apart the social fabric of how society works.”

Read the article and then decide whose side you are on — the hypocrites or the social angels.

Image credit: NotionsCapital.com

A month ago KG shared an article about how Facebook rummages through your life in pursuit of profit using and algorithm called People You May Know. The results are beyond creepy (emphasis mine).

• A woman whose father left her family when she was six years old—and saw his then-mistress suggested to her as a Facebook friend 40 years later.

• An attorney who wrote: “I deleted Facebook after it recommended as PYMK a man who was defense counsel on one of my cases. We had only communicated through my work email, which is not connected to my Facebook, which convinced me Facebook was scanning my work email.”

Still creepier, but great for profit, are Facebook’s shadow profiles.

… built from the inboxes and smartphones of other Facebook users. Contact information you’ve never given the network gets associated with your account, making it easier for Facebook to more completely map your social connections. (…) Because shadow-profile connections happen inside Facebook’s algorithmic black box, people can’t see how deep the data-mining of their lives truly is, until an uncanny recommendation pops up.

Then there is Android, which collects information even when you tell it not to.

Many people realize that smartphones track their locations. But what if you actively turn off location services, haven’t used any apps, and haven’t even inserted a carrier SIM card?

Even if you take all of those precautions, phones running Android software gather data about your location and send it back to Google when they’re connected to the internet…”

“Don’t be evil” Google also records conversations around their products; that’s not counting the bug in the new Home Mini that secretly recorded everything said near it.

And Amazon’s Echo is no different.

Chamath Palihapitiya, Founder and CEO Social Capital, who worked at Facebook for seven years and became vice president for user growth, is the most recent social media veteran to publicly apologize, “I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works.”

Social media addiction is not an accident; it’s intentional, design driven, and it’s sole purpose is to generate revenue.

“The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works,” he said, referring to online interactions driven by “hearts, likes, thumbs-up.” “No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth. And it’s not an American problem — this is not about Russians ads. This is a global problem.”

Palihapitiya’s isn’t the only one feeling guilty.

Palihapitiya’s remarks follow similar statements of contrition from others who helped build Facebook into the powerful corporation it is today. In November, early investor Sean Parker said he has become a “conscientious objector” to social media, and that Facebook and others had succeeded by “exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.” A former product manager at the company, Antonio Garcia-Martinez, has said Facebook lies about its ability to influence individuals based on the data it collects on them, and wrote a book, Chaos Monkeys, about his work at the firm.

The forces at work behind social media are also money-driven.

In his talk, Palihapitiya criticized not only Facebook, but Silicon Valley’s entire system of venture capital funding. He said that investors pump money into “shitty, useless, idiotic companies,” rather than addressing real problems like climate change and disease. Palihapitiya currently runs his own VC firm, Social Capital, which focuses on funding companies in sectors like healthcare and education.

I doubt any of this is going to change your social media consumption.

But never forget that these companies are not your friend. Their primary purpose is not to make you or anyone else happy.

Their purpose is to make money.

Period.

Anything else that happens is plain old serendipity.

(Watch the entire interview.)
Flickr image credit: Duck Lover

It’s likely you are too young to have heard of a book called The Hidden Persuaders.

Originally published in 1957 and now back in print to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary, The Hidden Persuaders is Vance Packard’s pioneering and prescient work revealing how advertisers use psychological methods to tap into our unconscious desires in order to “persuade” us to buy the products they are selling.

A classic examination of how our thoughts and feelings are manipulated by business, media and politicians, The Hidden Persuaders was the first book to expose the hidden world of “motivation research,” the psychological technique that advertisers use to probe our minds in order to control our actions as consumers. Through analysis of products, political campaigns and television programs of the 1950s, Packard shows how the insidious manipulation practices that have come to dominate today’s corporate-driven world began.

It was considered highly unethical and, although there was no social media to spread the word, people were vocally upset enough that many companies stopped doing it.

Gone but not forgotten.

The behavioral social science behind Hidden Persuaders continued to grow and became a driving force underlying the deliberate addictiveness of video games.

60 years, continued research and a name change to “gamificaton” and it has become the basis of today’s management approach for gig economy companies like Uber.

Uber helps solve this fundamental problem by using psychological inducements and other techniques unearthed by social science to influence when, where and how long drivers work. It’s a quest for a perfectly efficient system: a balance between rider demand and driver supply at the lowest cost to passengers and the company.

Employing hundreds of social scientists and data scientists, Uber has experimented with video game techniques, graphics and noncash rewards of little value that can prod drivers into working longer and harder — and sometimes at hours and locations that are less lucrative for them.

Is it ethical to manipulate a workforce to produce more work at less cost to their non-employer?

Of course, Uber and “ethical action” seems an oxymoron, but psychological manipulation does appear to be on the uptick in many companies.

This article should be required reading for anyone who works in the “gig economy” or is thinking about doing so.

Hat tip to KG for pointing it out.

Image credit: Geoff Simon

Sometimes people seem to forget that kids grow up and become adults.

Or they used to.

The responsibility for most of the problem can be laid at the feet of their parents and their helicopter approach to raising their offspring. Most ironically, they complain when job candidates sport the same attitudes as their own kids.

Other factors retarding adulthood include the escapism offered by today’s video games, especially for under-30 males, the lack of interpersonal skills driven by social media, along with social media’s unsubtle efforts to foster addiction in the name of profit.

And, of course, the largest factor being family and friends, whose emotional and financial support, enable a relatively comfortable living situation.

The difficulty today’s young adults are having in becoming actual adults was the impetus for (what else) a startup.

Rachel Weinstein, a psychotherapist, and Katie Brunelle, a former elementary school teacher and coach, responded by creating the Adulting School, a place for people to gain the skills they need to feel like an adult, from goal-setting and sheet-fitting to how to manage money or hang a picture.

Simon Senek, a British author and motivational speaker, also blames parents for the false expectations of so many Millennials, who never were given the chance to learn/live the process of achievement.

“Everything you want you can have instantaneously, except for job satisfaction and strength of relationships,” Senek argues. “There’s no app for that; they are slow, meandering, uncomfortable processes.”

Whatever you think about a school that teaches adults how to be adults the real question is: in what direction will the next generation go?

Image credit: the Adulting School

Do you believe that Twitter was founded with effects like Arab Spring in mind? Or that Mark Zukerberg started Facebook for altruistic reasons? Or that Instagram, Snapchat and other similar sites actually have your wellbeing in mind?

If so, you probably also believe in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy.

The primary purpose of every one of these sites is simple: to make as much money as possible.

How?

By using personalization to achieve behavioral addiction.

Infinite personalization comprises the artificial intelligence-driven, big-data based tools that allow algorithms to build a personalized Internet echo chamber customized just for you, designed to make you feel great. Infinite personalization feeds you the real, the fake, and everything in between, with the simple goal of holding your attention and getting you to come back for more. It is the process by which companies can measure, match, and predict consumers’ individual preferences with amazing accuracy and then tailor offerings to maximize revenue.

It’s done with full knowledge and, in my opinion, malice afore thought.

It’s why tech titans, starting with Steve Jobs in 2010, limit their kids, as I said a couple of years ago in The Hypocrites of Tech.

They want their kids to grow to positions of leadership and power and know they can’t if their world shrinks to a self-enhancing echo chamber that only regurgitates information that fits their preconceived ideas.

Personalization is active in the real world, too, and has been for several years, with young adults inventing ways to shrink their world by curating their college roommates and demanding “safe places.”  

All I can say it ‘good luck’ when their carefully curated echo chamber has to function in the work-world.

However, it’s a sad and scary commentary that in the frenzy to make more and more money tech is providing a detailed roadmap, along with the supporting technology, for demagogs to become dictators.

For a more detailed look at behavioral addiction check out Adam Alter’s Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked

Image credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com