Our Minds Have Been Hijacked by Our Phones
wired.com
wired.com
> Imagine we replace the Comment button with a Let’s Meet button. When we want to post something controversial, we can have the choice to say, “Hey let’s talk about this” in person, not online.
Why would Facebook, or any "attention seeking" Internet company for that matter, do this? You can even tell the interviewer is skeptical. If he had suggested, say, that we should take our business to consumer companies whose business models don't rely on attention grabbing, that would've at least been a start. Instead he suggests we "become more self-aware" and "transform design." Which consumers should become self-aware? Why would entrenched companies change their design? The idealism is nice and all, but so far I think this has been a wasted opportunity to fix a real problem. The messaging could be far more specific and realistic. But at least we're talking about it.
There's something called "Ethical Investing" (aka "Socially responsible investing", "sustainable investing" or "resposible investing").[1]
Its existence is clear proof that at least some investors do care about the social value of the companies and products they invest in.
What about just using client-based PoW to indicate how "loudly" one wishes to speak their post?
Casual posts probably would benefit very little. But at least fake news generators would have to pay some money if they want to get clicks by making your uncle angry.
How can anyone know?
For most people, social media isn't strictly a necessity but it's essential for keeping in touch with friends, long distance family, and to see what's going on with those friends, e.g. events. So stating "deleting social media is the only answer" is counterproductive because it's a non-solution.
As I've gotten older, my tolerance for bullshit diminished. You don't have to be friend with everybody. If people are substantially different than you, chances are high you can't be best friends.
Writing messages through pigeon carriers may be entertaining for few days, but all of my friends are accessible through phone or email.
I was just saying more on how we choose who we give our time to, rather than the medium.
As for Facebook/Gmail etc. They are fine tools for now, as all other software companies, they'll be gone one day.
Facebook probably faster than Google as it will be turning into a graveyard network at some point.
Social media became 'essential' because the barrier to communication dropped drastically, effectively widening your net for useless connections and sucking you into a vortex of crap.
After deleting FB, I could only remember a handful of people that mattered, another few reaching out of their own accord who I'd forgotten about.
Can't for the life of me remember beyond 30~ people from my list out of 900~. I realized I truly did not give a fuck about Kristoffer from Norway that I met zip lining in Mexico in the summer of 08.
I think a lot of people are reluctant to take this line of thinking to its logical conclusion: that we've made a monstrous and unconscionable mistake.
Recognizing that mistake for what it is demands that we own our parts in its genesis and solution. Neither will be terribly profitable.
Still, the grain of truth that consumers themselves could radically change the landscape by changing their habits is not wrong. It's just not realistic either. The entire point of hyper-metrics-driven mobile and web app design is to figure out what makes users do what YOU want, not what they would normally do.
I'd say the "grain" of truth a about consumers being able to change the landscape by changing their habits is exactly right. It might be unrealistic for everyone to do it en masse (though such things have happend in the past and will happen again). But it is entirely realistic for indivduals the landscape around themselves.
For example I don't glue myself to my phone, and am no longer on Facebook so I can't bring myself to care much about the evil things that Facebook is said to be doing on peoples phones.
I'm proud at least that we recognzed and stopped that behavior early on my project. But I didn't question the instructions I was given very directly without help from others, which I'm a bit ashamed of.
I have many tremendously-fun discussions with my friends on Facebook. On current events, philosophy, their most-recent research paper or gadget or patent. A lot of social media hand-wringing involves people (a) treating unfiltered public commentary as person discourse and/or (b) under-filtering their feeds, thereby turning what should be a personal space into one dominated by unfiltered public commentary.
On the other hand, what you see in HN is what everybody else sees, it's not hidden and you can selectively read and comment about what you find interesting.
a) no profile picture albums; no one gets to evaluate you based on what you choose to show off about your lifestyle, friends, the stuff you own, the fun you have, the trips you take, the people you date, whatever; those pictures may be interesting but it really is irrelevant to this network while being primarily attention-seeking, and is also the main source of anxiety and depression (especially for young people) related to using FB today. Obviously pictures of you or others pertinent to a discussion are fine, as is having a profile picture, just no concept of photo albums for the profile or otherwise.
b) there would have to be UI and features for organizing the entire network around discussions, wrt what's on your feed, what posts look like, how you interact with others, how you launch or join discussions, etc.
c) again, it's more than a HN with your real identity, it's still a social network, you still organize events, you still check in about things going on with each other, but "launch discussion" or "join discussion" are the primary features, not a generic "share", "update status", "like", "tag", "browse album" etc. Overall it's oriented around insights and mind more than stuff, lifestyle, and impulse thinking.
Towards a better humanity.
What would the adaptation for Hacker News or Reddit look like? For one thing, probably a controlled release of all new content in batches, so we get trained out of refreshing them all the time. To its credit, HN at least provides noprocrast.
I have found that putting some friction in front of the unconscious "tabbing to timewasting site" habit is really useful while trying to get something done.
This is exactly what I do.
I wrote a system that reads from multiple RSS feeds and screen scrapes non-rss sources into RSS feeds. Every article goes through some basic tagging before being indexed in a personal Elasticsearch instance and archived on-disk (my "personal Google").
Every morning I get an email with content filtered based on tags, prioritized based on my interests and upvotes (where applicable), and coarsely aggregated by theme (mostly for politics). I limit myself to 30 minutes of reading for each update, forcing myself to conscientiously prioritize. I occasionally click to the HN comments, but avoid Reddit like the plague.
Actionable articles get added to OmniFocus, but only if I will take action. Informative articles get added to Evernote, but only if I will reference them in the future.
It's imperfect, but still scratches that cave-man itch to constantly check the environment for new signals - I trust my software to do so on my behalf. Funneling content into action-items and references keeps me otherwise focused on doing things instead of reading things.
(I also abandoned Facebook/Twitter/etc because their mix of news/entertainment/communication was addictive - all I need is communication)
My FB stream mostly consists of inane things that other people have clicked "like" on, and if FB thinks those are the things that interest me the most, they are failing big time.
That sounds a little arrogant, but is my general experience. I see this in the submissions and comments where HN demands thought out posts. Jokes or comments that do not contribute are rarely at the top and often removed, while the opposite is true of jokes on Reddit (in general)
The "avoid gratuitous negativity" policy has helped, but we are still very much in a place of "most negative opinion wins" which pushes some discussions way off of reality. And those are just the ones I know about.
Turns out that sounding smart or righteously indignant (or usually, both) doesn't make something correct. Just a weird rabbit hole of darkly gratifying negativity. I guess I'm waking up to the fact that our flavor of "discussing ideas" might not actually be that more high-minded than Reddit or Facebook.
Holy Usenet Batman.
This is exactly what I did when I had to pay per minute of dial up. Still ended up spending hours in front of a computer.
I've noticed that with hot-topic issues (like the Google memo), there's usually a flurry of divisive, and in my opinion uninformed and low-quality discussion over multiple submission, followed by (somewhat) more informed and reasonable discussion when the initial outrage dies down.
I wouldn't know what the best way to implement this would be, though. A community guideline? A 'too hot, let it cool down' button for users with a certain amount of karma? Active moderation?
You are of course right that that would be absurd. But sometimes it's good to demand what you really want even though it's unreasonable. I think in this case, that we all think this is absurd that they would do such a thing, is a very strong argument against our current society and how it works at a deep level.
I was checking my phone every 5-10 minutes half out of restlessness at sitting inside all day, and also to keep up with rapidly evolving events in the world. But I wanted to focus more, without turning my phone off. So I put my phone in my left pocket instead of my right pocket.
It worked. Every time I reached for my phone, I had to think consciously how to get it out. That interrupted the cycle of just pulling it out enough to make me only pull it out once in a while. It went back to being a tool I use to do lots of things, rather than something I use to fill time when there's nothing to do for 30 seconds. The first step he mentions, simply being aware of these habits and breaking the cycles, can go a long way in keeping these habits from becoming too entrenched.
I was surprised to learn there are people who don't keep their phone in a particular pocket, who this wouldn't work for.
The rest, once in a while I'll open and see what tried to get my attention.
I'm one. Crap apps with tons of pointless notifications are many.
I own this phone and my time.
1. Deciding to use a social media website as a website rather than an app.
2. Using a long password which you have to manually type in every time.
3. Creating a separate browsing profile for a certain category of browsing. Eg: work profile -vs- fun profile
4. Leave the TV remote inside a drawer/shelf rather than just lying around on the couch.
I'm interested in hearing more suggestions!
PS: The counterpoint to this technique is to reduce friction for the things you would like to do more often.
> 2. Using a long password which you have to manually type in every time.
Yes! I do both of these for facebook and I rarely use it now. It's been great. The only downside is the friends who insist on group facebook messenger conversations (mbasic) which I won't see for a couple of days, and then need to repeatedly log in to keep up on an active topic or coordination/meet-up.
Couchsurfing And Meetup make in-person local group formation and related discussions possible. DC here is a town where people talk for money, but many communities of Americans are very shy about meeting any strangers.
Masses of people burdened by kids and long commutes or old age mostly seek distraction. Those are yesterday's TV ad audiences ordering more pizza cheese.
I ignore my phone. Some nerdier people have "auditory agoraphobia" and tune in to music, podcasts or books on tape in lieu of chewing cud. I think that is good compared to listening to Howard Stern in a car.
Other people are just remarkably bored. I bothered to spend a few weeks asking people what they were they doing on their phones outside offices. I was surprised to learn how most women I asked were constantly catalog shopping. I was surprised because I use Amazon like preppies used LL Bean to avoid wasting time in retail shopping. Visually obsessed shoppers are problems few will pay engineers to solve.
Maybe technology has made the problem worse, but at least in my case the problem is me, not whatever distracts me.
There so many great things you can do when being offline. But it's definitely not reading a physical newspaper in 2017. This doesn't make sense (for me at least) and this is not about liking or hating technology. It's like using a phone booth for making phone calls. A newspaper is just an inferior medium for that use case.
The actual message of your post is good though.
Edit: Why the downvotes?
Your comment is a non sequitur.
Is it a problem? You don't have to pathologize it.
I miss a solution but he doesn't propose any.
Edit: I just went another time to the site and still can't see any '3 steps' in text form. Would be great if you could enlighten us since you know the 3 steps.
> So how do we fix this? We need to make three radical changes to technology and to our society.
> The first is we need to acknowledge that we are persuadable. Once you start understanding that your mind can be scheduled into having little thoughts or little blocks of time that you didn't choose, wouldn't we want to use that understanding and protect against the way that that happens? I think we need to see ourselves fundamentally in a new way. It's almost like a new period of human history, like the Enlightenment, but almost a kind of self-aware Enlightenment, that we can be persuaded, and there might be something we want to protect.
> The second is we need new models and accountability systems so that as the world gets better and more and more persuasive over time -- because it's only going to get more persuasive -- that the people in those control rooms are accountable and transparent to what we want. The only form of ethical persuasion that exists is when the goals of the persuader are aligned with the goals of the persuadee. And that involves questioning big things, like the business model of advertising.
> Lastly, we need a design renaissance, because once you have this view of human nature, that you can steer the timelines of a billion people -- just imagine, there's people who have some desire about what they want to do and what they want to be thinking and what they want to be feeling and how they want to be informed, and we're all just tugged into these other directions. And you have a billion people just tugged into all these different directions. Well, imagine an entire design renaissance that tried to orchestrate the exact and most empowering time-well-spent way for those timelines to happen. And that would involve two things: one would be protecting against the timelines that we don't want to be experiencing, the thoughts that we wouldn't want to be happening, so that when that ding happens, not having the ding that sends us away; and the second would be empowering us to live out the timeline that we want.
[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/tristan_harris_the_manipulative_tr...
I am happy not to have phone addiction.
I have no apps, other than what came with it. In fact, that's one of the reason I picked a Windows phone. Nobody makes apps for it. Really, it does all I want.
I make calls, text, email, take pictures, and browse the web when I am bored and not home. I sometimes tether it and use a laptop. That's pretty much it.
It gets lost, the battery runs out, and I don't care. I'm okay with that. There are already a bunch of ways to communicate with me. I even have a landline.
It's not that bad, compared to what I witness others doing. I see people, out with others, and many of them remain glued to their phones. A friend recently informed me that people will use their phones, not as cameras, while having sex at those live cam sites.
I'm not actually sure how I'd feel if the missus pulled out her phone and was posting to Facebook during sex.
Speaking of Facebook, I don't have anything like that.
Anyway, it seems that we have all these outlets to communicate, but the majority of activities barely seems to meet that definition. But, I digress.
I guess I'm trying to say that I am also happy to not have a phone addiction. I don't even answer either of my phones, unless I have a reason to do so.
It has been about ten years that I haven't needed to give a phone permission to interrupt me. It feels pretty good.
I do have some super-posh Pixel XL kindly provided by work but that does not fit in my pocket too well when cycling. Hence I still rock the 'burner' phone that does private chat, emails, txt and calls. There are maps and interwebs on there too, it is all I need when I am not at a computer.
I don't have a 'thousand Facebook friends' as I am not on Facebook. However, on my ride to work I will see plenty of faces I know walking their dogs, jogging or cycling like myself. I get real-world 'likes' and the 'thread' of conversation is in memory only, not scrawled out in txt-spk.
Having the 'big phone' in my bag means I can take decent photos if I want to, I can ssh in to servers and try those new exciting apps with it too. I don't have 'FOMO' issues because I have the latest-and-greatest phone there if I want it.
The other benefit of my 'burner' phone is that it has a big battery that charges quickly, it takes SD cards and, due to light usage, the battery lasts a long time between those charges.
I am always there for people on my 'burner' phone so I have not disconnected from my phone whatsoever. The only 'app' apart from Whatsapp! and a compass app that I have installed is an app that tells me how often I checked my phone over the last 24 hours. Normally I am around 10 'checks of phone' a day, I believe most people are at the 65 level.
My colleagues that commute in via tin-box means, be it train, bus or car, well, they may be getting the 'Facebook likes' to light up their dopamine receptors but this is fake, much like how class 'A' drugs work. I enjoy knowing real-world people in the real community, with no adverts to see on my cycle commute. I also think it is a two-way thing, those half-dozen people I exchange smiles and friendly words with probably also enjoy being out and about for the same reasons.
Now what if I decide to sell the bicycle and endure normal transport instead, stalking people on social media instead of interacting in the real world? What if everyone did that? Would we have any community at all? If this happens, who will say hello to the old folks that don't have computer skills? What human interactions will they have?
I think that we really should be starting to call social media what it really is. Let's start calling it 'anti-social media' because that is what is really going on with this phone obsession people have and the apps that lure them in to scroll their life away.
"We optimize for measurable engagment as a proxy for customer satisfaction, which is itself often suggested as a proxy for product value. This is a terrible mistake and it makes us optimize for novel forms of addiction."
https://gist.github.com/nalply/6bcb91154df56b58974a65ebb3f0b...
It's not that I cannot understand this, and see where things can go wrong. It's that I can't seem to convince others of it.
The same holds for privacy issues. The arguments are all true, but just not compelling enough.
While I very much agree that something needs to be done to encourage making real friends in real life (possibly some kind of sonar app based on short range peer to peer?), I think trying to get opposing sides in a heated debate together is less than wise.
Tristan Harris is only mentioning some very recent manifestations and variations of a critique that has been around for a very long time.
The history of this critique is a complex and not easily summarized one,[1] but, to take just one example, in The Technological Society[2] Jacques Ellul[3] argued that it was the efficiency improvements in what Ellul called "technique" (which can be thought of as technology in a broader sense) were effectively irresistible and inevitable to society as a whole, as the adopters of less efficient techniques were inevitably out-competed by users of more efficient ones. For Ellul this was important because it meant the loss of humanity's freedom, as they are inevitably following where efficient technique leads them.
This was presaged by Heidegger[4] most famously in The Question Concerning Technology[5], and a whole field of Philosophy of Technology followed.[6]
A more recent and popular exploration of technology's influence can be found in the documentaries of Adam Curtis.[7]
[1] - For one easily accessible but analytically-flavored attempt at a summary, see: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/technology/
[2] - https://www.amazon.com/Technological-Society-Jacques-Ellul/d...
[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Ellul
[4] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heidegger
[5] - https://www.amazon.com/Question-Concerning-Technology-Other-...
https://www.amazon.com/Attention-Merchants-Tim-Wu/dp/1782394...
information needs to become transparent so addicts look through it rather than at it, with an augmented reality horizon. current mobile computing is incapable of providing immersive or useful experiences, the success of games shows the potential and inbuilt demand in connected movement devices. a mask is far more useful than a pair of glasses: identity tag, atmospheric filter, audio visual screen, trauma drug delivery system, human net, fashion and status symbol.
ideally you should wear your net/node like a second skin, after all it's the clothing of the 21st century. before we get there we need flexible integrated circuits, paper thin devices that are powered by light or heat. decades and decades away from mom and dad slipping on their iVide's.