What are the words on YouTube get you the biggest number of views?
Hates, destroys, obliterates, slams, all hateful negative words.
If this video was called Johan Hari makes you feel good!
it would not get many views.
If it's been given the title:
Johan Hari hates obliterates and destroys the algorithm!
It's going to get a lot of views.
At the moment social media is making us incredibly angry,
and if you want to understand why you've got to follow a chain of logic.
You are not the customer of Facebook,
you are the product they sell to the advertisers.
Every time you open Facebook or any of the other social media sites
they are making money out of you.
All of their engineering power all of their algorithms is designed
towards keeping you scrolling as often and as long as they possibly can.
That leads to anger in a slightly weird way
it comes down to something called negativity bias.
Human beings will stare for longer at something
that upsets us or angers us,
than we do as something that makes us feel good and happy.
Anyone who's ever seen an accident on the motorway
knows exactly what that effect is.
You stared longer at the mangled car wreck than you did
at the pretty flowers on the other side of the road.
This is a very deep thing in human beings 10 week old baby babies
will stare longer at an angry face then a happy face.
It's probably for a good evolutionary reason our ancestors who were
more alert to sources of danger got to be our ancestors
the ancestors who were just like oh look at the pretty flowers probably got eaten.
but that Quirk a human psychology has a terrible effect
when it combines with algorithms and engineering that are designed
to keep us scrolling for as long as possible.
Picture two teenage girls who go to the same party
going home on the bus.
One of them opens Facebook and goes that was a really nice party,
I had a nice time everyone was lovely.
Second girl opens her phone and goes:
Karen was a right f**king slag at that party and her boyfriend's a twat.
The algorithms are scanning everything you do
That first message the nice one
it'll put that message into some people's feed.
that second status update will go to far more feeds.
Because if it's enraging it's engaging it keeps more people looking.
Now that is bad enough at the level of two teenage girls going home from a party as a society
we've all been plugged into this anger machine everyone is incentivized to be the most mean and
angry version of themselves they're rewarded for it there's never any dialogue where people say you
know think you might be right on this but I think you're probably wrong of that you know but you
seem like a nice person even though we don't agree everything is like it's the last scene in Colombo
and he's accusing people of being a murderer or it's the last scene in Dracula and you're
Van Helsing driving a stake into someone's heart we can disagree with each other it's one of the
great joys of life one of the worst Hells in the world will be being locked in a room with people
who only agreed with you even the people with ideas you think are horrible do kind things for
some people we've got to get out of this extreme binary thinking that these anger-based algorithms
are constantly pushing us into it's deeply psychologically unhealthy it's deeply socially
unhealthy what kind of society can we have if we hate each other all the time what Facebook's
own internal research which was fortunately leaked to us because they weren't going to tell
us showed something really important what their own scientists found is that Facebook's current
business model keep people scrolling which hacks into this negativity bias was buried deep in their
business model indeed they said it was inherent to the business model and the only solution was
for Facebook to abandon that business model and choose a degrowth strategy they also showed that
a quarter of all the people who joined Neo-Nazi groups in Germany joined them because Facebook's
algorithm specifically recommended it so a lot of people are responding to this rage Machine
by saying the solution is for the social media companies to effectively become the sensor to
effectively decide who gets to speak and who doesn't and to cut off certain voices Tristan
Harris is one of the most important critics of big Tech having been at the heart of the machine
himself gives a really good metaphor that I think helps us to understand why I don't think that's
right if you pictured this Machinery at the moment what what he's doing is it's tilting the entire
landscape more towards crazy if you picture it is like a mountain it's tilting the whole mountain
and loads of rocks and boulders are falling down and what we're saying is oh you need to just build
Nets to catch some of the boulders that's not the solution the solution is stop tilting the mountain
we need to deal with the underlying factors that are making people angry now once we've done that
they'll of course be a legitimate debate about okay who do you allow on the platform and who
don't you allow on the platform but that's not the first step in the argument the first step in the
argument is okay let's stop it driving people crazy these social media sites are profoundly
damaging individual attention but they're also destroying our Collective attention as a society
we can't talk to each other we can't listen to each other we tribalize we become full of
rage and hatred and contempt if you are plugged into what the journalist Maggie Haberman called
an anger-based video game which is what these sites have become that anger doesn't get left
behind when you close the apps and go out into the world right we've got to go to the heart
of the problem and the heart of the problem is the current business model and there's a
solution to this it was explained to me by lots of the people who design key aspects of how the
internet worked so for example ASA Raskin said to me solution here is very obvious you've got to
ban this current business model which Professor shoshona zubov called surveillance capitalism
just pan it get rid of it we don't need it just say that a business model based on tracking
people in order to discover weaknesses in their attention and then selling their attention to the
highest bidder we do not allow that as a society and I remember saying to Aza and lots of the other
people who in Silicon Valley who told me this was the answer what happens the day after the ban when
I open Facebook and Twitter does it just say sorry mate we've gone fishing and they said of course
not what would happen is they would have to move to a different business model one is very simple
it's subscription you pay 50 cents or whatever it would be a month and you get access to Facebook
just like we do with Netflix and loads of other things that's one model another model is something
that everyone has experience of very close to them right now wherever you are unless you're
in a very obscure part of the world you're very close to a sewage pipe now before we had sewage
pipes we had [ __ ] in the streets we had cholera so together we all pay for sewers to be built and
we maintain the sewage pipes together and we own the sewers together now it might be in the
same way that we own the sewage pipes together we want to own the information pipes together because
we're getting the kind of equivalent of Cholera for our attention if there's a subscription
model or if there's some kind of public ownership independent of government suddenly
you're not the product anymore you're the customer at the moment we have a model of social media that
is designed explicitly as Sean Parker one of the key initial founders of Facebook has admitted
to hack and invade attention but it's just as technologically easy and it's just as politically
feasible to have a social media that's designed instead to heal your attention now Facebook will
never do that at their own accord we have to make them do it and there's a really good historical
analogy for this something very similar happened in the past and we put it right until the 1970s it
was quite common for people to paint their homes with lead paint and to put leaded petrol into
their cars actually it was known from the 1920s that exposure to lead really damages children's
brains their ability to focus their ability to pay attention but the entire lead industry
funded a kind of fake branch of science to deny the evidence but by the time you got to the 1970s
that science it was just undeniable herbal that lead was causing these profound negative effects
and so what happened there was a movement of ordinary people led in Britain by a housewife
called Jill runet who just said we're not going to let these people do this to our children's
brains no we don't tolerate it and they were not saying well let's ban pain let's ban petrol they
were saying let's ban the specific component in lead and petrol that is harming our kids attention
so they were banned and in most countries in the world they're now banned what I'm arguing for is
that we've got to do something similar with social media we've got to deal collectively with the
specific component that is [ __ ] your focus and mine your brain is healthier because Jill Rooney
and all those other people fought to protect your brain from exposure to lead now it's our job to
protect the Next Generation from a business model for social media that is profoundly damaging our
ability to focus and pay attention Jill brunette didn't say this is really hard she didn't give up
she got up as she fought and lots of other people joined her I think we need an attention movement
women to reclaim our minds we are not medieval peasants begging at the court of King Zuckerberg
for a few little crumbs of attention from his table we are the three citizens of democracies
we own our own minds and we can take them back if we want to please join Double Down News on
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