you're dealing with an addicted
generation this is a big time bomb
ticking
this is no accident indeed it is by
design i mean seriously
it was my mistake i mean i think we can
all feel it
to try to make these products as
addictive spike in dopamine
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we now know that many of the major
social media companies hire individuals
called attention engineers
who borrow principles from las vegas
casino gambling among other places
to try to make these products as
addictive as possible
that is the desired use case of these
products is that you use it in an
addictive fashion because that maximizes
the profit that can be extracted from
your attention and data
it literally is a point now where i
think
we have created tools that are ripping
apart the social fabric of how
society works that is truly where we are
the way the technologist jaron linear
puts it is that these companies
offer you shiny treats in exchange for
minutes of your attention
and bytes of your personal data which
can then be packaged up
and sold what happened is that the
attention economy and this race for
attention got more and more competitive
and the more competitive it got to get
people's attention on say a news website
the more they need to add these design
principles these more manipulative
design tactics
as ways of holding on to your attention
you don't realize it but you
are being programmed social media tools
are
designed to be addictive the actual
design desired use case of these tools
is that you fragment your attention as
much as possible throughout your waking
hours that's how these tools are
designed to use
well we have a growing amount of
research which tells us that if you
spend large portions of your day
in a state of fragmented attention so
large portions of your day where you're
constantly breaking up your attention
take a quick glance do it just check and
just quickly look at instagram
that this can permanently reduce your
capacity for concentration
i'm especially worried about this when
we look at the younger generation coming
up which is the most saturated
technology
it's very addictive because if you pull
on the slot machine arm enough you will
win
and you never know which poll will
reward you
that's an addictive behavior and it's
dopamine that is driving that addiction
so what happens
with social media is robert spolsky you
did the foundational research on this at
stanford calls it the magic of maybe
when you look at your phone and maybe
there's a text there and maybe there's
not and
you don't know when it shows up that
high you get
that's dopamine it's the magic maybe
maybe it'll be there maybe it won't when
it shows up
you get a 400 spike in dopamine that is
roughly the same amount of dopamine as
you're getting from cocaine it's
slightly less
than an extremely addictive drug like
cocaine and that's what's happening
we really care what other people think
of us
so for example you know when you upload
a new photo
a new profile photo of yourself on
facebook
that's a moment where our mind is very
vulnerable to knowing what other people
think
of my new profile photo and so when we
get new likes on our profile photo
facebook knowing this could actually
message me
uh and say oh you have new likes on your
profile photo and we
it knows that we'll be vulnerable to
that moment because we all
really care about when we're tagged in a
photo or when we have a new profile
photo
and the thing is that they control the
dial the technology companies control
the dial
for when and how long your profile photo
shows up on
other people's news feeds so they can
orchestrate it so that other people more
often
end up liking your profile photo over a
delayed period of time for example
so that you end up having to more
frequently come back and see what the
new likes are
and it's literally rewiring our brain
even social media the challenges
you know with these terms like facebook
depression and everything because
what's that this is social media
depression because whereas everyone's
looking at their feed
and they're comparing their lives to
other people the
highlights of other people's lives wow
and there's actually
less status life satisfaction more
sadness depression
and stuff like that and it's interesting
because if you think about
things like things that you know
routinely produce a lot of dopamine
alcohol for example there's a drinking
age
right we have a drinking aid alcohol
releases a whole lot of dopamine it
makes you feel really really good
we say okay you can have that but you've
got to wait you've got to be 21 years
old
we don't do that with social media we're
you know essentially putting highly
addictive drugs
into the hands of kids before they have
any natural defenses against them and
what you're seeing with
internet addiction with social media
addiction the same thing over and over
it's people
trying to change their state of
consciousness with a device trying to
get at the
underlying neurochemical chemistry and
it's very very addictive and so i would
say
the problem with the gadgets and i mean
they're amazing things
is that they interfere with
they approximately interfere with medium
to long-term goals i would say
and so i think the first thing you have
to do to bring them under control
is figure out what it is that their use
is interfering with it has to be
something important
so you think well i i want to do
something important
what is that oh it could be personal
maybe you want to have a relationship
you want to get married you want to have
kids you want to have a career that's
meaningful you know you want to have a
life you want to have an abrahamic
adventure and be the father of nations
let's say well you can't be
ratting away on your cell phone and
doing that and so i think
i think part of it is to set your sights
high and
and make a plan and figure out who you
could be and see if
obsessive utilization of smartphone fits
into that vision of nobility and
it will hardly because they're they're
unbelievably powerful communication
devices but
so so often it's it's for lack of
something better to do
and it also interferes
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you know imagine like when you take that
to the extreme
where you know bad actors can now
manipulate
large swaths of people
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to do anything you want it's just a it's
a really
really bad state of affairs and we
compound the problem right we curate our
lives
around this perceived sense of
perfection because we get rewarded in
these short-term signals hearts likes
thumbs up
and we conflate that with value and we
conflate it with truth
and instead what it really is is fake
brittle popularity
that's short term and that leaves you
even more and admit it
vacant and empty before you did it
because then it forces you into this
vicious cycle where you're like what's
the next thing i need to do now
because i need it back think about that
compounded by two billion people
and then think about how people react
then to the perceptions of others
it's just a it's a really bad so we know
from the research literature that the
more you use social media
the more likely you are to feel lonely
or isolated
we know that the constant exposure
to your friends carefully curated
positive portrayals of their life
can leave you to feel inadequate and can
increase rates of depression
and something i think we're going to be
hearing more about in the near future
is that there's a fundamental mismatch
between the way our brains are
wired and this behavior of exposing
yourself to stimuli with intermittent
rewards throughout all of your waking
hours
so it's one thing to spend a couple
hours at the slot machine in las vegas
but if you bring a slot machine with you
and you pull that handle all day long
from when you wake up to when you go to
bed
we're not wired from it it's short
circuits to brain we're starting to find
that it has
actual cognitive consequences one of
them being the sort of pervasive
background hum of anxiety
here's the thing the world we live in
isn't real
social media isn't real and by design
social media rewards us for showing our
best
life the edited posed champagne michelin
star holiday
orchestrated best angle of our life the
highlight reel
but you don't ever see real life the 99
of our lives the behind the scenes the
unglamorous unfiltered day-to-day bland
normality
and you end up comparing your behind the
scenes to other people's
fake highlight reel and using others as
a mirror or benchmark for how
you should look how successful you
should be or how you should live
these fake comparisons will only serve
to make you feel inadequate
and inferior to something that isn't
even real research continually shows
that comparing your life to someone
else's creates envy
low self-confidence low self-esteem and
depression
you compare yourself to other people
every single day
consciously or subconsciously and no
matter what i say you're not going to
stop
because comparing one thing to another
is a natural human thing to do
whether we want to admit it or not a big
reason why anything has value is because
there's something
worse or better to compare it to
think about it an old brick of a mobile
phone with a big aerial
is only considered amazing in a world
before the smartphone
the horse and carriage is only
considered a phenomenal mode of
transport
until the car comes along the answer
isn't to stop
making comparisons because unfortunately
we can't control that
but you have to change the object of
your comparison
from someone else to yourself you have
to measure yourself
against yourself and by doing this you
start at a base point where you consider
yourself to be perfectly fine
exactly how you are but it also is the
most effective
motivating and healthy way to work to
improve yourself
you'll become your happier self when you
stop putting pressure on yourself
to be more like someone else and when
you start comparing
real to real we're in a really bad state
of affairs right now
in my opinion it is it is eroding the
core foundations of how people behave
by and between each other and i don't
have a good solution
you know my solution is i just don't use
these tools anymore
i have it for years it's created huge
tension with my friends
huge tensions in my social circles
if you look at like you know my facebook
feed i probably haven't i've posted
maybe two times in seven years
three times five times like just it's
less than 10.
um and it's weird i guess i kind of just
innately didn't want to get programmed
and so i just tuned it out but i didn't
confront it
and now to see what's happening it's
really it really it really bums me up
back in the 1970s and the early 80s
at xerox park when steve jobs first went
over and saw
the graphical user interface the way
people talked about
influence
was a bicycle for our minds that um
here we are you take a human being and
they have a certain set of capacities
and capabilities
and then you give them a bicycle and
they can go to
all these new distances they're
empowered to go to these brand new
places and to do these new things to
have these new capacities
and um that's always been the philosophy
of people who make technologies how do
we
create bicycles for our minds to do and
empower us to feel and access more
now when the first iphone was introduced
it was also the philosophy
of these technologies how do we empower
people to do something more
and what and in those days it wasn't
manipulative because there was no
competition for attention
photoshop wasn't trying to maximize how
much attention it took from you
it didn't measure its success that way
and the internet overall had been in the
very beginning
not designed to maximize attention it
was just putting things up there
putting things out there creating these
message boards it wasn't designed with
this whole persuasive psychology
that emerged later if you feed the beast
that beast will destroy you
if you push back on it we have a chance
to control it and reign it in
and it is a point in time where people
need to
hard break from some of these tools
and the things that you rely on the
short term
dopamine driven feedback loops that we
have created
are destroying how society works
no civil discourse no cooperation
misinformation mistruth and it's not an
american problem this is not about
russian
ads this is a global problem
mr zuckerberg would you be comfortable
sharing with us the name of the hotel
you stayed in last night
um
uh no
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you