A good read, A Society That Lost Focus. Here are some quotes.
Google innovated by inventing a whole new way of exploiting attention: trying to learn as much as possible about users to show them the advertising they are more likely to click on. The whole story is told in great details in the book ‘Surveillance Capitalism,’ by Soshanna Zuboff.
Most monopolies were built by removing choices. You could not buy a computer without Microsoft Windows. You could not visit some websites without Internet Explorer. You can’t find a phone without Google in a shop (Google pay many billions dollars every year to be the default search engine on Apple devices). And if you manage to remove Google from your phone, you will lose the ability to run some apps, including most banking apps. Most apps even check at start if Google services are installed on the phone and refuse to start if it’s not the case. If it’s really hard not to use Google, it’s by definition a forced monopoly. Similarly, it is very hard to avoid Amazon when shopping online.
There’s one exception : Facebook. There’s nothing forcing us to go to Facebook or Instagram. There’s nothing forcing us to spend time on it. It’s like we have choice. But it seems we haven’t.
Well, here I am, who visited both like 5 times over the last years.
We get that famous “dopamine rush”, described in great details by Liberman and Long in “The molecule of more”.
Each time there’s a notification, each time there’s a red bubble in some part of the screen, the brain acts like it’s a new vital opportunity. We can’t miss it. A study showed that the sole notification sound was enough to distract a driver as much as if he was texting while driving. Yes, even without looking at your phone, you were distracted as much as if you did (which is not an excuse to look at it).
In his landmark book “Digital Minimalism,” Cal Newport offers a framework to rethink the way we use digital technologies. The central idea is to balance costs and benefits consciously, highlighting most hidden costs. Facebook might be free in the sense you don’t have to pay for it. But being exposed to advertising, being exposed to angry political rants, feeling compelled to answer, being exposed to picture of people you once knew and who seems to have an extraordinary (even if virtual) life is a very high cost.
Simply do the math. If you have 180 friends on Facebook, which seems to be a low amount those days, if your friends take, on average, 10 days of vacation per year, you will have, on average, five friends on vacation every day. Add to this statistic that some people like to re-post pictures of old vacations and it means that you will be bombarded daily by pictures of sunny beaches and beautiful landscapes while you are waiting under neon light for your next boring meeting in a gray office. By design, Facebook makes you feel miserable.
With public money, we are actually actively funding companies and startups thinking they will both create jobs and sell solutions to every problem. It is implied that every solution should be a technological one, should be sellable and should be intuitive. That’s it: you should not think too much about a problem but instead build blindly whatever solution comes to mind using the currently trending technological stack. French Author Antoine Gouritin wrote a funny and interesting book about that whole philosophy he called “Le Startupisme.”