4-15 Essay #3 Due; Read Tristan Harris’ “Our Minds Have Been Hijacked by Our Phones,” “How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds,” and his Ted Talk video. Also see Sherry Turkle’s YouTube video, “Connected, But Alone?”
4-17 Homework #11 due: Read Jean Twenge’s “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” and write a 3-paragraph essay about the alleged delayed development Millennials face from smartphones and helicopter parents. Show CNN Special Report: Being 13.
4-22 Homework #12 due: Read Adam Gopnik’s “The Caging of America” and write a 3-paragraph essay that explains why mass incarceration is America’s greatest scandal. I recommend you see documentary 13th on Netflix. See various essays and videos about for-profit prisons by Shane Bauer.
4-24 Homework #13 due: Read Richard Florida’s “Immigrants Boost Wages for Everyone” and write a 3-paragraph essay that analyzes the validity of Florida’s claim. See Vice Video “Home Sweet Alabama.” See video “3 Arguments Why Marijuana Should Stay Illegal” and support, refute, or complicate the argument that legalizing weed is a bad idea. We will also address the anti-vaxxers so we can develop an argumentative thesis that analyzes the phenomenon of privileged parents embracing the anti-vaxxer lifestyle. Consult the following: John Oliver video on vaccinations. Also see "Why Vaccination Refusal Is a White Privilege Problem"
4-29 Homework #14 due: Read “America’s Invisible Pot Addicts” and in 3 paragraphs explain the dangers of legalized pot. See Netflix Explained episode about history of marijuana.
5-1 Peer Edit
5-6 Essay # 4 due
Essay #4 Due Date: 5-6-18
You need a minimum of 3 sources for your Works Cited page.
Option One: Read Tristan Harris’ “Our Minds Have Been Hijacked by Our Phones,” “How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds,” and his Ted Talk video. Then develop a thesis that evaluates the validity of his claim that technology, especially smartphones, are not empowering us but “hijacking” our freedom and autonomy and working against our best interests. You may refer to Sherry Turkle’s Ted Talk “Connected, But Alone?”
Option Two: Read Jean Twenge’s “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” and write an essay that argues for or against Twenge’s claim that smartphones combined with helicopter parenting are resulting in delayed development of Millennials and Generation Z (born after mid 90s). You may refer to CNN Special Report: Being Thirteen.
Option Three. Develop an argumentative thesis that compares the spiritual evisceration and mental dissolution in Andrew Sullivan’s essay “I Used to be a Human Being” with Netflix Black Mirror episode “Nosedive.” You may consult Sherry Turkle’s YouTube Ted Talk “Connected But Alone.”
Option Four: Read Adam Gopnik’s “The Caging of America” and write a thesis that supports, refutes, or complicates the claim that mass incarceration is “The New Jim Crow.” Refer to the Netflix documentary 13th.
Option Five: Read Richard Florida’s “Immigrants Boost Wages for Everyone” and write an argumentative essay that analyzes the validity of Florida’s claim. See Vice Video “Home Sweet Alabama.”
Option Six: Develop an argumentative thesis that analyzes the phenomenon of privileged parents embracing the anti-vaxxer lifestyle. Consult the following: John Oliver video on vaccinations. Also see "Why Vaccination Refusal Is a White Privilege Problem."
Option Seven: See video “3 Arguments Why Marijuana Should Stay Illegal” and read Annie Lowry’s essay “America’s Invisible Pot Addicts” and support, refute, or complicate the argument that legalizing weed is a bad idea. See Netflix documentary and Netflix Explained.
Option Eight:
Watch Hasan Minhaj video (on both Netflix under Patriot Act and YouTube) and support, refute, or complicate the assertion that the presidential administration is undermining civil rights to the detriment of American democracy and freedom. Be sure to have a counterargument section. For example, defenders of the administration would argue that their policies strengthen America against terrorism.
Default Setting Essay Template for 1,200-word essay
9 Paragraphs, 135 words per paragraph, approx. 1,200 words (1,215 to be exact)
Paragraph 1: Attention-getting introduction
Paragraph 2: Transition from introduction to argumentative claim (thesis)
Paragraphs 3-6: Body paragraphs that give reasons for supporting your claim.
Paragraphs 7 & 8: Counterarguments in which you anticipate how your opponents will disagree with you, and you then provide rebuttals to those counterarguments.
Paragraph 9: Conclusion, an emotionally powerful re-statement of your thesis.
Make sure to include a Works Cited page.
Digital Habits Have Taken Away Our Freedom: Jaron Lanier and Cal Newport
10 Arguments for Deleting Social Media Account
Additional media and books to consider:
Black Mirror episode: “Nosedive”
Irresistible by Adam Alter
LikeWar by P.W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking
World Without Mind by Franklin Foer
Essay #4 Due Date: 5-6-18
You need a minimum of 3 sources for your Works Cited page.
Option One: Read Tristan Harris’ “Our Minds Have Been Hijacked by Our Phones,” “How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds,” and his Ted Talk video. Then develop a thesis that evaluates the validity of his claim that technology, especially smartphones, are not empowering us but “hijacking” our freedom and autonomy and working against our best interests. You may refer to Sherry Turkle’s Ted Talk “Connected, But Alone?”
Overview of the Essay Topic
How does social media in the smartphone age hijack our freedom and autonomy and work against our best interests?
The following should be considered for your body paragraphs (mapping components of a thesis):
One. Social media is now a portable crack machine that puts us inside a dopamine feedback loop resulting in a gradual behavior modification and addiction that can entrap even the smartest, most disciplined individuals because the addictive nature of social media is not a bug; it's a feature.
Two. When we are addicted to anything, including social media's intermittent rewards, we become a nastier, meaner, dumber version of ourselves.
Three. Because we are tribalists, we are vulnerable to social anxiety and social status as it pertains to our social media interactions. Long-term social media immersion results in anxiety and eventually into acute depression.
Four. Not only do we become addicted; our addiction makes us willing participants in our own submission to data mining so that we are the product of the social media companies who sell our most private date to other business entities without our knowledge and consent.
Five. Social media by its very nature tends toward fakery, manipulation, propaganda, and "fake news" because in grabbing attention from the reptilian part of our brains, social media is in a "race to the bottom" to get outrage. This sense of outrage is essential for maximizing clickbait and revenue for the social media companies.
Six. As we adapt to the "race to the bottom," we become more polarized as a society and this polarization degrades democracy while strengthening fascism and totalitarianism.
Counterarguments that need to be addressed:
One. Social media is free so people of all economic classes can participate in it.
Two. Everyone can participate in the marketplace of ideas. You don't have to be a professional journalist to have a blog or a vlog. Therefore, social media helps spread democracy.
Three. Social media gives us access to information that we've never had before.
Four. Social media helps us connect to people all over the world in ways that were once impossible.
If you want to do an alternative essay on the same topic:
Related Topic About Social Media: Should We Censor Racist Trolls?
Read "It's Time to Confront the Threat of Right-Wing Terrorism" by John Cassidy in The New Yorker and "Does the banning of Alex Jones signal a new era of big tech responsibility?" by Julia Carrie Wong and Olivia Solon in The Guardian and agree or disagree with the claim that big tech companies are morally obliged to censor right-wing white nationalist trolls such as Alex Jones.
How Technology Owns Us
Cats integrate with society but essentially remain independent and free. Humans on the other hand will find that their brains get hijacked in the manner Tristan Harris explains.
What’s scary about getting our brains hijacked is that we don’t know they’re getting hijacked. The process is so gradual it feels natural. We become enslaved to the devil because we deny his existence. He ruins us by helping us in our denial. Such is the devil that lurks behind social media. We don’t know our lives we’re ruined with addiction until we’re deep in the muck of it.
Addiction sneaks up on you and catches you unawares.
We’re more like dogs and Facebook or some other social media site has become our Master.
Portability of the Machine destroys our free will.
Lanier observes that the smartphone is a “cage we carry around with us everywhere we go.” Many of us bring our smartphones to bed. Many of my students are so tethered to their smartphones they have a pathological need to attend to it during class. They think this is normal, but this is not normal. This is addiction.
Addiction and Data Mining
We’re being tracked, receiving engineered feedback, and being mined for our data.
We are being molded into specimens for advertising manipulation.
We are being siloed into our political tribe’s bubble.
The Machine causes behavior modification.
We are living in a world beyond advertising.
We are now living in a bubble of “continuous behavior modification.” I refer you to Adam Alter’s book Irresistible.
Lanier writes that we are test subjects in an experiment, and we are not even aware of this.
We should be alarmed, but most of us are not. We are asleep at the wheel, so to speak.
Social media empires are “behavior modification empires,” so writes Lanier.
We become trapped in a short-term dopamine feedback loop.
We get hit with dopamine when we receive likes, followers, and positive feedback. This dopamine becomes a short-term substitute for real self-esteem, real self-confidence, and a real sense of an adult self, but of course this dopamine, like any drug, fails and our tattered self remains the tattered rag that it is.
Jason Lanier is arguing that by becoming addicted to these “short-term dopamine feedback loops” on social media we have lost our free will.
Social media addiction is connected to the growing divisiveness and polarization of society.
Lanier argues that the underlying force of both social media addiction and polarization is behavior modification that leads to helpless addiction. This helpless addiction makes us “crazy.” We’re crazy for more and more dopamine fueled by outrage and short-term self-esteem as we lose sight of real cognitive skills to be full realized adults.
“The addict gradually loses touch with the real world and real people. When many people are addicted to manipulative schemes, the world gets dark and crazy” (10).
The Tech Lords who make us addicted to social media know it’s bad for us.
These very same Tech Lords who design social media don’t allow their children to use social media or gadgets. They send their children to expensive Waldorf schools where technology isn’t allowed.
“Don’t get high on your own supply.”
These Tech Lords know they’re dealing with dangerous addiction because they hire consultants who work with gambling sites to maximize addiction (14).
Social pressure becomes an unhealthy force in the world of social media.
“People are keenly sensitive to social status, judgment, and competition. Unlike most animals, people are not only born absolutely helpless, but also remain so for years. We only survive by getting along with family members and others. Social concerns are not optional features of the human brain. They are primal.”
When we receive negative feedback on social media: being ignored, being scorned, being insulted, or being rejected, we experience hurt. We experience physical and emotional pain.
This hurt is a powerful force in controlling our behavior. We feel compelled to curate an existence to others that they would approve of. Social media pours gasoline on the fire of our desire for others’ validation and approval.
Social Anxiety
The resulting social anxiety from social media is probably enough reason to delete our social media accounts.
When we feel rejected, our social anxiety turns into depression, dejection, and despondency.
For those of us who are already vulnerable to this type of social anxiety and depression, social media is a nightmare scenario.
Rewards and punishments as the primary tools for controlling our behavior is called behaviorism.
Rewards and punishments (behaviorism) degrade human beings.
On page 18, Lanier writes:
“In the bigger picture, in which people must do more than conform in order for our species to thrive, behaviorism is an inadequate way to think about society. If you want to motivate high value and creative outcomes, as opposed to undertaking rote training, then reward and punishment aren’t the right tools at all.”
The Tech Lords don’t want behaviorism to affect their children. They don’t want their children to be Pavlovian dogs in a behavior modification experiment. That’s why they ban their children from social media and gadgets. The children go to Waldorf schools where they grow organic produce in a garden, make soup for lunch, and do creative projects in class.
We’re seeing the Upper Classes enjoy their power by not being tethered to behavior modification of social media.
The rest of us are like a giant underclass being mind-controlled by the social media and gadgets that the 1% foist upon us. We’re being punked.
Propaganda
The Tech Lords use propaganda: euphemisms for their mind control over us. They love to use the word “engagement,” which really means we’re Pavlovian dogs beholden to punishments and rewards.
We are addicts. Addicts are not engaged. Addicts are mind-numbed zombies, the opposite of engagement.
Lanier also prefers “manipulator” to “advertiser” (19).
The Tech Lords are running “empires of behavior modification.”
We fall prey to hidden manipulators.
Lanier argues that the hidden manipulators can make us zombies more often than not. Free will is not absolute. We will zone out from time to time. However, when we fall prey to the hidden manipulators, we become zombies more and more to the point that we lose more and more free will. Our behavior becomes more and more meaningless (23).
The problem is we all have small devices and we’re being manipulated by a few Tech Lords. But the problem goes deeper.
New business model is getting you addicted.
Being manipulated by social media is the new business model that everyone wants to emulate.
Your measured behavior change is now a product (25).
Social media is like a house made with lead. If you live in the social media world, lead toxins will poison and kill you (26).
Nine. What is BUMMER?
Behaviors of Users Modified, and Made into an empire for Rent (27).
To elaborate, BUMMER is a “statistical machine that lives in the computing clouds.”
BUMMER has enough data to predict human behavior.
Using BUMMER platforms degrades us, makes us a worst version of ourselves.
6 Parts of the BUMMER Machine
A = Attention Acquisition leading to Asshole supremacy
B = Butting into everyone’s lives
C = Cramming content down people’s throats
D = Directing people’s behaviors in the sneakiest way possible
E = Earning money from letting the worst assholes secretly screw with everyone else.
F= Fake mobs and Faker Society
People “weird and nasty online.”
People become their worst selves online, nasty, belligerent, ill-tempered. Why?
Ordinary people’s behavior is modified for the worse by the online behavior modification: attention. You must get attention. That is the online force.
Ordinary people begin to seek fake power by dominating others online. This need to dominate makes people act belligerent.
Lanier says ordinary people become “assholes because assholes get the most attention.”
Therefore, we’ve arrived at Part A of the BUMMER Machine: Attention Acquisition leading to Asshole supremacy.
We are now placed under surveillance.
Lanier observes that our gadgets are mining our personal date 24/7. We act as if this is normal, but it is not.
We have become product to Tech Lords. We pay them to manipulate us and use us for future manipulation. We act as if this is normal.
We’ve arrived at B: Butting into everyone’s lives.
We are manipulated by personalized content.
Algorithms choose our content and experience and therefore modify our desires by choosing what to cram down our throats. We think we made the choice, but the algorithm made the choice. We’ve arrived at C: Cramming content down people’s throats.
We get lost in a feedback loop.
People don’t realize they’re being manipulated by getting positive feedback. Customized feeds are designed to maximize our addictions. Of course, Tech Lords say they’re “engaging” us, but in reality that is a sneaky way of saying they are making us addicted to their product. We’ve arrived at D: Directing people’s behaviors in the sneakiest way possible.
Clickbait affects the quality of news.
Websites don’t get paid on quality of content. They get paid on clicks or traffic. If phony news gets higher traffic than real news, then real news may compromise itself to compete with the fake news. We’ve arrived at E: Earning money from letting the worst assholes secretly screw with everyone else.
Fake people have taken over social media.
Social media has become a place of weaponized misinformation. That is the dominant purpose, according to LikeWar by P.W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking.
Trolls, bots, A.I., fake people, cat fishers, and so on populate social media in giant hordes. We don’t know who’s who.
This brings us to F: Fake mobs and Faker Society
Facebook and Google are the biggest users of BUMMER?
Facebook and Google. The more a company uses BUMMER the more it attracts trolls like Russian operatives trying to destroy democracies around the world.
BUMMER is reviewed in The Guardian.
Jaron Lanier is on 21-minute video explaining how social media ruins your life.
Jaron Lanier is on 14-minute Ted Talk video about how to remake the internet.
Sherry Turkle gives 19-minute Ted Talk.
Jaron Lanier on Wolf Pack Aggression, Fakery & Meaninglessness
One. How does Lanier compare the Asshole Personality Factor to drug addiction?
Social media leads to addiction, which leads to radical personality change. To become an addict is for a normal person to lose her best self to her monster self.
The addict is in a constant state of neediness and deprivation, looking for the next hit. Smartphone nation is a nation of addicts.
Addiction is about selfishness.
The addict “is always deprived, rushing for affirmation.” He is nervous, “compulsively pecking at his situation.” He is selfish, self-absorbed, and too “wrapped-up” in his addictive cycle to have empathy for others (39).
Addicts succumb to a “personal mythology of grandiosity.” This grandeur speaks to their colossal insecurity.
Social media addicts are aggressive: They victimize others and they play the victim.
Social media addicts become competitive trolls trying to “win points” in arguments and become more and more belligerent.
Lanier notices when he was a prominent blogger at Huffpost he received a torrent of belligerent emails. He noticed manipulation and a prominent phony AH Factor, the result of personalities conforming to online addiction.
Of all the arguments against social media, this is the one that he is most emotional and “visceral” about.
How Social Media Creates Assholes
Simple syllogism: Assholes get the most attention. Social media creates attention addiction. Therefore, social media creates assholes.
Two. What is Solitary/Pack switch?
Lanier says we all have an inner troll. The troll is the pack wolf. We are more happy and more free as the solitary wolf.
But social media makes us pack wolves.
We all have a Solitary/Pack switch for our inner wolf.
Social media flips the Pack switch on. We become obsessed with our ranking in the wolf pack. Where we stand in our social hierarchy is our everything, so much that we lose contact with reality. Loyalty to the pack becomes more important that any adherence to reality, so if our pack denies climate change, we deny climate change to the death.
If our pack supports a racist politician, we justify our support of this racist politician. We may deny that this politician is racist even if overwhelming evidence supports the contrary.
This Pack Behavior is ruining America. It’s making us divided against each other. Social media has accelerated Pack Behavior in ways we cannot even imagine because in part in a very short period of time close to 2.5 billion people worldwide are on social media.
Pack behavior also creates a social outrage machine on Twitter where people will gang up on someone who is perceived as being bad. People get like sharks tasting blood. Take the case of Justine Sacco, for example.
Solitary Wolf
In contrast to being a Pack Wolf, a Solitary Wolf is an independent critical thinker who isn’t beholden to groupthink or being beholden to conforming to the pack.
Pack Behavior on Facebook and Twitter
Where you stand in the social hierarchy in Facebook and Twitter worlds becomes important because the social media environment manipulates you based on rewards and punishments. Rewards are likes and followers, which produce dopamine. We get addicted to dopamine and begin to behave in ways that will enhance our social esteem on these platforms, what Lanier calls “BUMMERland.”
We will also share outrage of the Pack.
We can become an inner troll as a result.
Lanier’s conclusion: Exit BUMMERland.
Three. How does fakery grow exponentially on social media?
Because behavior modification steers people to be fake versions of themselves, curating some grandiose self, everything else that generates from social media is likewise fake (54).
BUMMER amplifies everything that is fake because in part fake gets attention; real does not.
How Lies Beat the Truth
Armies of fake people gather to “steal the oxygen in the room” so that real voices can’t be heard (55).
If swarms of trolls repeat lies over and over, how do truth-tellers spend time on real news when they have to waste their time refuting lies, which becomes an exercise in futility.
When trolls accused President Obama of being a Muslim terrorist who didn’t have a birth certificate to prove that he was born in America, the media wasted a lot of time rebuking a lie that was so preposterous that it should not have been even addressed, but because of huge movement propagated this lie, the lie could not be ignored. The lie “stole the oxygen in the room,” so to speak.
Holocaust Deniers on Facebook
Zuckerberg allows Holocaust deniers to have a voice on Facebook as we read in this Guardian article.
Fake News Makes Money for Social Media Sites
Fake accounts spreading sensational fake news get a lot of hits and traffic for Facebook and YouTube, so these platforms profit from lies.
Fake news makes lots of money and is hard to detect, as we see in this Washington Post article.
Writing fake news can make individuals more than $10,000 a month on AdSense according to this Washington Post article.
Social Media Profits from Tribalistic Partisan Hatred of The Other
Fair-minded news is too boring for social media platforms, which appeal to our lowest reptilian self, so social media news by its very nature is tribalistic, partisan, hateful, and reptilian. As a result, America has never been so divided (57).
Fake News Is Dangerous
The mass lie that vaccination shots are dangerous and the cause of autism gains steam on social media platforms so that parents deny their children proper vaccinations. This can result in epidemics of measles and other life-threatening diseases.
People who immerse themselves in BUMMER cannot think critically. They are loyal to their tribe but disconnected from reality.
Four. How does social media remove context?
Social media replaces any context you give to your content with its own context, based on algorithms. “You are no longer a name but a number” (65). He continues: “A number is public verification of reduced freedom, status, and personhood.” In other words, living in social media’s algorithm-based context is a prison.
Five. How is social media destroying empathy and human connection?
Two ways: tribalism by isolating us in our own filter bubbles and the loss of public space to inward smartphone absorption.
Filter bubbles alters our reality and cuts us off the reality of others, as explained in this Ted Talk video of 9 minutes.
Consider we live in our own filter bubbles.
Consider we are cut off from our sense of physical space as we get and more and more plugged in to our smartphones.
Consider we become loyal to our tribe by expressing rage against our foes on the Social Outrage Machine of social media.
Consider all of the above, and you’ll see we’re becoming a people cut off from one other. This should concern us for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is violence.
Six. How does social media strip us of our capacity for happiness?
Social media makes its profits by winning our attention, so much so that these “attention merchants” are motivated to turn us into addicts. Addiction spells the end of happiness. As Jaron Lanier writes: “It will dole out sparse charms in between the doldrums as well, since the autopilot that tugs at your emotions will discover that the contrast between treats and punishment is more effective than either treats or punishment alone. Addiction is associated with anhedonia, the lessened ability to take pleasure from life apart from whatever one is addicted to, and social media addicts appear to be prone to long-term anhedonia” (82).
Anhedonia is the self-imposed prison of isolation and futile pleasure from a life that is beholden to addiction.
Lesson #4: Connection Between Financial & Emotional Insecurity
One. What is the connection between emotional and financial insecurity?
Social media like Google and Facebook are “free” but this is not really a free service. The cost is huge.
Part of the cost is time and attention, as we see here.
We pay by giving up our private data, which Facebook charges for a price, as we see in this Time article.
Fast Growth
Being free meant Facebook and Google exploded. Huge user base and billions of dollars were made quickly.
Just as quickly, over 2 billion people worldwide became “part-time lab rats” in a diabolical mind control experiment.
Advertising grew and grew on these “free” sites to the point that they became part of “mass behavior modification” (97).
Tech entrepreneurs got super rich and the giant customer base became miserable addicts beholden to the social media “drugs.”
Two. Why would paying for services be better than “free” BUMMER?
For one, the pay distribution would be bigger: More people would make money.
Should you pay Sam Harris directly for his podcast or let him get paid through royalties via some kind of AdSense venue? He probably gets paid 20 times more by direct payment rather than ad royalties.
For two, paying a vendor directly improves content. For example, we pay for HBO, Netflix, and Amazon Prime, and their content is excellent. Compare their content to a YouTuber who makes Adsense revenue.
For three, BUMMER is an unhealthy barter system. Lanier writes: “Let us spy on you and in return you’ll get free services.”
Three. How is BUMMER a disease on Martin Luther King’s dream of the moral arc of justice?
Martin Luther King posited that over time, life’s moral arc tended toward justice. This is described in Timothy Snyder’s book The Road to Unfreedom as the politics of inevitability. It is inevitable that over time the human race gets better: more just, more smart, more moral, more decent.
But there is another vision of the world. We might call it the Pendulum View. The pendulum swings back and forth between justice and evil; kindness and cruelty; love and hate.
Lanier argues that BUMMER destroys the moral arc narrative and makes us tribalistic assholes unable to sustain the kind of democracy that would lift humanity toward the kind of justice Martin Luther King describes (107).
BUMMER weaponizes misinformation to spread racist totalitarianism throughout the world (109).
Themes from World Without End by Franklin Foer
Mold You Into Their Image Is Not Free
We read that social media tech entrepreneurs are attention merchants who make money from stealing your life. This is why social media is not free.
“More than any previous coterie of corporations, the tech monopolies desire to mold humanity into their desired image of it.”
Tech companies don’t make money by helping you preserve your free will. They make money by automating everything you do. You are a lab in a behavioral modification experiment. Your social media is not “free.”
GAFA stays dominant by enslaving you to their product. What is GAFA, as the Europeans call it? GAFA is the following: Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple.
Social Media Is Taking Us to Point of No Return
Foer writes: “Once we cross certain thresholds--once we transform the values of institutions, once we abandon privacy--there’s no turning back, no restoring our lost individuality.”
GAFA controls our diet of information resulting in them controlling our behavior. No one anticipated that a few institutions could control billions of people. This is a dream come true for tech giants.
This is a nightmare for individualism and freedom.
This concentration of power from the monopolies results in the “homogenization” of behavior. This spells death.
Facebook Steals Free Will:
“While it creates the impression that it offers choice, Facebook paternalistically nudges users in the direction it deems best for them, which also happens to be the direction that thoroughly addicts them. It’s a phoniness most obvious in the compressed, historic career of Facebook’s mastermind.”
Algorithms Replace Free Will
Foer writes: “Facebook would never put it this way, but algorithms are meant to erode free will, to relieve humans of the burden of choosing, to nudge them in the right direction.”
You are a transparent lab rat:
Foer writes: Facebook can predict users’ race, sexual orientation, relationship status, and drug use on the the basis of their ‘likes’ alone. It’s Zuckerberg’s fantasy that this data might be analyzed to uncover the mother of all revelations, ‘a fundamental mathematical law underlying human social relationships that governs the balance of who and what we all care about.’”
Amazon’s Growing Monopoly
Amazon’s monopoly control is explained by Hasan Minhaj in his Netflix show The Patriot Act.
“I Quit Social Media” in a 4-minute video.
“Why I Quit Social Media” in an 8-minute video.
“How to Break Your Social Media Addiction” in a 10-minute video.
Cal Newport's Digital Minimalism
One. How do so many of us become exhausted and broken by our internet habits?
The internet becomes our boss by making constant demands on our attention. We work so hard to please all the internet forces beckoning us 24/7.
We don’t even know we’re a slave. It happens gradually.
We lose uninterrupted time to focus on creating our better selves. We lose focus.
Internet companies’ success is based on making us addicted. That is their job.
The internet fosters anger and outrage because attention gets traffic, so the internet makes us an angrier, more outraged, more obnoxious version of ourselves, according to techno-philosopher Jaron Lanier.
Over time, Newport observes we lose our autonomy. We become addicts and slaves to the Internet Attention Merchants.
Two. What is the challenge of digital minimalism?
We can’t go back in time. Technology is here to stay. We must learn to reap the benefits while minimizing its liabilities.
Another challenge is to see the futility of “taking a break” or taking a “digital Sabbath” or a “digital cleanse.” Like junk food, Internet use can’t be purged from time to time. Rather, we need to change our overall habits.
Newport writes: What you need is a “full-fledged philosophy of technology use, rooted in your deep values, that provides clear answers to the questions of what tools you should use and how you should use them and, equally important, enables you to confidently ignore everything else.”
Such a philosophy seeks to find the sweet spot between the Neo-Luddites, who reject all technology as evil, and the Quantified Self Enthusiasts, who want to embrace technology in every micro task of their existence.
Three. What is the value of focus?
Focus excludes chaos and distraction and makes us concentrate on what makes us achieve excellence and become happy. Internet and social media are about distraction. But we need focus.
Newport quotes Marcus Aurelius: “You see how few things you have to do to live a satisfying and reverent life?”
The more we can be digital minimalists, Newport argues, the more we can focus on what makes life satisfying and reverent.
To achieve focus, we must engage in “aggressive action” to combat the pitfalls of social media: mental and spiritual disintegration. Our “hyper-connected world” or “humming matrix of chatter and distraction” is leaving us hyper-disconnected.
Technology became a Frankenstein monster that overtook us and killed our focus. When Steve Jobs first conceived the iPhone, he saw it as an iPod that would keep a phone number directory to make phone calls and play music, not a “general purpose computer” that we carry in our pockets and take to bed with us.
What’s crazy is that the radical influence of Facebook and smartphones on our lives was “unplanned and unexpected.” We have not had time to process this sucker punch to the face.
Four. What are the unforeseen effects of smartphones and social media?
Newport concedes that you can find tech people who use their smartphones and social media to increase their productivity and self-promotion, but this is just a “thin slice” of what is happening.
On a much broader scale, the average social media user has been rapidly losing self-control.
“It’s not about usefulness, it’s about autonomy.”
This loss of autonomy was unplanned, but once the tech lords realized they could control the masses and make money from this, they capitalized on it.
The “nerd gods” are “selling addictive product to children,” to quote Bill Maher.
As Tristan Harris says on Anderson Cooper and his many videos, the smartphone is a slot machine.
Silicon Valley is not programming apps; they’re are programming people.
Five. Is it true that technology is neutral; what makes technology good or bad is how we use it?
The answer is no. Technology is not neutral. It is designed to be addicting, polarizing, and mentally disintegrating. Bill Maher: “Big Tobacco wants your lungs. The App Store wants your soul.”
Six. What specifically is the crack cocaine that gets us hooked on social media?
Here it is: “Intermittent positive reinforcement and the drive for social approval.”
By intermittent, we are saying the positive reinforcement is unpredictable and erratic in its dishing out rewards; this becomes more addicting than predictable rewards.
Regarding social approval: Since Paleolithic times, we have been hardwired to gain social approval from the tribe in order to increase our survival and status in the group. We are hardwired to want approval.
The converse is a true: A lack of feedback causes anxiety and distress. What is wrong with us? We then do jumping jacks on social media and get lost down social media rabbit holes trying to win approval, the very thing the Tech Lords want for their profits.
When you tag or like someone on social media, they feel obliged to reciprocate; this in effect creates a social-validation feedback loop.
The Tech Lords are “exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology,” the very thing a hacker does, so says Sean Parker.
What’s the net sum of this? We have lost control of our digital lives.
Newport cites Adam Alter, author if a book I taught two years ago: Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology.
Compulsive social media use “is not the result of a character flaw, but instead the realization of a massively profitable business plan.”
Seven. What is Newport’s central argument throughout the book?
Newport is not arguing whether or not social media and Internet devices are useful or not. He is arguing about how we’ve lost our autonomy.
Eight. What is the book’s most powerful metaphor about gaining our self-control and overcoming addiction?
He cites Plato’s Chariot with Two Horses Metaphor.
We are the driver of the chariot. We have two horses pulling the chariot, our good horse and our crappy horse. When we surrender to digital world, we energize and strengthen the crappy horse, which takes control of our chariot, resulting in our loss of control and direction.
The takeaway is to see how every situation we’re in is an opportunity to strengthen our good or bad horse.
Newport’s “concrete plan” is to show how digital minimalism is a way of strengthening our good horse and weakening our bad one.
Lesson Two. Based on Chapter 2 and 3
One. What makes it difficult to free ourselves from smartphone and general internet addiction?
The habits we have are “culturally ingrained,” and they are backed by “power psychological forces” that makes us feel that we are losing control.
Newport argues that no small tweaks will cure us of our dysfunction; rather, we need a “philosophy of technology use” (36).
"It's Time to Confront the Threat of Right-Wing Terrorism" by John Cassidy in The New Yorker
Related Topic About Social Media: Should We Censor Racist Trolls?
Read "It's Time to Confront the Threat of Right-Wing Terrorism" by John Cassidy in The New Yorker and "Does the banning of Alex Jones signal a new era of big tech responsibility?" by Julia Carrie Wong and Olivia Solon in The Guardian and agree or disagree with the claim that big tech companies are morally obliged to censor right-wing white nationalist trolls such as Alex Jones.
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