Free Your Mind, Turn Off Your Phone
Liberation from tech has far-reaching effects
I turned off my Snapchat notifications.
I know this declaration makes me sound vacuous in that Lululemon sort of way, in that mango Juul pod sort of way, in that Ugg boots and jean shorts kind of way—but I think you should too.
Although this contentious stance may be 2020 heresy, I have felt mentally unbound. My screen time, once an embarrassing number of hours per day, now averages out to about two hours, most of which is spent on Google Maps and Safari. I find myself not looking at social media for days at a time, immersing myself in real-life connections instead.
I recently watched the Netflix documentary, “The Social Dilemma,” which was alarming, to say the least. The docudrama features testimonies from prominent tech innovators, each of whom rattles off a devastating list of features that they designed. Every one posited that their inventions had gone off the rails. These aspects of the apps we use every day have been rendered sinister: the Facebook like button, the YouTube recommendation algorithm, the surveillance of clicks and taps—they all contribute to the pernicious problem of technology addiction.
Social media is addictive by nature; these innovators designed them for that purpose. Personalized recommendations on Facebook and Instagram hold your attention longer, turning your attention to the app for hours at a time.
This plot is called the “attention extraction economy,” with attention being the time you spend on the app that you could be doing other things, and extraction being the maximum amount of that attention the apps can squeeze out of you. The goal is to extract as much attention as possible by targeting you with personalized ads and displaying posts you will like. The extraction is amplified by a digital model of you, which big tech creates by collecting your information and increasing accuracy with every second you spend on the app. The final part of this model is economy; big tech keeps the dollars rolling in by keeping you glued to the screen.
Of course, the issue is larger than stealing your time. Algorithms created to serve you what you want to see pull people into polar echo chambers, preventing people from understanding—or wanting to understand—the other side. According to an internal Facebook report in 2018, “64% of the people who joined extremist groups on Facebook did so because the algorithms steered them there.”
This is clearly a frightening percentage, one that Facebook is controversially doing very little to lower. Although the company is attempting to tamp down the hate speech, conspiracies, and false information that run rampant on the site, critics say that Zuckerberg and friends are not doing enough, especially in the weeks before the presidential election.
Even Google searches are personalized. The trailer for “The Social Dilemma” begins with this sentence: “When you go to Google and type, ‘climate change is,’ you’re going to see different results depending on where you live and the things Google knows about your interests.” I see “climate change is an absolute nightmare,” “climate change is it too late,” and “climate change is an existential threat.” Try it for yourself—what comes up? It is terrifying to realize that a platform that is meant to deliver objective information is serving up individualized results.
The ethically anemic actions of the stars in tech don’t come as a surprise—keeping you on the app longer generates more revenue for them. However, it didn’t begin that way. The inventor of the Facebook like button, Justin Rosenstein, said in the film that he had intended the like button to spread positivity in the world, but it has quickly turned into a value of self worth, and has inadvertently set in motion a competitive environment against ourselves and our peers.
What was the tech industry’s advice for remedying this nascent technological malady? They all agreed—turn off your notifications.