Notes on a Nervous Planet(26)
‘It is very common,’ Rosenstein told The Guardian in 2017, like a latter-day Dr Frankenstein, ‘for humans to develop things with the best of intentions and for them to have unintended, negative consequences . . . Everyone is distracted, all the time.’
And two of Twitter’s founders have expressed similar regrets. Ev Williams – who stepped down as CEO in 2010 – told The New York Times in 2017 that he was unhappy with the way Twitter had helped Donald Trump become president. ‘It’s a very bad thing, Twitter’s role in that.’
Another Twitter co-founder Biz Stone has other regrets. He stated in an interview with Inc. that he thought the big wrong turn Twitter made was when it allowed strangers to tag people in their posts, as it created an environment rife for bullying. Another employee, according to Buzzfeed, has called Twitter a ‘honeypot for assholes’.
And, in early 2018, Tim Cook – CEO of Apple – declared to a group of students in Essex, England, that he doesn’t think children (such as his nephew) should use a social network, or overuse technology at all, which shows that these aren’t simply ‘Luddite’ concerns.
Indeed, a group of former tech employees have gone further, and set up the Center for Humane Technology, aimed at ‘realigning technology with humanity’s best interests’ and reversing the ‘digital attention crisis’.
Now, at long last, there are many instances of tech people getting together to discuss concerns. For instance, at a 2018 conference in Washington called Truth About Tech, speakers included Google’s former ‘ethicist’ and now prominent tech whistleblower Tristan Harris and early investor of Facebook Roger McNamee, along with politicians and members of lobby groups such as Common Sense Media, who are trying to combat tech addiction in young people. A variety of concerns were raised, such as the way Google’s Gmail ‘hijacks’ minds, or how Snapchat exploits teenage friendships to fuel tech addiction via functions like ‘Snapchat streaks’ where users can see how many interactions they’ve had with friends per day. According to The Guardian, Harris compared the tech world to the Wild West in that the ethos is ‘build a casino wherever you want’ and McNamee compared it to the tobacco and food industries in the past, where cigarettes were promoted as healthy, or where manufacturers of ready meals failed to mention their products were loaded with salt. The difference being that with, say, an addiction to cigarettes, is that the cigarettes had no information about us. They didn’t collect our data. They couldn’t know us better than our own families. The internet, of course, can know everything about us. It can know who our friends are, it can know our taste in music, it can know our health concerns, our love life, and our politics – and internet companies can keep using this information to make their products ever more addictive. And at the moment, warn the tech insiders, there isn’t much regulation to stop them.
An increasing amount of research reinforces their concerns. For example, studies that show how technology contributes to a state of ‘continual partial attention’ and how it can be addictive. One 2017 study from the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas concluded that the mere presence of your smartphone can reduce ‘cognitive capacity’.
At the time of writing, there is still no official recognition that ‘smartphone addiction’ or ‘social media addiction’ are psychological disorders, although the fact that the World Health Organization now classifies video game addiction as an official mental disorder suggests that there is a growing understanding of how seriously technology can affect our mental health. But that understanding still has a long way to go, and clearly lags behind the disorientating speed of technological change.
Though pressure is rising. In 2018, for instance, CNN reported that the mighty Unilever threatened to pull its advertising from Facebook and Google unless they combat toxic problems – including privacy concerns, objectionable content and a lack of protections for children – which are ‘eroding social trust, harming users and undermining democracies’. There is a growing awareness that the great power of internet companies must come, Spiderman-style, with a great sense of responsibility. However, it is debatable as to how much responsibility they will develop without real social and financial pressure of the kind we are only beginning to see. As with fast food or cigarettes or the gun industry, the companies making a profit from something might be the most reluctant to see the potential problems. So when the people on the inside are among those raising the alarm, we should really listen.
11
THE DETECTIVE OF DESPAIR
‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins’
—T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
Awareness WHEN I FIRST became ill, at the age of 24 – when I ‘broke down’ – the world became sharper. Painfully so. Shadows had sudden weight, clouds became greyer, music became louder. I became more alert to everything I had been numb to. I noticed the things that made me feel worse about the modern world. Things that probably make many of us feel worse. I felt the wearying pressure of advertising, the frantic madness of crowds and traffic, the suffocating nature of social expectation.
Illness has a lot to teach wellness.
But when I am well I forget these things. The trick is to keep hold of that knowledge. To turn recovery into prevention. To live how I live when I am ill, without being ill.