The guilty technophile

Book review: The Chaos Machine by Max Fisher

2023-01-11T00:00:00+00:00

Criticisms of current social media platforms are of several natures: some lament at how distracting they are by design, with consequences on both the personal and the professional life. Others, taking a more philosophical stance, argue their design promotes ways of behaving or interacting that takes their users away from many desirable virtues. An angle of attack that recently gained traction and falls into the latter category is to highlight that they are powerful radicalization machines and induce political polarization.

In the early 2010s, the role of Facebook and Twitter in the trigger and organization of the Arab springs gave social media an aura of tools promoting democracy. A couple of years later, culminating with the 2016 Trump election in a backdrop of large scale mis-information and Russian interference, the public perception had reversed.

“The Chaos Machine”, by Max Fisher, tells the story of how the largest social media platforms led to radicalization all around the world, fuelling genocides in Myanmar, anti-refugee attacks in Germany, leading to the rise of QAnon in the USA to name a few. The cause? A mix of financial incentives and hubris. VC funded platforms seek growth at all costs. Their business model is advertising and the goal is the maximization of user engagement - time spent on the platform -ultimately sold to advertisers in a race for users’ attention.

In each instance of radicalization, the causal chain is both hard to establish and complex to explain. It is a mixture of human psychology (our inclinations, impulses and tendencies), pre-existing conflicts or oppositions, of technological determinism: social media are more than simple tools and do change our behavior, and of algorithms with nefarious (mostly unexpected, yet rarely acted upon) emergent behaviors as a result of their goal to maximize engagement.

An early example: attitudes towards vaccination in the US in 2014, studied by Renee DiResta. Users defiant towards vaccination tend to spend more time online seeking and sharing information. As a result, anti vaccine sentiment occupies a much larger fraction of the virtual space than it does in real life. The underlying mechanisms are the ability to reach huge audiences, the removal of friction (it takes one click to share), the different social norms that apply online (people don’t get silenced). On top of that, algorithms do identify and over share posts or invitations to groups that catch the attention the most and lead to further time spent online; these posts tend to be more outrageous, fear inducing, and often factually wrong. When external observers noticing these trends reported their worries to Facebook, they replied with what would become their usual response: the platforms are not to blame, there should be no obstacles to free expression online, they know better how to fix problems the state has been unable to solve so far.

The problem grew bigger as companies relied more heavily on the use of algorithms to recommend content. Such algorithms work by figuring out, by trial and error, what content leads to the maximum engagement for each individual user. The huge amount of personal information the platform gathers allows this recommendation to be extremely personalized and effective.

Whether on Facebook, Twitter or YouTube, these algorithms have been shown to lead users down rabbit holes of radicalization, sometimes identifying and recreating known paths towards radicalization that predate social media. For example the disenfranchised may find relief following the advice of a self-help guru, leading to another one who, en passant, starts to introduce scapegoats that could explain personal issues, ending with hate speech towards a now enemy group to get rid of.

One annoying aspect but also a force of this book is the hammering of the same story unfolding time and time again, with journalists, researchers and whistleblowers exposing the evidence of the role of social media platforms and the refusals of the latter to take any form of serious action to counter it, unless it directly threatens their profits. Its explanation of the economic incentives driving the business of social media platforms and of the psychological and sociological research on how we interact with those is exhaustive and enlightening.

Fisher is not very optimistic about the future: he believes we are only seeing the beginning of the effect of radicalization on the political landscape, to the benefit of once outcast political forces. He sees the US as unable to act against its most successful tech companies. However, he believes regulation might come from Europe - who already shared its impatience with Facebook’s lack of action - and he predicts the fight with the tech giant will be ruthless.

Book review: The Attention Merchants by Tim Wu

2022-12-27T00:00:00+00:00

“The attention merchants” is a history of the advertising industry. For a product to find its buyers, potential purchasers need to know about its existence. When the production of goods was limited and economies mostly local, word of mouth or reputation were enough to fulfill this information role. This changed in the 19th century, with a fast increase in production. With information abundant, people’s attention became a scarce resource to compete for.

This is when a new economic model was created in which it is profitable to gather a large audience and sell its attention - via an ad- to the highest bidder. An early example is the creation of tabloids in New York in 1833; where established newspapers strived to produce a product worth reading for a fee (with adverts considered only a extra source of revenue), tabloids cut down the production and hence the retail price of newspaper by a huge factor and focused on sensational or gossipy topics that gathered wide audiences. Advertising spaces on these were then sold to companies hoping their ads would reach more eyeballs.

From this moment, this model kept expanding and adapted to the new forms of media: the radio, television, the internet. The history of advertising is a story of trials and errors, of the upset of social conventions or values (for example the journalist’s ethic with tabloids), successes, excesses, and in the end backlashes.

The creation of the FDA in 1906 is the outcome of one of these backlashes. Surfing on the booming efficiency of the craft of curating the message that will sell, the patent medicine industry prospered on the selling of at best harmless and for sure cheap to make products under outlandish and fake promises: curing all diseases or bringing eternal life. When the lies and large scale harms of this industry were exposed, the public outcry led to new regulations, and a new defiance towards advertising.

Wu tells the story of these cycles until today. Despite many backlashes, the industry always grows back stronger. He describes the spread of advertising, in space, as it expands to new medias and areas of existence (the private space of the home with the radio, the living room with the tv) and time, with the increase of the daily hours when our attention is harvested (the average American teenager spends an average of 7+ hours on their smartphone, most of which on social media). Wu also tells the story of manipulation turned into a science, and of the power and hubris of those who harness it for political reasons or for profit.

It is fascinating to discover the attention merchants at play during my own lifetime with the last efforts to save television and the early experiments with the internet. Today, targeted advertising is the dominating force that turned Facebook and Google into some of the largest companies in the world. Wu argues that as the shareholders of these companies push for revenue - through more intrusive advertising - we may be at the verge of a new backlash.

Published in 2016, The book ends with a word of caution about the dangers of living a distracted life. Having surrendered all our waking hours to advertisers we may be losing touch with what matters to us and to society.

The key merits of this book are to take perspective and to unpack the mechanisms of the advertising industry. It is a hopeful book, history tells us that after the excesses and harms, society strikes back. Wu urges us to pay a closer look to the implicit contract we sign with advertisers and to be always vigilant to track and renegotiate the terms.

Book review: How to do Nothing by Jenny Odell

2022-11-23T00:00:00+00:00

When a friend recommended that I read How to do Nothing by Jenny Odell, I knew I would like it: I consume all content discussing the attention economy (how some companies prey on our attention, itself treated as a commodity) and I try to make mine the injunction to do less. I was, however, expecting to find usual arguments and advice. I was wrong.

Books criticizing the attention economy have been the preserve of a narrow group: technology journalists, worried scientists eager to warn society, ex-Google tech designer or Facebook executive who repent on their creations. Their technical expertise is crucial: the science, the facts, the history, the technical and mental tools are needed to fight back.

Jenny is an artist, an ecologist, and a militant. Her outlook and her playful use of words are refreshing.

Her starting observations are familiar: the villain of the story is “the invasive logic of commercial social media and its financial incentive to keep us in a profitable state of anxiety, envy and distraction”. Interacting with such a system makes us lonely, at times miserable, and unable to collectively tackle today’s important challenges.

Jenny’s book describes her journey, starting, in the midst of a personal crisis, with a refusal: the refusal to play by the rules of a game. Against the urge to cultivate a personal brand, she prefers to disappear. Instead of FOMO (fear of missing out), she cultivates NOMO (the necessity of missing out). Against the imperative to always be productive, she prefers to do nothing - the ultimate refusal to modern day’s ideology of progress and its imperative of productivity. Doing nothing is not a call for inactivity, but a call to see past the current cultural lens that sees value in the useful in a very narrow sense. To disengage only to re-engage, in something else.

This initial refusal is an escape, a necessary time to regain clarity and understanding. But it is a temporary one. Jenny knows the answer requires more than a digital detox, yet doesn’t lie in a permanent removal. The answer will be collective, political – unlike the communal movement of the 1960s.

Instead, she proposes a radical change of perspective and values. One in which we reconsider the boundary of the self, and view in other beings more than just a means to an end. One in which we humbly acknowledge our contribution to an ecosystem and thrive to preserve it. One in which we accept the challenges that come with living in a community. Such a shift in perspective is hard to reach. It begins with a retraining of the attention. And this is where art can help. Art can teach us to see the world differently, to adopt different perspectives. It “invites us to perceive at different scales and tempos than we are used to”.

Jenny’s ideal world is one of grounded-ness, of context, in space and time. To the placelessness of our online lives, she opposes the placefulness of a local life. To the immediacy and short memory of social media, she opposes a slower pace of living and an embedding in history. To mindless scrolls on the world wide web, she opposes mindful strolls, near home, in communion with birds (she loves birds), animals and nature.

Her current perspective is the fruit of a slow process of observation, questioning and understanding. And it still evolves. Jenny deconstructs a world view that no longer makes sense to her, to humanity, one layer at a time. As such it is complex and at times hard to follow. It is idealistic but optimistic and deeply human.

Book review: The Shallows by Nicholas Carr

2022-10-29T00:00:00+00:00

My generation grew up with the internet. I can’t imagine life before its advent – unless I intentionally disengage from it in a radical move. For my parents’ generation the rise of the internet happened during their late thirties: they were well engaged into their respective careers and there existed a life without it. Born in 1959, Nicholas Carr is a couple of years younger than my parents. As a young journalist he embraced the possibilities of internet with enthusiasm: blogs, search engines and social media offered new ways to find information, produce and share content to a large audience. Until something changed.

Carr is part of an early group of writers who noticed with a growing unease that internet was changing him: he could no longer read books, would easily get distracted, started to develop a set of compulsive behaviors (which you are most likely familiar with). With his book The Shallows, published in 2010, he sets off to understand what was happening to him and whether he should be worried.

Carr goes back in time. Every technology, from the book to the computer, through the typewriter, had their critics. The proliferation of books, Socrates worried, would reduce memory and as a consequence, impair complex thinking. He was wrong and Carr spends a long time describing the way books changed humanity in positive ways, promoting depth, focus in solitude, and nuance. Agreeing with proponents of technological determinism, he argues that such a promotion of behaviors is the unplanned and emerging result of how we interact with a technology. The book wasn’t introduced to create the ‘literary mind’, it just happened. This literary mind, he argues is precious, responsible for many great human achievements since Gutenberg and necessary to the good functioning of our modern societies. His epic summary of Maryanne Wolf’s work made me want to read her books – she is a world expert on the effect of books on cognition.

What sort of behaviors does the internet promote? With its hyperlinks and multimedia nature, it has obvious advantages in terms of management and diffusion of information. At the time Carr was writing this book, techno-utopists were predicting a new ‘digital mind’ connected to the internet which would function as a cognitive prosthesis – just as a book does, albeit a better one. Driven by his personal feeling of loss rather than enhancement, Carr turned to the scientific literature.

Already back in 2009, the evidence was mostly negative. The list is long. Reading online leads to less understanding than in print. Reading changes online, we skim rather than read. Multimedia is mostly a distraction when it comes to learning. It is a media that overloads working memory, and impairs the formation of long term memory as a result. Social media promotes instantaneity. In some contexts, search engines (surprisingly) reduce serendipitous encounters. I was surprised to learn that since the internet, academic citations have become less diverse and more biased towards recent content: having access to more information does not make scientist ‘consume’ it in positive ways.

This book is a cautionary tale. Carr shares his fear of losing his literary mind, and most importantly of what it will be replaced with. He warns the reader to be cautious, to not blindly embrace new technologies – a tendency in Silicon valley circles to view all technological innovation as positive and inevitable. In other words, he asks us to be conservative when it comes to digital technologies.

‘The shallows’ is probably less controversial today than when it was first published. The problems it highlights have become worse, and awareness thereafter has increased. As with many technology books, the shallows feels a bit outdated but its message is more relevant than ever. Personally, it introduced me to many important concepts and figures of the ‘resistance’ to the unquestioned embrace of technology in ever more aspects of our lives. I strongly recommend it.

Book review: Stolen Focus by Johann Hari

2022-08-28T00:00:00+00:00

Stolen Focus is the latest book by Johann Hari, in which he sets out to understand the root causes of the decline of attention in western societies.

As has become his trademark recipe, Johann frames the book as his own journey to understand the deep causes of this global attention loss. The book starts with his very personal story of distraction and exhaustion, both of which prevent him from focusing on what matters and makes him lose his sense of control over his life. Throughout the remaining 350 pages of his book, Johann attempts to change via a radical 3 month long digital detox, and to understand through a world tour interviewing experts.

By the time the book was published, in 2022, the topic of how technology distracts us, prays on our attention, is engineered to make us addicted or contributes to weakening the fabric of the societies has become mainstream, culminating with the Netflix show the social dilemma released late 2020.

Despite coming late to the topic, Johann has an original approach that makes ‘Stolen focus’ both engaging and relevant. I like the personal story. Johan is not shy to express his emotions: his guilt and shame when feeling he has no willpower. His withdrawal symptoms when he decided to detach from his phone. I feel he is perceptive and honest about his feelings and sensations regarding his use of technology. This makes him relatable, possibly more so than Cal Newport, the author of digital minimalism, who’s been very intentional with his use of technology from a young age and has never had a social media account. His personal account also makes the practical solutions he advocates and tries feel less out of reach.

I expected a book focused on technology (smartphone, social media, etc) but the book goes broader than this. Although an obvious - and somehow easy - culprit, the attention economy is framed as one cause among other environmental ones and broader world trends. For example, one cause of our declining attention, he reckons, is the increase of our consumption of information, which predates the advent of digital technology. Other causes include our poor diet, chronic lack of sleep, or how we do not let our kids play. The description of these additional causes broadened my perspective on the topic.

Maybe the best I got from this book is an introduction to the work of writer and technology ethicist James Williams and his efforts to come up with new concepts and language to understand and challenge the damages of the attention economy. More about his work soon!

First post

2022-07-22T00:00:00+00:00

Hi there, my name is Vincent Adam, I am an academic conducting research in machine learning with a keen interest in cognitive science. Given these geeky credentials, you won’t be surprised I am a technology enthusiast, marveling at human ingenuity over the last centuries.

Born in the late 80s, I grew up in the digital world with early desktop computers, the Game Boy, and bulky Nokia phones, then came smartphones and social media. These tools and objects shaped my life, society and culture.. and vice versa.

Over the last few decades, I have experienced first hand some (unexpected?) downsides of technology: it has at times participated in making me anxious or miserable in my personal and professional life. And I quickly noticed I was not alone to feel that way, nor alone to notice that these individual stories were caused by and fueled broader worrying societal changes.

It is this journey to understand the root causes and consequences of these personal and collective stories that I plan to share with you through this blog. This ongoing journey is at heart interdisciplinary spanning diverse fields such as psychology, sociology, politics, economics, biology, etc.

My aims are to inform, to trigger healthy discussions, and this is also an excuse to write.

What to expect? Report on studies, books, legislation, activism, my own options and musings, advice, possibly some fiction. I am keeping the options broad!

I plan to write regularly, every other week or so. I hope you enjoy it.