Cal Newport has some thoughts on the “digital ethics” movement. In his post Beyond Digital Ethics he argues that large companies will never turn their backs on revenue just because it’s “the right thing to do”:

Instead of quixotically convincing some of the most valuable business enterprises in the history of the world to behave against their interests, we should convince individuals to adopt a much more skeptical and minimalist approach to the digital junk these companies peddle.

We don’t need to convince YouTube to artificially constrain the effectiveness of its AutoPlay algorithm, we should instead convince users of the life-draining inanity of idly browsing YouTube.

This approach will be challenging too, because we are up against some really strong brain psychology. As Don Norman notes in Why bad technology dominates our lives:

Curiosity is, on the whole, a virtue. We have evolved to be curious. Our nervous system is especially sensitive to change, and changes in the environment attract attention. But the technology-centered view labels this natural, creative trait as a liability: Curiosity is renamed as distraction. A human virtue is now turned into a liability.

Worse, many businesses have learned to exploit our curiosity. The continual bombardment of tantalizing tidbits of information deliberately designed to grab our attention away from other, potentially more valuable activities are distractions that can lead to accidents, injury, and interpersonal problems.

We are in uncharted territory and there are no easy solutions.

Don Norman attempts to explain Why bad technology dominates our lives:

Curiosity is, on the whole, a virtue. We have evolved to be curious. Our nervous system is especially sensitive to change, and changes in the environment attract attention. But the technology-centered view labels this natural, creative trait as a liability: Curiosity is renamed as distraction. A human virtue is now turned into a liability.

Worse, many businesses have learned to exploit our curiosity. The continual bombardment of tantalizing tidbits of information deliberately designed to grab our attention away from other, potentially more valuable activities are distractions that can lead to accidents, injury, and interpersonal problems. What kind of business exploits curiosity for its own ends? Almost any business that discovers there are profits to be made by continually engaging people’s curiosity, hopes, and interests. For example gambling, computer games, social networks, and even television series that can go on and on, week after week, year after year, trapping their viewers into addiction.

We talk a lot about “personal responsibility” and how it’s up to each person to make good choices about how they spend their time. That is true as far as it goes, but it brushes over the incredibly strong forces of persuasion theory and how easily humans are manipulated. “Personal responsibility” doesn’t give us a hall pass to exploit the human brain’s weaknesses.

Nikhil Sonnad writes that Everything bad about Facebook is bad for the same reason:

Underlying all of Facebook’s screw-ups is a bumbling obliviousness to real humans. The company’s singular focus on “connecting people” has allowed it to conquer the world, making possible the creation of a vast network of human relationships, a source of insights and eyeballs that makes advertisers and investors drool.

But the imperative to “connect people” lacks the one ingredient essential for being a good citizen: Treating individual human beings as sacrosanct. To Facebook, the world is not made up of individuals, but of connections between them. The billions of Facebook accounts belong not to “people” but to “users,” collections of data points connected to other collections of data points on a vast Social Network, to be targeted and monetized by computer programs.

Here’s the crux of it:

There are certain things you do not in good conscience do to humans. To data, you can do whatever you like.

In Filter Failures Ethan Chiel asks if platforms are sucking the joy out of the internet, and he makes a pretty compelling argument:

The internet as we use it now is, for the most part, what the large platforms want it to be: an engine for serving us what their various systems think we want, or what we wanted before, or what our demographics want en masse.

Here’s the problem:

What’s lost in the process is whatever you might have found that neither you nor an algorithm might guess is interesting. Some song in a forum thread you idly clicked on, a news item about something you’ve never expressed interest in or heard of that you read because you had 5 minutes to kill and it caught your eye.

This reminds me of how we used to browse music stores. We idly flipped through CDs, and picked a few to try out in the listening booth based on the cover, the song titles, and some undefined ¯_(ツ)_/¯ factor. Now we just see and hear what we’ve seen and heard before, and the cycle continues…

Thi Nguyen’s essay Why it’s as hard to escape an echo chamber as it is to flee a cult is one of the most insightful things I’ve read in a long time. Nguyen argues that echo chambers are very different from what he calls “epistemic bubbles”, and that conflating the two concepts places our focus on the wrong solutions to the problem. In short, the difference is this:

In epistemic bubbles, other voices are not heard; in echo chambers, other voices are actively undermined.
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Epistemic bubbles are easy to pop, because all it takes is to introduce previously unheard voices into it. Echo chambers, however, are extremely difficult to penetrate, because at its core lies the belief that everyone not in it is untrustworthy:

An ‘echo chamber’ is a social structure from which other relevant voices have been actively discredited. Where an epistemic bubble merely omits contrary views, an echo chamber brings its members to actively distrust outsiders. In their book Echo Chamber: Rush Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment (2010), Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Frank Cappella offer a groundbreaking analysis of the phenomenon. For them, an echo chamber is something like a cult. A cult isolates its members by actively alienating them from any outside sources. Those outside are actively labelled as malignant and untrustworthy. A cult member’s trust is narrowed, aimed with laser-like focus on certain insider voices.

Or to put it even more succinctly:

An epistemic bubble is when you don’t hear people from the other side. An echo chamber is what happens when you don’t trust people from the other side.

This is a long essay, but I highly recommend reading the whole thing. It was a real eye-opener for me.

I should stop reading (and writing) about Facebook at some point, but there’s been some really interesting thinking around the social internet in general recently. I especially enjoyed Benedict Evans’s The death of the newsfeed, because it puts into words a lot of things I’ve been thinking about. On the social implications of algorithmic feeds:

One basic problem here is that if the feed is focused on ‘what do I want to see?’, then it cannot be focused on ‘what do my friends want (or need) me to see?’ Sometimes this is the same thing - my friend and I both want me to see that they’re throwing a party tonight. But if every feed is a sample, then a user has no way to know who will see their post. Indeed, conceptually one might suggest that they have no way to know if anyone will see this post.

This is one of the major flaws of algorithmic feeds. People share things so that those things can be seen. But if you can’t tell who will see the things you share, that’s frustrating, and more than a little nerve-wracking. Hence the move back to smaller networks:

I think one could suggest that this is some of what’s behind the suggestions of systemically lower engagement on Facebook newsfeeds, and behind the obvious growth of person-to person chat (most obviously WhatsApp, iMessage, FB Messenger and Instagram - three of which Facebook of course owns). The social dynamics of a 1:1 chat work much more strongly against overload, and even if one person does overshare they’re in a separate box, that you can mute if you like. […]

Messaging can be more private, have less social pressure, and be more fun. A Snapchat story isn’t a permanent record and has less pressure to show off your perfection. Stickers and filters are more fun and spontaneous than Facebook’s rigid blue boxes (and the days of throwing sheep at people are gone alone with Facebooks’ platform). And some of these offer light-weight ways to interact without obligation, which was also a feature of Facebook’s model, but deliver that piece of Maslow in different ways.

On that note, I think the distinction Cal Newport draws in On Social Media and Its Discontents is really important:

There’s a distinction between the social internet and social media.

The social internet describes the general ways in which the global communication network and open protocols known as “the internet” enable good things like connecting people, spreading information, and supporting expression and activism.

Social media, by contrast, describes the attempt to privatize these capabilities by large companies within the newly emerged algorithmic attention economy, a particularly virulent strain of the attention sector that leverages personal data and sophisticated algorithms to ruthlessly siphon users’ cognitive capital.
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In the final analysis, I agree with Cal:

I support the social internet. I’m incredibly wary of social media.

I can’t get this quote from Dan Cohen’s Back to the Blog out of my head:

It is psychological gravity, not technical inertia, however, that is the greater force against the open web. Human beings are social animals and centralized social media like Twitter and Facebook provide a powerful sense of ambient humanity—the feeling that “others are here”—that is often missing when one writes on one’s own site. Facebook has a whole team of Ph.D.s in social psychology finding ways to increase that feeling of ambient humanity and thus increase your usage of their service.

For anyone who doesn’t get why features like Instagram Stories are so popular, there you go. “Ambient humanity” is a very strong force. We share seemingly insignificant details about our lives not because we think everything we do is important or worth sharing. We do it to know we’re not alone.

(link via Kottke.org)

This story by Rene Chun about China’s New Frontiers in Dystopian Tech is wild:

Don’t even think about jaywalking in Jinan, the capital of Shandong province. Last year, traffic-management authorities there started using facial recognition to crack down. When a camera mounted above one of 50 of the city’s busiest intersections detects a jaywalker, it snaps several photos and records a video of the violation. The photos appear on an overhead screen so the offender can see that he or she has been busted, then are cross-checked with the images in a regional police database. Within 20 minutes, snippets of the perp’s ID number and home address are displayed on the crosswalk screen. The offender can choose among three options: a 20-yuan fine (about $3), a half-hour course in traffic rules, or 20 minutes spent assisting police in controlling traffic. Police have also been known to post names and photos of jaywalkers on social media.

I can’t help but be reminded of that “biometric advertising” scene in Minority Report:

I think everyone has “Facebook Article Exhaustion” right now. But Brian Barrett’s Facebook Owes You More Than This makes a somber, important point:

This is not a screed about deleting your Facebook account. It’s not a rant about online ads. It is an argument, though, that Facebook has been a poor steward of your data, asking more and more of you without giving you more in return—and often not even bothering to ask. It has repeatedly failed to keep up its side of the deal, and expressed precious little interest in making good.

If you feel exasperated by the whole Facebook privacy debacle, I think this article will help make sense of some of those feelings. One more quote:

But as Facebook collects more and more data, and offers advertisers more and more tools to monetize it, the benefit to you seems not to have grown in kind. You get an ever-shifting algorithm designed to keep you scrolling, which the company’s own research suggests can leave you “feeling worse afterward.” You get dozens of Russian propagandists flooding millions of News Feeds with high-emotion content designed to undermine US democracy, with slow and incomplete disclosures about the impact. And you get ads for the same pair of shoes—that you already bought—trailing you for months.

Also check out the always excellent Paul Ford’s Facebook Is Why We Need a Digital Protection Agency, in which he calls for a digital equivalent of the Environmental Protection Agency. His reasoning:

The activist and internet entrepreneur Maciej Ceglowski once described big data as “a bunch of radioactive, toxic sludge that we don’t know how to handle.” Maybe we should think about Google and Facebook as the new polluters. Their imperative is to grow! They create jobs! They pay taxes, sort of! In the meantime, they’re dumping trillions of units of toxic brain poison into our public-thinking reservoir. Then they mop it up with Wikipedia or send out a message that reads, “We take your privacy seriously.”