-New Urban Tech- Brain Hacking, Emotional Contagions, and Obsessed with 'Likes': Former Google Manager Reveals Silicon Valley is Purposely Engineering Your Phone, Apps, and Social Media to Get You Addicted

A communications device, or a slot machine? A Silicon Valley insider shares the intent behind "brain hacking" to get you addicted to your phone and social media. 

THE DESIGN

Tristan Harris is a former Google Product Manager who has information that might change the way you look at your smartphone and how much time you spend on it, or at least he hopes to. Harris is one of the first tech insiders to publicly acknowledge that the companies responsible for programming your phones are working hard to get you and your family to feel the need to be on it constantly. Behind closed doors, programmers call this  "brain hacking", though the term is not publicly preferred by those in the tech world.  

During a  recent interview on CBS television's news magazine, 60 Minutes, Harris describes the modern day smartphone as a slot-machine,  designed the same way as gambling- intended to hijack minds and create a habit to keep you hooked. Whereas with gambling there is the thrill of getting to a potentially big payday, smartphones, apps, and social media, however, are designed to get you to use the product for as long as possible by seeking your reward in likes-  feeding the human craving for acceptance and belonging. 

CREATING THE NEED IN A NEW GENERATION

Facebook's recent introduction of the Facebook Kids app for children sent child experts onto high alert, coming out publicly against introducing such a habit-forming phenomenon to young children, as well as opening kids up to security risks.

With an actual tech professional from one of the world's most influential tech companies divulging the hidden dangers in today's smartphone usage, it comes as no surprise when we look back to the recent backlash over Facebook's new Messenger Kids app, introduced at the start of 2018.  Children's health advocates came out in full force against Facebook Kids Messenger; citing the growing body of research that demonstrates the excessive use of social media and digital devices is harmful to kids, both teens and smaller children.

MOUNTING CONCERNS AND BACKLASH

Little by little, we may soon begin to see people taking timeouts from extended smartphone and social media use, sometimes referred to as "cleansing": if not from the mounting pressures and expectations that come from being "connected" to so many friends and followers, then because of the mounting concern over the unethical ways user information is being farmed out to third parties- for purposes far beyond shopping or retail marketing. 

In 2014,  for example, Facebook allowed a massive mood altercation experiment on nearly 700,000 users,  in which the users' news feeds were manipulated to assess the effects on their emotions. The details of the experiment were published in an article entitled "Experimental Evidence Of Massive-Scale Emotional Contagion Through Social Networks" published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.  The article reports:


"We show, via a massive (N = 689,003) experiment on Facebook, that emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness."

While that experiment was relatively small in scale and not the first of its kind, with the floodgates now opened for third parties to use personal data for purposes outside of standard retail or lifestyle marketing, the looming question has now become, at what point does the harvesting of a person's social media profile information become flagrantly unethical?

This week in both tech and political news another tech expert and data scientist by the name of Christopher Wiley has publicly come forward to share how he helped his former employer, Cambridge Analytica, harvest tens of millions of Facebook profiles to play a consequential role in the Leave campaign for Britain's EU referendum.   Later, Wiley created what he calls former Trump Chief strategist Steve Bannon's Steve Bannon's "psychological warfare tool" for the current US president's 2016 election campaign.  Cambridge Analytica is a privately held firm that "mines and analyzes data" to, as per the company's claim, "change consumer behavior". On a number of news outlets, the scientist has come forward this week to state the key mission of the company he helped build and the programs he created is to exploit the vulnerabilities of its clients audience, and lead them to behave in a particular way, saying;  "the premise of Cambridge Analytica is to warp people's perception to gain an objective".

In the wake of Christopher Wiley's public revelations, Cambridge Analytica has been banned from Facebook as of March 17th, 2018,  and in the aftermath, Facebook's stock has dropped by $30 billion US dollars (or 6%)  in value over the backlash. 

Former Google product manager Tristan Harris has moved on to begin his own tech start-up, "Dopamine Labs", is currently developing software called, "Onward",  a program designed to break users' bad habits and encourage them to do something else once they are spending too much time online. Harris currently has an app called "Space" that creates what Wiley calls a 'moment of Zen' - a 12-second delay before the launching of social media apps to give users pause before they dive into down the attention-span vortex of social media and apps. "Space" was previously rejected by  Apple, but as of the airing of Wiley's 60 Minutes interview this week, the company has announced that they've had a change of heart, and "Space" is now available via the  Apple app store.