Tristan Harris Slot Machine
Monitoring Desk
Tristan Harris, who previously designed products for Google, describes phones as slot machines. 'It operates on a variable schedule of rewards,' Harris told the CBS This Morning. Former Google employee Tristan Harris felt something needed to be done to combat tech designers' relentless efforts to influence our behavior. So you're playing the slot machine, and there's a. Ex-Google product philosopher Tristan Harris calls his smartphone “a slot machine in his pocket,” and is pressuring Silicon Valley to make their tech less addictive. At a time when 50% of American teenagers think they’re addicted to their smartphones, and with pediatricians debating how much time children can spend looking at screens. Most Popular Smartphones and social media by their very nature are like slot machines, enticing users to check for updates and news, explains Tristan Harris for Spiegel Online, describing intermittent variable rewards and need for social approval. The technology, like magicians, gives users the illusion of choice. In another article, I told you about Tristan Harris’s article, “The Slot Machine in Your Pocket”. To refresh your memory, he wrote about how when we acknowledge our addiction to our phones, we tend to put the blame on ourselves for allowing it to happen for so long.
Everyone from Senate leaders to the makers of Netflix’s popular “Social Dilemma” is promoting the idea that Facebook is addictive, managing editor Scott Rosenberg writes from the Bay Area.
- Humans have raised fears about the addictive nature of every new medium since the 18th century brought us the novel. Yet we’ve always seemed to recover our balance once the initial infatuation wears off.
The September debut of “The Social Dilemma” on Netflix sounded this alarm for millions of viewers.
- The documentary centers on Tristan Harris, the former Google engineer who has been leading the assault on social media as co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology.
- Harris started talking about smartphones as “slot machines” years ago: “Every time I check my phone, I’m playing the slot machine to see, ‘What did I get?’ This is one way to hijack people’s minds, to form a habit.”
- At a Nov. 17 hearing to grill Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Lindsey Graham borrowed Harris’ “slot machine” language.
The big picture: “Internet addiction” follows previous alarms over video game addiction, TV addiction, comic book addiction and so on.
- “Social media is a drug” is the latest version of “TV is a drug,” which was an update of “rock music is a drug,” and so on.
Facebook largely rejects claims that its service addicts users by design.
- In a Facebook document rebutting “The Social Dilemma,” the company argues: “Facebook builds its products to create value, not to be addictive.”
- “We certainly do not want our products to be addictive,” Zuckerberg told Graham at the Senate hearing. “We want people to use them because they’re meaningful.”
Our thought bubble: Addictions typically are driven by an effort to numb pain or escape boredom. Solutions need to address demand for the addiction, not just the supply.
- People with fulfilling jobs, healthy families and nourishing cultures are a lot less likely to get addicted to Facebook or anything else.
Courtesy: Axios
Tristan Harris Book
Scrolling, bursts of likes, and incentives like Snapchat streaks may seem like innocuous features within your favorite apps, but they’re actually designed to make you completely addicted to your smartphone.
“This thing is a slot machine,” Tristan Harris says, gesturing to his iPhone during a 60 Minutes segment that aired Sunday.
As a former Google product manager, Harris would know. He started out as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and then spent three years at Google, during which time his anxiety about the way that apps eat up our attention grew and grew. He feels that tech companies have gained an inordinate amount of power through apps to affect our quality of life.
“Inadvertently, whether they want to or not, they are shaping the thoughts and feelings and actions of people,” Harris says. “They are programming people. There’s always this narrative that technology’s neutral. And it’s up to us to choose how we use it. This is just not true. They want you to use it in particular ways and for long periods of time. Because that’s how they make their money.”
After attempting to get Google on board with finding ways to avoid cheaply manipulating our attention — what he calls the “race to the bottom of the brainstem” — he left the company to travel around the country and give talks on how apps need to be better designed to actually improve our lives instead of just using up our time.
Some of the ways that apps captivate our attention are truly stunning. Ramsay Brown founded a company called Dopamine Labs that writes code for apps with the aim of provoking neurological responses from users. He told 60 Minutes how Instagram, for example, doles out bursts of likes in sudden rushes to elicit positive reactions from its users.
“There’s some algorithm somewhere that predicted, ‘Hey, for this user right now who is experimental subject 79B3 in experiment 231, we think we can see an improvement in his behavior if you give it to him in this burst instead of that burst,’” Brown says.
Brown also mentioned how the continuous scroll function of Facebook has been proven to keep users plugged into the site for longer, scrolling endlessly for something they’ll like.
In fact researchers have found that we’re now so addicted and dependent on our phones for dopamine that most of us have actually developed anxiety that can only be quelled by reengaging with our apps. When we put down the phone, our brain signals the adrenal gland to produce a burst of the hormone cortisol, which is synonymous with stress. From that point, we can only relieve our anxiety by picking up the phone again.
Tristan Harris Slot Machine Machines
To learn more about how how apps are manipulating our brains and the tech insiders that are trying to change that, watch the entire 60 Minutes segment here.