Shucking Oysters: Nudge, Nudge
By Alex Allen
Every summer mid to late August, like clockwork, I have a mini meltdown. 1+1=2. Except this year, I had three in one week. Some action by a visitor always melts me down. It often involves a dog or a child or a spouse. It’s not pleasant and I am always three degrees of separation from sharing my angry words with those with no empathy or heart.
But this kind of behaviour alarms me, quite frankly. The sheer lack of self-consciousness out there. What is happening to “human” beings? Consciousness was what separated us from other wildlife, was it not? Why have we become so mean and heartless? Is it the weather? The heat? The global unrest and divisiveness? Leaders unravelling worldwide? Fragile mental health? The aftermath of the pandemic? Trump?
I’m blaming it on the gadget that they call “smart,” yet those who use it seem to be getting dumb and dumber. This was all planned. Sean Parker, Facebook’s first president, shared their strategy: “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?”
Known as the “social-validation feedback loop,” they figured out how to exploit our vulnerabilities. A little dopamine hit because someone liked the photo you posted of your perfect Asian chicken lettuce wraps, getting you to post more photos, so you can have even more likes and comments. Adore me!
Nir Eyal, wrote in Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, that your smartphone is a glorified slot machine. A ping when you insert your coin. A ka-ching when you pull the lever. “Training your mind to conflate the thrill of winning with its mechanical clangs and buzzes.”
Like sex and hunger, the act of pulling the lever, becomes pleasurable in itself. Dopamine is social media’s partner in your brain. Even your smartphone looks and feels like a slot machine, “pulsing with colourful notification badges, whoosh sounds, and gentle vibrations.” We are distracted because we want to be. Because it’s fun.
And then the nerds discovered “intermittent variable reinforcement.” Like slot machines, they use this psychological weakness to incredible effect. The unpredictability of the payouts makes it harder to stop. Social media does the same. Posting a picture of your lettuce wrap may get you some likes or nothing at all. Compulsively seeking a positive response, you are unable ever to logoff from the platform.
Social media apps are some of the most easily accessible products on earth. Max Fisher wrote in The Chaos Machine, “It’s a casino that fits in your pocket, which is how we slowly train ourselves to answer any dip in our happiness with a pull at the most ubiquitous slot machine in history.” And the Fear Of Missing Out makes one a slave to their gadget. Obsessively checking their Facebook feeds – during meals, while driving, immediately upon waking or before sleeping, and so on. This compulsive behaviour is intended to produce relief in the form of social reassurance, but instead it breeds more anxiety and more searching. It’s as if we’re being forced into casinos at gunpoint, where we lose everything, generation after generation, and then we’re told we’ve got a gambling problem.
Facebook’s “Like” feature, Fisher writes, is the equivalent of a car battery hooked up to a sociometer. It’s not just the ‘Likes’ that we spend so much of our energy pursuing, it’s that they offer immediate gratification. This is a powerful form of approval because it shows the world how popular you are and activates your dopamine. When was the last time 80+people publicly adored you in person?
People don’t want to miss anything, or fall out of touch, or have to rely on their own internal thoughts – to say nothing of having to converse with their like-minded phone scrolling mates, sitting right next to them. But social media is not a substitute for real public discourse. Instead of connection, we have disconnection.
As with every human invention, we have the dark side. Platforms that promote mob-like hysteria and harassment with virtually no constraints or safeguards. Identity groups, silos, cyber-bullying, fake news, and conspiracy theories.
We enjoy being outraged. Fisher wrote, “Outrage is a simple emotional cocktail: anger plus disgust. Moral outrage is a social instinct.” Like when I saw the visitor treating their dog with complete disrespect, I was morally angry. I wanted to see them punished and shamed. The difference, I was not online nor out of line.
But this is how people get riled up online. It’s what extremists and propagandists have figured out. Rally people to their side by triggering outrage, often at a poor scapegoat or an imagined bad person. Someone, say, who flips out at a ferry crew member might have once expected some finger wagging from fellow passengers. Now, if the incident is recorded and posted online, they might face weeks of abuse hurled at them not only from the local community but from all over the world.
Unfortunately, it is easier than ever for shaming to spin out of control, and alarmingly, it has grown more crueller and even sadistic. Whether anything is true or false, has little bearing on reality. What matters is whether the post can provoke a powerful reaction – a moral outrage. Facebook and Google, not only profit from shaming events but are engineered to exploit them. The more time feuding online, the more they idly reveal your browsing habits, the more precisely you can be targeted by advertisers.
I have nothing against technology, so long as the tools are put to use to improve our real-world social life as opposed to diminishing it. Think hard about how much meaning and fulfillment “modern wonders” actually bring to your lives. If everyone is spending hour after hour on their phones, scrolling through texts and timelines, then that becomes normal behaviour. But as Matt Haig noted, “when normality becomes madness, the only way to find sanity is daring to be different.”
