if you're doing with an addictive generation this is up being time bomb ticking this is no accident indeed it is by design I mean seriously it was my mistake I mean I think we can all feel it to try to make these products as additive spike in dopamine we now know that many of the major social media companies hire individuals called attention engineers who borrow principals from Las Vegas casino gambling among other places to try to make these products as addictive as possible that is the desired use case of these products is that you use
it in an addictive fashion because that maximizes the profit that can be extracted from your attention and data it literally is a point now where I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works that is truly where we are the way the technologists Garan lunaire puts it is that these companies offer you shiny treats in exchange for minutes of your attention and bytes of your personal data which can then be packaged up and sold what happened is that the attention economy in this race for attention got more
and more competitive and the more competitive it got to get people's attention on its a news website the more they need to add these design principles is more manipulative design tactics as ways of holding on to your attention you don't realize it but you are being programmed social media tools are designed to be addictive the actual design desired use case of these tools is that you fragment your attention as much as possible throughout your waking hours that's how these tools are designed to use well we have a growing amount of research which tells us that
if you spend large portions of your day in a state of fragmented attention so large portions of your day we are constantly breaking up your attention to take a quick glance to just check them just quickly look at Instagram that this can permanently reduce your capacity for concentration I am especially worried about this when we look at the younger generation coming up which is the most saturated this technology it's very addictive because if you pull on the slot machine arm enough you will win and you never know which fool will reward you that's an addictive
behavior and it's dopamine that is driving that addiction so what happens with social media is Robert Sapolsky - the foundational research on this Stanford calls it the magic of maybe when you look at your phone and maybe there's a text there and maybe there's not and you don't know when it shows up that high you get that's dopamine it's the magic maybe maybe it'll be there maybe it won't when it shows up maybe they 400 cents spike in dopamine that is roughly the same amount of dopamine as you're getting from cocaine slightly less than an
extremely addictive drug like cocaine and that's what's happening we really care what other people think of us so for example you know when you upload a new photo a new profile photo of yourself on Facebook that's a moment where our mind is very vulnerable to knowing what other people think of my new profile photo and so when we get new likes on our profile photo Facebook knowing this could actually message me and say oh you have new likes on your profile photo and we it knows that we'll be vulnerable to that moment because we all
really care about when we're tagged in a photo or when we have a new profile photo and the thing is that they control the dial the technology companies control the dial for when and how long your profile photo shows up on other people's newsfeeds so they can orchestrate it so that other people more often end up liking your profile photo over a delayed period of time for example so that you end up having to more frequently come back and see what the new likes are and it's literally rewiring our brain even social media the challenges
you know with these terms like Facebook depression and everything because it's that this is social media depression because where's everyone's looking at their feed and they're comparing their lives to other people that they're highlights of other people's lives and there's actually less satisfaction or sadness depression and stuff like that and it's interesting because if you think about things like things that you know routinely produced a lot of dopamine alcohol for example there's a drinking age right we have a drinking it the alcohol releases a whole lot of dopamine it makes you feel really really good
we say okay you can have that but you've gotta wait you've got to be 21 years old we don't do that with social media were you know essentially putting highly addictive drugs into the hands of kids before they have any natural defenses against them and what you're seeing with Internet addiction with social media it's the same thing over and over to people trying to change their state of consciousness with a device trying to get at the underlying neural chemical chemistry and it's very very addictive so I would say the problem with the gadgets and I
mean they're amazing things is that they interfere with they approximately interfere with medium to long term goals I would say and so I think the first thing you have to do to bring them under control is figure out what it is that their use is interfering with it has to be something important so you think well I want to do something important what is that it could be personal maybe you want to have a relationship gonna get married you want to have kids you want to have a career that's meaningful you know you wanna have
a life you want to have an Abrahamic adventure and be the father of Nations let's say we can't be ratting away on your cell phone and doing that and so I think I think part of it is to set your sights high and make a plan and figure out who you could be and see if obsessive utilization of smartphone fits into that vision of nobility and it will partly because they're they're unbelievably powerful communication devices but so so often it's it's for lack of something better to do and it also interferes you know and imagine
like when you take that to the extreme where you know bad actors can now manipulate large swathes of people to do anything you want it's just a it's a really really bad state of affairs and we compound the problem right we curate our lives around this perceived sense of perfection because we get rewarded in these short-term signals hearts likes thumbs up and we conflate that with value and we conflated with truth and instead what it really is is fake brittle popularity that's short-term and that leaves you even more and admit it vacant and empty before
you did it because then it forces you into this vicious cycle where you're like what's the next thing I need to do now because I need it back think about that compounded by two billion people and then think about how people react then to the perceptions of others it's just a it's really bad so we know from the research literature that the more you use social media the more likely you are to feel lonely or isolated we know that the constant exposure to your friends carefully curated positive portrayals of their life and leave you to
feel inadequate and can increase rates of depression and something I think we're gonna be hearing more about in the near future I said there's a fundamental mismatch between the way our brains are wired and this behavior of exposing yourself to stimuli with intermittent rewards throughout all of your waking hours so it's one thing to spend a couple hours at the slot machine in Las Vegas but if you bring the slot machine with you and you pull that handle all day long from when you wake up that when you go to bed we're not wired from
it it's short circuits to brain we're starting to find that it has actual cognitive consequences one of them being the sort of pervasive background hum of anxiety here's the thing the world we live in isn't real social media isn't real and by design social media rewards us for showing our best life the edited posed champagne Michelin star holiday orchestrated best angle of our life the highlight reel but you don't ever see real life the 99% of our lives the behind the scenes that unglamorous unfiltered day-to-day bland normality and you end up comparing your behind-the-scenes to
other people's fake highlight reel and using others as a mirror benchmark for how you should look how successful you should be or how you should live these fake comparisons will only serve to make you feel inadequate and inferior to something that isn't even real research continually shows that comparing your life to someone else's creates envy low self confidence low self-esteem and depression you compare yourself to other people every single day consciously or subconsciously and no matter what I say you're not going to stop because comparing one thing to another is a natural human thing to
do whether we want to admit it or not a big reason why anything has value is because there's something worse all better to compare it to think about it an old brick of a mobile phone with a big aerial is only considered amazing in a world before the smartphone the horse and carriage is only considered a phenomenal mode of transport until the car comes along the answer isn't to stop making comparisons because unfortunately we can't control that but you have to change the object of your comparison from someone else to yourself you have to measure
yourself against yourself and by doing this you start a base point where you consider yourself to be perfectly fine exactly how you are but it also is the most effective motivating and healthy way to work to improve yourself you'll become you'll happy yourself when you stop putting pressure on yourself to be more like someone else and when you start comparing real to real we are in a really bad state of affairs right now in my opinion it is it is eroding the core foundations of how people behave by and between each other and I don't
have a good solution you know my solution is I just don't use these tools anymore I have it for years it's created huge tension with my friends huge tensions in my social circles if you look at like you know my facebook fee if I probably haven't I posted maybe two times in seven years three times five times thing just it's less than 10 and it's weird I guess I kind of just innately didn't want to get programmed and so I just turned tuned it out but I didn't confront it and now to see what's happening
it's really it really it really bums me up back in the 1970s in the early 80s at Xerox PARC when Steve Jobs first went over and saw the graphical user interface the way people talked about influence the world was a bicycle for our minds that here we are you take a human being and they have a certain set of capacities and capabilities and then you give them a bicycle and they can go to all these new distances they're empowered to go to these brand new places and to do these new things to have these new
capacities and that's always been the philosophy of people who make technologies how do we create bicycles for our minds to do and empower us to feel and access more now when the first iPhone was introduced it was also the philosophy of these technologies how do we empower people to do something more and what and in those days it wasn't manipulative because there is no competition for attention Photoshop wasn't trying to maximize how much attention it took from you it didn't measure a success that way and the internet overall had been in the very beginning not
designed to maximize attention it was just to putting things out there putting things out there creating these message boards it wasn't designed with this whole persuasive psychology that our burns later if you feed the beast that beast will destroy you if you push back on it we have a chance to control it rein it in and it is a point in time where people need to hard break from some of these tools and the things that you rely on the short term dopamine driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works no
civil discourse no cooperation misinformation miss truth and it's not an American problem this is not about Russian ads this is a global problem mr. Zuckerberg would you be comfortable sharing with us the name of the hotel you stayed in last night
