Jaron Lanier interview on how social media ruins your life

is there a principle reason why I should delete my social media and if so what is it mmm there are two one of them is for your own good and the other is for society's good for your own good it's because you're being subtly manipulated by algorithms that are watching everything you do constantly and then sending you changes in your media feed in your diet that are calculated to adjust you slightly to the liking of some unseen advertiser and so if you get off that you can have a chance to experience a clear view of

yourself in your life but then the reason for society might be even more important Society has been gradually darkened by this scheme in which everyone is under surveillance all the time and everyone is under this mild version of behavior modification all the time it's made people jittery and cranky it's made teens especially depressed which can be quite severe but it's made our politics kind of unreal and strange where we're not sure if elections are real anymore we're not sure how much the Russians affected brexit we do know that it was a crankier affair that it

might have been otherwise you say it's not for me as an individual is it bad for me because I'm addicted why become chemically hooked you have the founders of the great Silicon Valley spying empires like Facebook have publicly declared that they intentionally included addictive schemes in in their designs now we have to say this is what I would call almost a stealthy addiction it's it's a statistical addiction what it says is we will get the broad population to use the services a lot will get them hooked through a scheme of rewards and punishment and the

rewards or when you're retweeted the punishment is when you're treated badly by others online and then within that will very gradually start to leverage that to change them so it it's this very kind of stealthy manipulation of the population so it's not as dramatic as a heroin addict or a gambling addict but it is the same principle but who's doing the manipulating I mean it there isn't some most sort of Wizard of all sitting behind a screen well this is the peculiarity of the situation the people who run the tech companies like Google and Facebook

are not doing the manipulating they're doing the addicting but the manipulating which rides on the back of the addicting is the paying customer of such a company so and and many of those customers are not at all bad influences they might simply be trying to promote their cars or their perfumes or whatever and indeed I have sympathy for them because they're concerned that if they don't put money into the system nobody will know about them and you know is it different to just television advertising or billboard advertising or anything else the difference is the constant

feedback loop so when you watch the television the television isn't watching you when you see the billboard the billboard isn't seeing you and vast numbers of people see the same thing on television and see the same billboard when you use these new designs social media search YouTube when you see these things you're being observed constantly and algorithms are taking that information and changing what you see next and they're searching and searching and searching and they're just blind robots there's no evil genius here until they find those patterns those those little tricks that get you and

make you change your behavior in terms of society I mean you you you through in this you know it's making people depressed but is there any actual evidence for that yeah unfortunately there's a vast amount of evidence there have been dozens of studies at this point including studies released by Facebook scientists so this is this is something we can call a consensus and and when Facebook releases such things they say oh but we do all these good things to that balance it but there's there's a general acknowledgement that depression correlates the scariest example is a

correlation between Rises and teen suicide and there and the rise in use of social media and so yes unfortunately this is real are you sure you can blame it on social media is it not just those two things may have happened at the same time for other reasons well here's a distinction we have to make it's very similar to the problem of global climate change we can say statistically over the whole population yes the correlation is real and any particular person of course we can't just as we can't blame any particular storm on global warming

it's causality isn't it yeah I mean it is causality and it's this is something that's very well demonstrated so when the company's own scientists are publishing on this top it can come to the same agreement I think it's time to say this is real why have you sort of turned on your own kind I love Silicon Valley and I do not at all feel that I've turned on my own kind and just to be clear I'm very much a part of this I've sold a company to Google I'm not in any sense an outsider I

believe that what we're doing is not in our own self-interest business interests are a part of society if they destroy society they destroy themselves I believe it's very clear that we could offer all of the good things and there are many many good things in these services and social media in particular I'm convinced we can offer them without this manipulation engine in the background there's a world of other business plans and I think they'd be better for us so I don't think we're being evil so much as we're being stupid when it comes to Facebook

has Facebook made itself safe yet in terms of dates of harvesting and scraping normal well Facebook's fundamental design is one that is it's the business model is too addictive and then offer a channel to you to third parties to take advantage of that to change you in some way without you realizing it's happening I mean that's that's what it does so I don't think any amount of tweaking can fully heal it I think it needs a different business plan I mean it's very hard to throw a barrage of rules that's somebody who's following certain incentives

and then expect them to really make a difference so when my lucky book says he's taking action and you know he regrets what's happened and all the rest of it you're saying he can't make his own product a safe or desirable product I believe that as long as his business incentives are contrary to the interests of the people who use it who are different from the customers then no matter how some serious and I believe he's he's sincere and no matter how clever he is he can't undo that problem he has to go back to

the basics and change the nature of the business planet and if he if he doesn't agree with that and says we're just gonna carry on how much of a important is security of that data and the inability to repeat what has happened with Cambridge analyst care and all that kind of sort of data harvesting that went on I don't believe that this is I don't believe that what happened with Cambridge analytic is the worst of it the whole system is designed for this like let's suppose that Facebook reforms itself so that the next Cambridge analytic

accantus access to that data they can still get access to the same results because the service Facebook offers is exactly what sells yeah I mean this is you know there are bad actors are are are able to use Facebook in ways that Facebook can't understand because the way the service is designed is fundamentally to be manipulative so I think the data protection idea is a sincere and good idea but it's certainly not adequate it doesn't address the core problem which is the manipulation engine and as long as that is there a bad actor can find

a way to utilize it so to me this this concern about data protection while laudable doesn't address the core problem do you think they're all as bad as each other I mean you know what why is something like YouTube which is basically just a way of watching video bad for you YouTube it's not necessarily bad for you remember this is a statistical distribution so for some percentage of people it'll have an effect of making them crankier around election time and feeling media around the time they might be making a purchase and so forth and the

way it works is that all the data Google can get on you much of which comes from just your email or whatever else it might be is fed into an engine that compares you with other people who share some similar traits and YouTube's ordering of videos that are presented to you is designed to on the one hand maximize your engagement so you won't stop watching but that's achieved not just by observing you but by a multitude of people who are similar to you and then when you do get an ad it's contextualized in a way

that has been shown to be effective not only for you but for this whole population so it's this giant statistical thing and it's bad for you because it leeches your free will it makes you cranky it makes the world a little darker because you're not perceiving reality clearly anymore you're B it's being manipulated it's being tricked in a way and it the people who are paying or maybe not paying just using the system to in a clever way to get at you are not necessarily pleasant people they're they're sort of the worst actors in some

cases but then some users think look I can handle advertising you know I know what I'm doing here I'm getting a free service and you know they think they're manipulating me but I know what I'm doing the problem is that behaviors techniques are often invisible to the person who's being manipulated and and this has a long history this has been done for a long time it used to be that the only way to be subjected to continuous observation and modification was to either be in an experiment you could be in the basement of a psychology

building and have students tweaking you for their projects or you could join a cult or you could be in an abusive relationship I mean this has been done before and often the people who are in these situations do not realize that's happening to them in fact the whole point is that it's it's sneaky it's it's a it's a mechanical approach to manipulating people and because it's it's so algorithmic it doesn't involve direct communication and people don't get the cues to understand what's happening with them why do you think social media has had the effect what's

that it has you know is it because of the way people respond to things on social media well I'd like to give you a slightly detailed answer as quickly as I can and that is that in traditional behaviorism you would give an animal or a person a little treat like candy or maybe an electric shock and you'd go back and forth between positive and negative feedback and when researchers try to determine whether positivity or negativity is more powerful they're roughly at parity they're both important but the difference with social media is that the algorithms that

are are following you respond very quickly they're looking for the quick responses and the negative responses like getting startled or scared or irritated or angry tend to rise faster than the the positive responses like building trust or feeling good those things rise more slowly so the algorithms naturally catch the negativity and amplify it and introduce negative people to each other and all of this and so what this does is it means that the algorithms discovered there's more engagement possible say by promoting Isis and promoting the Arab Spring and so Isis gets more mileage or promoting

the Ku Klux Klan than black lives matter now in the big picture it's not true that negativity is more powerful but if you're doing this very rapid measurement of human impulses instead of accumulated human behavior then it's the negativity that gets amplified so you tend to have elections that are more driven by rancor and abuse and you tend to have outcomes that are kind of crazy so the effects on the media we consume the news as well as also alarming because then it will be the news that makes people angry this is the news that

gets seen in the future or now rather than you know a more balanced diet of what's really going on in the world well I think what goes on on a show like this is that you have a bit of a longer time horizon in which by which you measure success so you have to impress your viewership enough to tune in but this is over a process of days and weeks and months and year and you build up a sense of rapport with your your viewership right if you're an algorithm that's just looking at instant responses

you don't get that it's just like how did I engage this person and it'll be you'll you'll find that engagement more often by irritating people than by educating them and so is that how you create Trump well did you say or you know any of the other list leaders who were doing very well at the moment partly from the internet I I have never known Trump but I haven't met him a few times over a fairly long period over thirty years actually through different circumstances and I will say that while I never would have voted

for him as president and I always thought he was um somewhat untrustworthy and a bit of a showman and a bit of a scammer he never lost himself and became so strangely insecure and so weirdly irritable until he had his own addiction in this case to Twitter and it's it's really damaged him I mean I I view Trump in a way as a victim oh yeah absolutely his character has been really damaged by his Twitter addiction because of the reaction he gets from each tweet yeah so you know what happens in addiction is the addict

becomes hooked not just on the good part of the addiction experience but on the whole cycle so a gambler is not just addicted to winning but to this whole process where they mostly lose and in the same way the Twitter addict or the social media addict becomes addicted to this engagement which is often unpleasant where they're engaged in these you know really abusive exchanges with other human beings and only once in a while is that you know you can watch the Trump like every once in a while there will be this tweet where somebody likes

him and that's when he gets his little uh we call it in the trade the dopamine hit that's what it's called in Facebook for instance he gets his little dopamine hit and then he dives in for more negativity and things then he gets it again and you can see the addiction playing out do you think it's possible to create a do-gooding social networks yes I'm absolutely positive and the way to do it is to have a different business model wherein so right now we've created this bizarre society that's unprecedented where if any two people wish

to communicate over the Internet the only way that can happen the only way it's financed this you're a third party who believes that those two can be manipulated in a sneaky way it's it's a it's an insane way to structure civilization so we can keep all the good stuff and there is good stuff on social media of course we can keep all that and just throw away the manipulation business model and substitute in a different business model and and there are many alternatives that would be better they just have to be honest it could be

a paid service like a Netflix where you're paying for it you're the genuine customer it has to keep your interest it could be like a public library it could become a public thing that is that isn't commercial at all that's an option but what we did in Silicon Valley is we wanted it both ways we wanted everything open and free but we wanted hero entrepreneurs and hackers and so the only way to get that was this advertising thing that that gradually turned into the manipulation engine as the computers got faster and this this weird business

planet once you can see that there are alternatives you realize how strange it is and how unsustainable it is this is the thing we must get rid of we don't have to get rid of the smartphone we don't have to get rid of the idea of social media we just have to get rid of the manipulation machine that's in the background just one last thing as well that is also obsessing parents screen time itself do you think that is a bad thing or is it just what's on the screen to be frank with you I

struggle with this question because I have an 11-year old and so I I tend to think that manipulation time when the kids are being observed by algorithms and tweaked by them is vastly worse than just screen time by itself so I'll include video games and in the social media you know the things that are manipulating them because they all similarly addictive they're addictive but not manipulative typically another here I'm not sure how evil we've become lately because there might be some video games that are using behavior mod techniques for pay that's conceivable I can see

how that could happen you're thinking about it out there don't do it okay find something better to do but the the mainstream video games are not doing that they are addictive so there are plenty of things that are addictive that aren't leveraging that for manipulation see these are two different stages what do you think of fault lines I have not played it done played it because fortnight's is exactly that it's getting people to pay for things within their game no but see the thing is getting them to pay is still not manipulating them for a

third party that's getting them to buy stuff I mean Amazon does that to get you to buy stuff all kinds of people do that that that might be annoying you might object to it especially if you feel your kids are wasting money you might object to it you might feel it's not an ideal example of human behavior and character and maybe there could be a better business whatever but it's not directly manipulating you say to influence an election it's not trying to change your behavior out in the larger world and and that's the thing that's

really tragic about designs like Facebook and Google they are succeeding at doing that but your advice tonight to everyone watching this is delete all your accounts I would like to make two very quick pitches on that account one if you're a young person and you've only lived with social media your first duty is to yourself you have to know yourself you should experience travel you should experience challenge to yourself you need to know yourself and you can't know yourself without perspective so at least give it six months without social media and really quit him don't

like quit Facebook would keep another Facebook thing like whatsapp because then it'll still be spying and manipulating get rid of the whole thing for six months and know yourself and then you can decide I can't tell you what's right you have to decide but you can't until you know yourself and then for the rest of society I'd say as long as we can have some small percentage of people who are off it then the society can have voices to give perspective if everybody's universally part of this thing we cannot have perspective we cannot have a

real conversation and it's too lonely right now you know we need more people who are just outside of that who are thinking without the manipulation and I think we'll find it extraordinarily valuable to have them are you just New Age hippie I mean have you just been through the mill and kind of worked out I want to check out of all this and let's just let's just stop do I seem new-age to you I don't know I mean you know I mean I hear here's what I'll tell you the bind you put me in is

that I'd be happy to trash the new age and and demonstrate that I'm not part of that manner of thinking I'm certainly not I think I hope I've come across as a non utopian but the problem is many of my friends in California are quite new age so I want to be kind to them you