Unplugging

I do not own a smartphone. I do not want to be connected to the world all the time. I cut that umbilical cord a long time ago when I moved away from the hurry-worry working world. If you need to communicate with me – you can wait. As I watch the world around me becoming increasingly hypnotized by these little handheld go-everywhere-with-you pieces of technology, I am increasingly glad to say: “it ain't me”. As far as I'm concerned they are Trojan horses; they're tracking devices at the least and behavior modification instruments at worst. Those looking at their smartphone screens more than twice a day are essentially providing a continual stream of feedback sharing personal information with technicians we don't know, working for some of the largest companies the world has ever seen, for purposes we should all be suspicious of.

Whether you use a smartphone or any other computing device, someone is collecting a data base on you that grows by the second. What they already know about you is more than you might imagine. What kinds of links do you click on? What videos do you watch all the way through? How quickly are you moving from one thing to the next? Where are you on the planet when you do these things? Who are you connecting to in person and online? What facial expressions do you make? What were you doing just before you decided to buy something or not? The algorithms tracking you are constantly correlating your behavior with that of everyone else. All these measurements add up essentially to spying on us all.

As individuals, mostly you and I don't matter to the machines monitoring us. But there is considerable value in large numbers, trends, and patterns. Advertisers stand at the ready to influence us with messages that have worked on other people that share traits and situations with us. They call it advertising. I call it unauthorized direct behavioral manipulation. Whatever connected device we are using these days, we are increasingly getting bombarded with individualized, continuously adjusted, never ceasing promotional stimulation.

These attempts at behavior modification are unprecedented. We're all becoming conditioned pets of the machine – well-trained lab rats controlled more and more by huge corporations for their benefit, not ours. The frightening part is that the lab rat being conditioned by very successful behavior modification techniques generally doesn't even know it.

I like to think becoming aware of what is happening is liberating, or at least it enables us to make a choice to disconnect, at least some of the time. The pervasive surveillance and constant subtle manipulation we are being subjected to has become the new norm, however, and goes largely unquestioned. I find it unethical, cruel, and potentially dangerous – for who knows exactly who is going to use the power of the data you generate, and for what!

Many insiders, some of them founders of the mighty social media empires are sounding alarm over our collective loss of control over the momentum of the machine. Here's a warming shot the first president of Facebook, Sean Parker, fired over the bow of all Facebook users:

“We need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in awhile, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever.... It's a social validation feedback loop... exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you're exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.... The inventors, creators – it's me, its Mark [Zuckererg], its Kevin Systrom on Instagram, its all of these people – understood this consciously. And we did it anyway... it literally changes your relationship with society, with each other.... It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it's doing to our children's brains.”

Here is what former vice president of user growth at Facebook, Chamath Palihapitaya had to say:

“The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we've created are destroying how society works.... No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation; mis-truth. And it's not an American problem – this is not about Russian ads. This is a global problem.... I feel tremendous guilt. I think we all knew in the back of our minds – even though we figured this whole line of, like, there probably aren't any bad unintended consequences. I think in the back, deep, deep recesses of, we kind of knew something bad could happen.... So we are in a really bad state of affairs right now, in my opinion. It is eroding the core foundation of how people behave by and between each other. And I don;t have a good solution. My solution is I just don't use these tools anymore. I haven't for years.”

If the people running these companies don't use, nor allow their children to use, their own social media applications, what does that say? It is quite revealing to learn that many, if not most, social media administrators in Silicon Valley send their children to Waldorf Schools which generally forbid all electronics.

No one at the top is denying that the technology may be harming us, but are they admitting by their personal choices that it may be beyond their control? The question that remains may be that if you and I - the users of such technology – the ones generating all the data – can resist the temptation to be ever in touch with the world, can we begin to steer it in a better direction????