Attention grabbing

While I am apparently on a recommendation kick, let me share with you this essay: How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds.  Have a handful of thought-provoking pull-quotes.

there is no malicious corporation behind all of email who consciously chose to make it a slot machine. No one profits when millions check their email and nothing’s there. Neither did Apple and Google’s designers want phones to work like slot machines. It emerged by accident.

But now companies like Apple and Google have a responsibility to reduce these effects by converting intermittent variable rewards into less addictive, more predictable ones with better design.

I’ve understood the way email and social media notifications use intermittent reinforcement for quite a while now, but somehow it never occurred to me that they could redesign their products to be predictable.

If there’s not a gmail plugin that does this already, I might have to write one.

Like Facebook, LinkedIn exploits an asymmetry in perception. When you receive an invitation from someone to connect, you imagine that person making a conscious choice to invite you, when in reality, they likely unconsciously responded to LinkedIn’s list of suggested contacts. In other words, LinkedIn turns your unconscious impulses (to “add” a person) into new social obligations that millions of people feel obligated to repay. All while they profit from the time people spend doing it.

A succinct explanation of the why LinkedIn is the worst.

In other words, they make the thing customers want (milk, pharmacy) inseparable from what the business wants. If stores were truly organized to support people, they would put the most popular items in the front.

Tech companies design their websites the same way. For example, when you you want to look up a Facebook event happening tonight (your reason) the Facebook app doesn’t allow you to access it without first landing on the news feed (their reasons), and that’s on purpose. Facebook wants to convert every reason you have for using Facebook, into their reason which is to maximize the time you spend consuming things.

So here’s a question: if we’re not regulating grocery stores to make them put milk in the front, why should we be regulating Facebook?  At what point does the misalignment between producers and consumers - a fundamental element of a capitalist economy - become something to halt rather than tolerate?

Instead of viewing the world in terms of availability of choices, we should view the world in terms of friction required to enact choices. Imagine a world where choices were labeled with how difficult they were to fulfill (like coefficients of friction) and there was an FDA for Tech that labeled these difficulties and set standards for how easy navigation should be.

Harris raises this in the context of consumer behavior, but I see this all the time in discussions of freedom, whether that’s the free market (”Just start up a competitive business”) or free software (”Just fork the project”).  The hypothetical ability to do something is not the same as the actual ability to do something.