Stolen Focus — Chapter no 9

9

The First Glimpses of the Deeper

Solution

After learning so much about how our technology works, I was left with two clear and urgent questions. Firstly: what are the specific changes to this invasive tech that could be made, in practice, to prevent it harming our attention and focus? And secondly: how do we compel these huge corporations to introduce these changes in the real world?

Tristan and Aza – drawing on their own experiences, and the essential work of Professor Shoshana Zuboff – believe that if we are going to find a lasting solution, we need to go right to the root cause of the problem. That’s why, one morning, Aza said to me starkly: ‘We could just ban surveillance capitalism.’ I paused to try to process what he was saying. This would mean, he explained, that the government would ban any business model that tracks you online in order to figure out your weaknesses and then sells that private data to the highest bidder so they can change your behaviour. This model is, Aza says, ‘just fundamentally anti-democratic and anti-human’, and it has to go.

This sounded dramatic and frankly impossible when I first heard it, but Tristan and Aza explained that there are plenty of historical

precedents for something becoming so widespread, only for society to discover it actually causes a lot of harm and ban the market in it.

Think about lead paint. It was in a majority of American homes – then it was discovered to damage the brains of kids and adults, making it harder for them to focus. As one of Tristan’s mentors, Jaron Lanier, pointed out to me, when we found that out, we didn’t say nobody could paint their homes ever again. We just banned the lead in the paint. Your home is still painted today – just with much better products. Or think about CFCs. As I mentioned before, when I was a child in the hairspray-obsessed 1980s, it was discovered that a substance in hairsprays was destroying the ozone layer that protects us from the sun’s rays. It terrified us all. We banned CFCs.

We still have hairsprays, they just work differently, and today, the ozone layer is healing. There are all sorts of things that we have decided, as a civilised society, can’t be bought and sold, like (for example) human organs.

So, I asked them, let’s say we banned surveillance capitalism.

What would happen to my Facebook and Twitter accounts the following day, the following week, the following year? ‘I think they would have a crisis moment, in the same way that Microsoft had a crisis moment,’ Aza told me. In 2001, Microsoft was ruled by the US government to have become a monopoly. That company reinvented itself, and now ‘They’re sort of like the benevolent adult in the room. I think the same transformation would happen to Facebook.’ In practice, the day after a ban, these companies would have to find different ways to fund themselves. There is one model that is obvious, and an alternative form of capitalism that everyone reading this will have some experience of – subscription. Let’s imagine each of us had to pay fifty cents or a dollar every month to use Facebook.

Suddenly, Facebook would no longer be working for advertisers and offering up your secret wishes and preferences as their real product.

No. It would be working for you. Its job – for the first time – would be to actually figure out what makes you happy, and to give it to you –

instead of figuring out what makes advertisers happy, and how they can manipulate you to give it to them. So if, like most people, you want to be able to focus, the site would have to be redesigned to facilitate that. If you want to be socially connected, instead of isolated in front of your screen, it would have to figure out how to make that possible.

There’s another obvious way that these companies could survive, which is for them to be bought by the government and taken into public ownership. This would take social media out of the capitalist part of the economy. This can sound drastic, but every single person reading this book benefits today, directly, from exactly the same model. We all agree we need to have sewers – they are an unavoidable necessity, unless we want to go back to the world of cholera outbreaks and faeces in the streets. So in virtually every country, the government owns, maintains and regulates the sewers, and even hardcore anti-government activists agree that this is a good use of state power.

Using the same model, our governments could acknowledge that social media is now an essential public utility, and explain that when it is run according to the wrong incentives, it causes the psychological equivalents of cholera outbreaks. It would be a bad idea for the government to run it – it’s easy to imagine how authoritarian leaders could abuse that. Fortunately, there’s a better option: you can have public ownership, independent of the government. In Britain, the BBC is owned and funded by the British public, and it is run in the interests of the British public – but its day- to-day running is independent of the government. It’s not perfect, but this model works so well that it is the most respected media organisation in the world.

Once the financial incentives are changed – through subscription, or public ownership, or another model – then the nature of these sites can change, in ways we can actually begin to envision already.

Aza told me that ‘it’s actually technically not hard’ to redesign the

major social-media sites so that, instead of trashing your attention span and our societies, they would be designed to heal them, once the financial incentives to do that are in place. This was difficult for me to grasp at first, so I asked what social media would look like after the changes they would like to see. Tristan, Aza and others began by explaining minor changes, then built up to big changes, and then told me what has to happen to make any of these changes happen.

They started by talking about how these companies could, overnight, remove a lot of the aspects of these apps and sites that deliberately scramble our heads and keep us online longer than we really want. Aza said: ‘For instance, Facebook tomorrow could start batching your notifications, so you only get one push notification a day … They could do that tomorrow.’ (This was something Tristan had proposed in his explosive slide show back when he was still at Google.) So instead of getting ‘this constant drip of behavioural cocaine’, telling you every few minutes that somebody liked your picture, commented on your post, has a birthday tomorrow, and on and on and on – you would get one daily update, like a newspaper, summarising it all. You’d be pushed to look once a day, instead of being interrupted several times an hour. ‘Here’s another one,’ he said. ‘Infinite scroll.’ That’s his invention, where when you get to the bottom of the screen, it automatically loads more and more, forever. ‘What’s going on there is it’s catching your impulses before your brain has a chance to really get involved and make a decision.’ Facebook and Instagram and the others could simply turn off infinite scroll – so that when you get to the bottom of the screen, you have to make a conscious decision to carry on scrolling.

Similarly, these sites could simply switch off the things that have been shown to most polarise people politically, stealing our ability to pay collective attention. Since there’s evidence YouTube’s recommendation engine is radicalising people, Tristan told one

interviewer: ‘Just turn it off. They can turn it off in a heartbeat.’ It’s not as if, he points out, the day before recommendations were introduced, people were lost and clamouring for somebody to tell them what to watch next.

Once the most obvious forms of mental pollution have been stopped, they said, we can begin to look deeper, at how these sites could be redesigned to make it easier for you to restrain yourself and think about your longer-term goals. ‘It doesn’t take much work to start imagining what would be different interfaces,’ Aza said. The most obvious example takes us back to where I started with Tristan, in our very first conversation: there could be a button that says ‘here are all your friends who are nearby and are indicating they’d like to meet up today’. You click it, you connect, you put down your phone and hang out with them. Instead of being a vacuum sucking up your attention and keeping it away from the outside world, social media would become a trampoline, sending you back into that world as efficiently as possible, matched with the people you want to see.

Similarly, when you set up (say) a Facebook account, it could ask you how much time you want to spend per day or per week on the site. You might name ten minutes, or two hours – it’s up to you – and then the website could help you to achieve your goal. One way could be that when you hit that limit, the website could radically slow down.

In tests, Amazon found that even 100 milliseconds of delay in the pace at which a page loads results in a substantial drop-off in people sticking around to buy the product. Aza said: ‘It just gives your brain a chance to catch up to your impulse and [ask] – do I really want to be here? No.’ In addition, Facebook could ask you at regular intervals – what changes do you want to make to your life? Maybe you want to exercise more, or take up gardening, or become vegetarian, or start a heavy-metal band. It could then match you up with other people nearby – friends, or friends of friends, or interested strangers in your neighbourhood – who say they also want to make that change and

have indicated they are looking for the equivalent of gym buddies.

Facebook would become, Aza says, ‘a way of socially surrounding yourself with the behaviour that you want’. A battery of scientific evidence shows that if you want to succeed in changing something, you should meet up with groups of people doing the same.

At the moment, they said, social media is designed to grab your attention and sell it to the highest bidder, but it could be designed to understand your intentions and to better help you achieve them.

Tristan and Aza told me that it’s just as easy to design and program this life-affirming Facebook as the life-draining Facebook we currently have. I think that most people, if you stopped them in the street and painted them a vision of these two Facebooks, would say they wanted the one that serves your intentions. So why isn’t it happening? It comes back, Tristan and Aza said, to the business model. If right now these social-media companies made the changes that you just read about, they would lose an enormous amount of money. Within the existing economic structure of the companies, they can’t do the right thing by your attention span or the wider society. This – above everything else – is the rock-solid reason why you have to change the business model, if you want to change the way social media affects us.

The business model can only be changed by regulation imposed on these companies by governments, they said. Then the changes I just described would cease to be impossible threats to the bottom line and start to become very exciting ways to tempt subscribers. At the moment there is a fundamental clash between your interests – to be able to focus, to have friends you see offline, to be able to discuss things calmly – and the interests of the social-media companies. With the introduction of a ban on surveillance capitalism and a move to a different business model, that clash ends. As Tristan put it, you’d be paying for the interests to be aligned between you and the product you use. Suddenly that team of Silicon Valley engineers behind the screen wouldn’t be working against you and

your deeper intentions; they’d be working for you and trying to serve your deeper intentions.

One day, Aza said to me: ‘The fundamental thing is that no one likes the way that they are spending time or making decisions with the way technology currently is. It’s hard to get from that hill to this hill, because we have to go through a valley. That’s the role of regulation – to help making crossing that valley easier. But the hill on the other side is much, much nicer.’

I found so much of what Aza and Tristan had taught me persuasive – but I was wary about their argument that we need to use the law to stop these companies from continuing as they are. There were several reasons why. Firstly, I wondered if they were overstating the problem. When I spoke with Nir Eyal, he said: ‘Every generation has these moral panics, where we only want to look at the negative sides’ of an issue. He told me ‘Tristan is reading, literally verbatim, from the 1950s about the comic-book debate,’ when many people believed that children were being made violent by a new wave of gory comics. In the 1950s, ‘People like Tristan went to the Senate and told the senators that comic books are turning children into addicted, hijacked [zombies] – literally, it’s the same stuff … Today, we think of comic books as so innocuous.’ On this basis, he argues – and here he’s not alone – that the science that Tristan and Aza and other critics of the current tech business model draw on is incorrect. He believes that some of the social science I have drawn on in the past two chapters is garbled or wrong.

I’ll give you one detailed example, so you get a sense of this controversy. Tristan argues YouTube is radicalising people, based on an array of evidence I mentioned before. Nir responds by pointing to a recent study by the coder Mark Ledwich that suggested in fact,

watching YouTube had a slightly deradicalising effect on its users.

Tristan, in response, directs people towards the Princeton academic Professor Arvind Narayanan, and many other critics of this study, who say that the research Nir is citing here is worthless. Let’s go through this, step by step. The people who say YouTube radicalises you argue that this effect happens over time. You create a profile, you log in, and gradually YouTube builds up knowledge of your preferences, and to keep you watching, the content it feeds you gets more extreme. But the research Nir cites didn’t study any logged-in users. All they did was go to a video on YouTube – say, Boris Johnson giving a speech – and without logging in, they looked at the recommendations that appeared along the side. If you use YouTube in this highly unusual way, the videos don’t become more extreme over time, and it might be fair to say YouTube is deradicalising. But huge numbers of YouTube users do log in. (We don’t know exactly how many, because YouTube keeps that information secret.) For every conceivable way the tech companies could be screwing with us, there is a back-and-forth like this, with Tristan and Nir each citing rigorous social scientists who have reached opposing conclusions. Tristan draws on academics from Yale and New York University and Harvard; Nir draws on academics like Professor Andrew Przybylski at Oxford University, who agrees with Nir that Tristan’s warnings are overheated. So what’s happening? It’s not that either of them is being disingenuous – it’s that measuring the changes these sites are triggering is really complicated, and hard to figure out. We have to be honest that we are making decisions based on a lot of uncertainty here. In the long sweep of history, there will likely be some areas where it turns out Nir is right, and some where Tristan is right. That still leaves us with a basic dilemma. Right now, we need to make choices about whether to let social-media companies continue behaving as they have been. We have to figure out the balance of risk.

There are two things that helped me make up my mind about what I think we should do next. One was a thought experiment, and the other was hard evidence from inside Facebook itself.

Let’s imagine Nir is wrong, and we all follow his advice anyway – we allow surveillance capitalism to continue getting us ‘fiendishly hooked’, with only light regulation. Then let’s imagine Tristan is wrong, and we all follow his advice anyway – we regulate the Big Tech companies to stop their invasive practices.

If Tristan is wrong and we still follow his advice, you would have been tricked into creating a world where you get targeted with a lot less advertising, you spend less, you get spied on less, and in return, you have to pay a small sum each month to subscribe to a few social-media companies, or those companies have in some way been taken over as public utilities run in our collective interests, like the sewers or the highways. Now imagine if we did what Nir wants.

What happens if he’s wrong? What are we left with? Attention shrinks even more, political extremism expands, and the disturbing trends we see around us continue to rise.

The second thing that persuaded me was even more decisive.

One day, in the spring of 2020, it was revealed what Facebook actually thinks about these questions, in private, when they think we will never be able to hear them. A large number of internal Facebook documents and communications were leaked to the Wall Street Journal. It turned out that behind closed doors, the company had responded to the claims that their algorithms had damaged our collective attention and helped the rise of Trump and Brexit by convening a team of some of their best scientists and tasking them with figuring out if this was really true, and if it was, to figure out what they could do about it. The unit was called Common Ground.

After studying all the hidden data – the stuff that Facebook doesn’t release to the public – the company’s scientists reached a definite conclusion. They wrote: ‘Our algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness,’ and ‘if left unchecked’, the site would

continue to pump its users with ‘more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention and increase time on the platform’. A separate internal Facebook team, whose work also leaked to the Journal, had independently reached the same conclusions. They found that 64 percent of all the people joining extremist groups were finding their way to them because Facebook’s algorithms were directly recommending them. This meant across the world, people were seeing in their Facebook feeds racist, fascist and even Nazi groups next to the words: ‘Groups You Should Join.’ They warned that in Germany, one-third of all the political groups on the site were extremist. Facebook’s own team was blunt, concluding: ‘Our recommendation systems grow the problem.’ After carefully analysing all the options, Facebook’s scientists concluded there was one solution: they said Facebook would have to abandon its current business model. Because their growth was so tied up with toxic outcomes, the company should abandon attempts at growth. The only way out was for the company to adopt a strategy that was ‘anti-growth’ – deliberately shrink, and choose to be a less wealthy company that wasn’t wrecking the world.

Once Facebook was shown – in plain language, by their own people – what they were doing, how did the company’s executives respond? According to the Journal’s in-depth reporting, they mocked the research, calling it an ‘Eat Your Veggies’ approach. They introduced some minor tweaks, but dismissed most of the recommendations. The Common Ground team was disbanded and has ceased to exist. The Journal reported dryly: ‘Zuckerberg also signalled he was losing interest in the effort to recalibrate the platform in the name of the social good … asking that they not bring him something like that again.’ I read this and I thought of my friend Raull Santiago, in his favela in Rio, being terrorised by helicopters sent by the far-right government that was elected with the help of these algorithms – algorithms so powerful that Bolsonaro’s

supporters responded to his victory by chanting, ‘Facebook!

Facebook!’ I realised that if Facebook won’t change the fact that their algorithm unintentionally promotes fascism – that it promotes Nazism in Germany – they will never care about protecting your focus and attention. These companies will never restrain themselves. The risks of letting them continue behaving the way they have are greater than the risks of overreacting. They have to be stopped. They have to be stopped by us.

I was daunted. For a while, I felt I had no idea how we could achieve such a goal. Many people go this far in the argument, and then sputter to a pessimistic halt. They say – yes, this system is messing with us in terrible ways, but we’ll just have to adjust, because nothing and nobody can stop it. We live in a culture where there is a sense of deep political fatalism at every turn. I saw this when I wrote my book about the war on drugs, Chasing the Scream, and I travelled all over the world talking about it. Especially in the US, I kept hearing: Yes, you’re right that the drug war is a disaster and a failure. (Over 80 percent of Americans agree.) Yes, you’re right that decriminalisation or legalisation would be better. But no, it will never happen – so do you know a good lawyer or rehab facility for an addicted relative?

Political pessimism keeps people trapped in a search for purely personal and individual solutions.

But here’s the truth: this despair isn’t just self-defeating; I think it’s actually empirically wrong. I reminded myself – forces as powerful as the tech companies have been defeated many times in human history, and it always happens in the same way. It is when ordinary people form movements and demand something better, and they don’t give up until they have achieved it. I know that could sound vague or idealistic, so I want to give a very practical example of a

change that happened in my family, and very likely in your family, in the past three generations.

I am forty-one years old. My grandmothers were the age I am now in the year 1962. In that year, my Scottish grandmother, Amy McRae, was living in a working-class tenement in Scotland, and my Swiss grandmother, Lydia Hari, was living on a mountain in the Swiss Alps. Amy had been forced to leave school when she was thirteen, because nobody thought it was worth educating girls. While her brother stayed in education, she was sent to work cleaning toilets, which she did all her working life. She had wanted to work with homeless people, but in practice women were locked out of jobs like that, and she was told to know her place as a woman and shut up. Lydia grew up in a Swiss village, and as a teenager she was constantly drawing and painting. She wanted to be an artist. She was told that girls couldn’t be artists. She got married young, and was told to obey her husband. I would sit in their kitchen years later, when her husband would hold out an empty mug and yell ‘Kaffee!’ (coffee) and she was expected to scramble to fetch it. She would sometimes sketch, but she said it made her depressed, because it reminded her of what her life might have been.

My grandmothers lived in a society in which women were excluded from almost all systems of power and almost all choices about their lives. In 1962 there were no women in the British cabinet, the US cabinet or the Swiss government. Women made up less than 4 percent of the members of British parliament and the US Senate, and less than 1 percent in Switzerland’s Federal Assembly, where women weren’t even allowed to vote in seventeen out of the country’s twenty cantons (including the one where my grandmother lived). This meant that the rules were written by men for men.

American and British women were banned from getting mortgages or opening bank accounts unless they were married and had written permission from their husbands. Swiss women were banned from getting jobs at all without the written permission of their spouse.

There were no domestic-violence shelters anywhere on earth, and it was legal everywhere for a man to rape his wife. (When, in the 1980s, there were moves to ban rape within marriage, one California Assembly member objected, saying, ‘But if you can’t rape your wife, who can you rape?’) In practice, men could beat their wives, because the police did not regard this as a crime, and they could molest their daughters, since it was so taboo to speak out about this that nobody ever went to the police to report it.

As I type out those facts, I keep thinking about my fifteen-year-old niece. Like her great-grandmother, she loves to draw and paint, and every time I see her doing it, I think of Lydia, doing the same thing in her Swiss village eighty-five years before. Lydia was told to stop wasting her time and start serving men. My niece is told: You’re going to be a great artist – let’s start looking at art schools. My niece never met my grandmother, but I believe that Lydia would have been happy to know the ways in which feminism changed the world.

I know it’s exceptionally irritating for a male to mansplain this topic in this way, especially when so much sexism and misogyny remains, and when women still face huge barriers. I know the advance of women’s rights is far from won, and many of the advances that have been made are under threat. I know only one thing here that is definitely true: the difference between the lives of my grandmothers and the life of my niece is a stunning achievement, and it happened for one reason, and one reason only. There was an organised movement of ordinary women who banded together and fought for it, and continued fighting even when it was really hard.

There are, of course, many differences between the fight for feminism and the fight for our focus. But nonetheless, I kept returning to this example in my mind for a very basic reason. The feminist movement teaches us that huge and seemingly immovable forces can be challenged by ordinary people – and that when they do, it can lead to real change. The concentrated power of men in 1962 was vastly greater than the power of Big Tech as I write this in

2021. Men controlled almost everything – every parliament, every corporation, every police force – and they had for as long as those institutions had existed. It would have been very easy, in that situation, to say – nothing can change; give up; women will just have to learn to live a life of subordination. Many people are tempted to think that now, when they contemplate the huge forces stealing our focus. But that’s the thing about the pessimistic belief that we are powerless and can’t change anything. It’s false.

Think about another historical example. I’m gay. In 1962, I would have been put in jail for it. Now I can get married. Homophobia ruled for 2,000 years, and then it didn’t. The difference – the only difference – was a movement of ordinary people demanding an end to the forces thwarting their lives. I am free because the people who came before us didn’t give up; they got up. Again, of course, there’s big differences between the struggle for equality for gay people, and this fight. But there is a key parallel: no source of power, no set of ideas, is so large it can’t be challenged. Big Tech would love us to believe that their power is impregnable and there’s no point fighting for change because that never works. These companies are as fragile as every other powerful force that was torn down in the end.

If we don’t form a movement and fight, what is the alternative?

Tristan and Aza warned me that right now, we are only at the start of what unregulated surveillance capitalism will do to us. It is only going to become more sophisticated and more invasive. They gave me lots of examples. Here’s one. There’s a technology that exists called ‘style transfer’. If you use it, you can show a computer lots of paintings by Van Gogh and then you point it at a new scene, and it can recreate it in the style of Van Gogh. Aza told me how ‘style transfer’ could quite soon be used against you or me: ‘Google today could read all of your Gmail, come up with a model that can mimic your style, and then sell that to an advertiser. [You, as the user] don’t even know what’s going on,’ but you will start to receive emails that are unusually welcoming and persuasive, because they sound just

like you. Even worse, in Aza’s opinion, ‘they could look at all of your Gmail, look at all the emails you responded to quickly and positively, and learn that style. So [they] learn the style that is uniquely persuasive to you. There is nothing illegal about that. There are no laws to protect you against that. Is it breaking your privacy? They’re not selling your data. They’re just selling an asymmetric knowledge about how you work – even more than you know about yourself – to the highest bidder.’ It’s an asymmetry so extreme that it will hack vulnerabilities you don’t even know are vulnerabilities. There are technological innovations coming that will make the current forms of surveillance capitalism look as crude as Space Invaders looks to a kid raised on Fortnite. Facebook, in 2015, filed a patent for technology that will be able to detect your emotions from the cameras on your laptop and phone. If we don’t regulate, Aza warns, ‘Our supercomputers are going to test their way to finding all our vulnerabilities, without anyone ever stopping to ask – is that right? It’ll feel to us a little bit like we’re still making our own decisions,’ but it will be ‘a direct attack against agency and free will’.

Tristan’s mentor, Jaron Lanier – a veteran Silicon Valley engineer – told me he used to be a consultant for loads of dystopian Hollywood movies, like Minority Report, but he had to stop because he kept designing ever-more-frightening technologies to warn people of what was coming – and designers kept responding by saying: that’s so cool; how do we make that? ‘Sometimes I hear people say it’s too late to make certain changes to the web or platforms or digital technology,’ James Williams told me. But the axe, he said, existed for 1.4 million years before anybody thought to put a handle on it. The web, by contrast, ‘is less than ten thousand days old’.

We are, I realised, in a race. To one side there is the rapidly escalating power of invasive technologies, which are figuring out how we work and fracking our attention. On the other side there

needs to be a movement demanding technologies that work for us, not against us; technologies that feed our ability to focus, instead of fracturing it. At the moment, the movement for humane technology consists of a few brave people like Professor Shoshana Zuboff, Tristan and Aza. They are the equivalent of the scattered bands of brave feminists of the early 1960s. We all need to decide – are we going to join them and put up a fight? Or are we going to let the invasive technologies win by default?