> An apology for the Internet, from the people that built it
A fifteen step analysis from New York magazine, outlining why the Internet has gone wrong.
At its core is an argument that because most of the Internet is monetised by advertisements, companies try to keep us engaged, and the best form of engagement is anger:
To keep the internet free — while becoming richer, faster, than anyone in history — the technological elite needed something to attract billions of users to the ads they were selling. And that something, it turns out, was outrage. As Jaron Lanier, a pioneer in virtual reality, points out, anger is the emotion most effective at driving “engagement” — which also makes it, in a market for attention, the most profitable one. By creating a self-perpetuating loop of shock and recrimination, social media further polarized what had already seemed, during the Obama years, an impossibly and irredeemably polarized country.There are anecdotal tales of people leaving social media and having sudden improvements in their mental health. This would account for that.
Tristan Harris: We cannot afford the advertising business model. The price of free is actually too high. It is literally destroying our society, because it incentivizes automated systems that have these inherent flaws. Cambridge Analytica is the easiest way of explaining why that’s true. Because that wasn’t an abuse by a bad actor — that was the inherent platform. The problem with Facebook is Facebook.I'm a big believer in paying actual money for Internet services where I can, as the platform tends to be geared towards my benefit rather than the benefit of the advertiser. That's a very privileged and fortunate position to be able to take, and does raise the question of whether, in this instance, money is buying a form of happiness.