From: Nikola Chubrich
Date: September 8, 2020
Subject: Secrets

Call dropped: last word was 'secrets'.

To finish the thought: I don't think you need waste your time on Facebook. Nevertheless understanding how it works would tell you something about the pathology of our time.

To finish up an earlier thought: you are indeed right that the difference between "pub talk" and the internet is the scale of the audience; we might also mention the permanence. The dystopian absurdity is that the low-stakes and often light-hearted atmosphere of the pub has been replicated in software, this, most likely, with great psychological sophistication (Facebook is both psychologically and algorithmically sophisticated, and the former aspect is, to me, especially problematic).

Publication had the inherent deterrent that what you published had to be worth the cost of publishing: either your money, or somebody else's. The internet inherently removes this natural brake on discourse, and surely any platform that had not been specifically designed to replicate this deterrent in software would have exhibited defects in quality and sensationalism.

But the pathology of Facebook, Twitter, and also YouTube is of quite a different order. Content is specifically propagated to be sensationalistic, addictive, shallow, and thoughtless. The methodology is essentially Skinnerian (albeit, as I said, with great psychological sophistication): keep the rat pressing the lever for as long as possible, but also-----and this is part of the absurdity-----keep the rat distracted. It is thus not enough to engross the social media participant in an engaging story, film, work of music. The purpose is to sell as much advertising as possible for as long as possible. Advertisement in the midst of an engrossing diversion is an annoyance and ignored as much as possible.

alThat was where things have stood with network television: show a movie or a television show, and interrupt it as much as you can without causing the viewer to shut the TV off in frustration.

Facebook's genius (and it is I think quite a diabolical genius) is to reduce the purveighed content to the level of advertising itself, so that advertising becomes a seamless part of the experience, is no less diverting than what one is supposedly there for in the first place, and therefore is not ignored. 

Imagine a newspaper, for instance, whose articles consist entirely of columns formatted and written entirely in the style of advertising, and of equal word count, interspersed with actual advertising. An article on the Syrian war would be at first glance, and under literary analysis (of style, not of content) quite like a car dealership advertisement. There would be nothing beyond the headlines and the copywriting.

In this type of environment, readers (supposing they could be persuaded to read such a newspaper) would devote very much more of their attention to advertising than in an ordinary newspaper; the revenue from advertising would accordingly rise substantially. Meanwhile, since in-depth reporting is not needed and in fact cannot be used, the costs of producing the newspaper also go down.

Is this what Facebook is? Not quite. That would be too brazen. Rather, the environment is carefully engineered to distract and attenuate the reader's attention so that what he sees is more or less what I describe above. Someone may post a long-from article, but it appears amid a colorful parade of images and videos and snippets of text (the videos are autoplayed, i.e., without the user asking) that make it difficult for the mind to engage beyond a very limited time. As the mind jumps to the next topic, ads are slotted in.

Any attempt to write at length is implicitly discouraged. The text formatting abilities are impoverished (nothing more than plain ASCII, even though functional rich text editors have existed on the Web for years), and once posted, a comment is truncated to no more than several lines (at Facebook's discretion), typically breaking off in mid-sentence, the rest being replaced by a link "more". The "more" link is meant to be uninviting and is rarely clicked.

How do they do it? No TV or newspaper could get away with reducing their content entirely to the level of advertising. The psychological secret is twofold: one, the process is active. The rat's act of pressing the lever is part of the addictive loop. Much has been learned from the designers of slot machines in gambling casinos: the constant scrolling to the bottom of the page quite consciously functions as the lever in the slot machine.

Two, Facebook has hijacked the human need for connection. Nobody expects to find a real friend on the other side of a TV or a newspaper; but Facebook is composed, in theory, of one's friends. In the lower part of the screen, given very little space, is a chat window. The easiest way for me to reach many of my friends is to go into this chat window. As I am writing them, videos are appearing in my main field of view and starting to play.

The influence of all this psychological engineering on the chat medium itself has been astonishing. Until 4-5 years ago chat sessions were often focused, deep, and long-running. (I kept in touch with Lushen while he was in Tanzania this way.) You might talk to one person for an hour or more; the immediate line-at-a-time delivery made it a literary medium somewhere between conversation and poetry. At some point Facebook took over the chat business, and chats tend now to be perfunctory: little more than greeting cards.

As is much commented, all of what the user enters into Facebook, including private messages, is carefully analyzed to understand the user's propensity for responding to particular advertisements.

On the cost side, Facebook produces no content. All of it is produced by the users themselves. They have inflated profit in four ways simultaneously: 1) their production cost is negligible (it boils down to servers and software coding, essentially); 2) they have increased attention to and therefore the value of advertising immensely; 3) the advertising is targeted; and 4) users have been persuaded to spend immense amounts of time on Facebook, more than anyone has ever watched a single television channel.

As an illustration of the social impact of the time factor, I can relate my experience of visiting the Yale Fencing Team several years ago. When I was on the team, practice began at 3:15 and ran until nearly 7:30. Fifteen years later, students were straggling in at 4:30 or 5:00. What had happened? Several people told me that practice had to be curtailed because students were spending so much time on Facebook and other social media. Academics had not gotten any less demanding; the result was that the time students were willing to spend on extracurriculars had to decrease.

I can be quite sure that Facebook had wormed its way into students' social lives to such a degree and become so indispensable, and that it has become so much an involuntary reflex, that the students' decision to give fencing short shrift was not really theirs to make. Nor could the coaches have done anything differently: attempting to enforce the old practice times might well have led to the team dwindling.

Here was the opportunity to learn an Olympic sport in four years, from scratch, from an Olympic coach. The time you put into it was what you got out. Without, I think, consciously realizing it, the students traded more than an hour a day of fellowship, mentorship, and athletic and mental training, for a pursuit that did little to enrich their lives, and in fact is notably enervating and stultifying.

(Google is also designed to encourage this behavior, I should mention.)

*

Who does all of this psychological engineering? It is a commonplace occupation in Silicon Valley. There is, for instance, a consulting firm called "dopamine labs"----they advise developers how to deliver the addictive jolt of dopamine, or so they say.

A friend of mine with a recent graduate degree in economics interviewed for a job at Zynga, a game company that runs on Facebook. Her job description was to be optimizing user engagement, which is a rather bloodless way of denoting what I have described above.

Industrial companies have been widely excoriated for poisoning the natural environment as a side effect of production. The latest generation of companies is doing something even more extraordinary: they are poisoning the human mind with the product itself; and the product, aside from the fact that it has hijacked certain vital channels of societal communication, is of virtually no utility----in fact, I would argue, it has essentially negative utility.

N.I.C.