Day 007. Breaking the Scroll: 91 Days Off Social Media & Rediscovering Life IRL

A Millennial's Digital Detox Diaries. Tracing Tech Addiction and Why Tristan Harris and BJ Fogg are Names to Note.

📢❗🚨 Day 007 of this special series in October. 📢❗🚨

If you’re new here, welcome!

I am writing a special daily series this October chronicling my eighth time on an Instagram sabbatical. I’ve welcomed this annual ritual since 2016, but this year I am documenting my daily observations and sharing them with you, my lovely readers. 

I can’t promise what each day will bring, but I am sharing on the day reflections on all the thoughts sprouting in my mind. Some say I am an over-thinker, I prefer to self-identify, as a lover of thinking.

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Stay tuned—for a little while—to see what I’ll create. Thank you for spending some of your day with me. You can access the archive to the previous editions in this series here.

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“The real problem of humanity is that we have palaeolithic emotions or brains, mediaeval institutions, and God-like technology.” 

E.O. Wilson, Harvard Sociobiologist

Thanks @GettyImages, Unsplash.

I chanced upon a conversation from 2017, with Tristan Harris the founder of the Center for Humane Technology, on the Making Sense with Sam Harris podcast recently. Harris’ mention of a class he had taken during his studies at Stanford caught my attention. 

The class taught by BJ Fogg, PhD, a behavioural scientist at Stanford University, was called “Persuasive Technology,” in which Harris was a student. Fogg also authored a book of the same title: “Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do.”

Considering what we’re awakening to about the truth, the ethical questions, and the damaging influence of technology— especially the addiction to social media apps and its repercussions on mental health globally— it feels somewhat ironic to see how blatant the premise of the curriculum was at the time. It’s as if Stanford was handing out a “Manipulate the Minds of Millions 101” as a syllabus. 

The class and the book might have well been called “How to Use Technology to Manipulate How People Think and Behave” or “How to Use Technology to Hack People’s Brains.” I’m sure that would’ve gone down very well. Maybe even with an added disclaimer: “Ethical Considerations and Global Impact on Humanity Sold Separately.”

Jokes aside, to highlight the significance of Dr. Fogg’s curriculum—and its relevance to this series— it’s worth noting that Kevin Systrom, Instagram’s original founder, was also part of the cohort of students who took BJ Fogg’s class in persuasive technology.

I guess Synstrom, is what you can refer to as a model student. He applied the principles he learned: “How to Make Billions By the Art of Using Computers to Hijack What People Think and Do,” and became a self-made billionaire in the process.

Although that class is no longer taught (shocker!). BJ Fogg continues to teach Behavioural Design with a more positive spin and less controversial themes. His central thesis has shifted away from the narrative of using technology for human persuasion and instead seems to focus more on the ethics of persuasive design and how to use his research to architect positive habits and lifestyles instead. 

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Fogg’s recent New York Times Bestseller is titled “Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything,” is a clear departure from using technology to influence human behaviour.

It’s now more like, “Hey, let’s use these powers for good.” Of course, a single person is rarely solely liable or responsible for the ethical use of their research. That’s what we have tech billionaires for! 🙄😛

The consideration that persists is how such research can be applied in the real world. Whether it’s used for good or for ill is beyond the responsibility of the single researcher. But it’s clear how influential Fogg’s work has been, for Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and beyond. 

In mapping out the detailed schematics around understanding human behaviour, Foggs unintentionally created a manual for manipulation. It’s like giving a toddler a nuclear launch code and hoping for the best—what could possibly go wrong?

I’ll reiterate too: no one could have predicted the outcomes of apps like Instagram and the like, neither do I believe anyone started out with evil intentions.

I also don’t believe the problems we are facing were single handedly caused by a single actor. It’s a confluence of various factors that created the complex issues we face today. 

However, it’s also worth noting that if incentives continue to be positioned only towards ultimate power and profits, ethical considerations will naturally tend to take a back seat.

The combination of human intelligence in understanding our behaviour and the capitalistic climate we’re in, dominated by the technological empires of today, creates the perfect storm of increasingly difficult ethical lines to navigate.

The problems we face go far beyond the highly addictive apps.

The main concern I see is how we inadvertently have created an economy that allows for brain hacking and rewiring—the attention economy. Thus, raising generations of humans, through a social experiment we have no way predicting the results of.

The children and adolescents of today are developing through high exposure of technologies we barely understand ourselves. So, my thoughts goes way beyond thinking about myself and my Instagram addiction.

As Harris continues to claim, the world we live in today is becoming increasingly more complex than the world we knew before. The issues we are navigating go beyond what our institutions—the people supposedly responsible to keep us safe— can keep up with. But, again, it’s not their fault.

The ways we address the problems we face today are necessarily multifaceted. We can no longer rely on our institutions, because our institutions can barely keep up with the pace of innovation. As the world becomes more complex, so too does the solutions we need.

Stay tuned for tomorrow’s edition. I’ll uncover what I’ve found on what Stanford students learned in BJ Fogg’s influential class on Persuasive Technology. 

**Click the links above to jump to specific timestamps in the video below that address the key points highlighted.**

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If you have time, make time to watch this eye-opening talk or you can access a summary of this talk on bitesize.

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Follow along and read the previous editions of this series…

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This series feels like a public service announcement (PSA)—ideas I want everyone to be able to access. I’ve made it accessible and public for everyone to read.

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Thank you for spending some of your day with me.