On Technology and the Profit Motive, How it’s Destroying Free Will and Destroying our Mind
In this late stage, contemporary form of capitalism, the advancement of technology, and more specifically social media, has been hailed by the apologists as “innovation!” and somehow proof the greatness of the “invisible hand” of the market, and somehow evidence of the profit motive working. This quite literally could not be further from the truth.
Social media, in its purest form under 2021 capitalism, is sheer fire proof that profit for the rich is put over the needs of the entire world. To understand what I mean, we must understand the way modern social media works, and then we can look at the disgusting manipulation of our minds and the evil hindering of free will for every single human being on social media.
Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Pinterest, all the big tech companies residing in Silicon Valley have all had former employees recently open up about the practices that the engineers and designers at these corporations take part in.
Addiction. When going onto your phone and opening up a social media app, you are building an unknowing dependency and addiction to the designed dopamine splurges the apps give you. This isn’t an accident. In modern day, late stage capitalism, attention has been privatized and turned into an industry in the market. Advertisers pay companies billions of dollars for attention that the users of these companies give them and their ads. Let’s think. If I am an advertiser, how will I know which company to invest my capital into to promote my product? The answer is clear, whichever company gives me the most engagement. Heads of companies must provide these advertisers with hoards of data to convince advertisers to invest into their users’ attention. We, the users of these sites and apps, are not the customers, we are the products. The advertisers and investors are the customers, buying and then selling our attention for a profit.
So the question then becomes, how can these corporations guarantee users’ attention? Developers of Facebook have designed algorithms that target areas of the mind the average person has zero knowledge of, with the goal of manipulating these sectors of the mind to make you psychologically dependent on these social media corporations. Specifically, they create algorithms that target your pleasure receptors, the same way a drug does. Consider for a second the refresh feature of Instagram. This action is based on slot machines at casinos, where every time you pull the lever, you don’t know what’s coming next. Psychologists call this “intermittent reinforcements’’, sometimes when we check social media, there is a reward for us, other times there is not. Imagine for a second your feed was designed like a Google search page, where you can make the conscious decision to press onto the next page. This allows you to look up, check the time again, and get out of the social media bubble. The infinite feed is one of purpose and one to keep you hooked into the app. It is a feature to maximize and exploit your attention. There are more too. Catherine Price, writing this in Science Focus explains further, “Our phones and apps also take advantage of our inherent social impulses and anxieties, including our fear of missing out (FOMO) and the impression that we need to reciprocate when we feel someone has done something for us. Take, for example, those ticks on Facebook, WhatsApp and other platforms that indicate when your friend has read your message. Your friend knows you’ve seen those ticks, so there’s now a social pressure for them to respond. You might even get emails telling you that you have unread messages and notifications, piling on the pressure to log in, lest you miss out on some news or leave someone hanging. And then there are those little dots that indicate when someone is in the process of replying to your message.” It’s clear, the moment you open the app, AI deploys these psychological tools to keep you hooked. And this isn’t some conspiracy theory either. In The Social Dilemma engineers and designers of Facebook open up about all of this. They open up about how a plethora of engineers employed within Silicon Valley for these different social media companies took classes to learn more about how they can exploit the mind. Every little thing involved in the creation of the platforms is designed to increase your attention and dependency. It’s the same reason that the picture you got tagged in, isn’t in the notification or email the company sends you, when you get tagged. they need you to open up the app so they can deploy these psychological tricks on you and manipulate the decisions you make, to maximize your attention, because that’s how they profit.
It gets worse too. We all hear about the amount of sheer data these companies have of our actions online. Every little thing we do, like how much time we spend on post x, how much time we spend opening messages versus watching videos… every little thing you choose to do online is tracked and then kept in the vault for AI. By the day, AI is getting closer and closer to perfect at predicting exactly how we act. Put it this way, if the engineers behind the companies are creating algorithms to coincide with the psychological tools deployed to increase dependency, AI has knowledge of both, and can predict how you will react to changes in your feed, changes to the app, etc. AI, and the engineers deploying, are able to know exactly how you will react to any change in the app. They are able to enter your mind, manipulate your mind, and then use that manipulation to know exactly how you will respond to tech change. Jaron Lainer, computer philosopher and scientist, “describes as sinister the way the big digital media companies use algorithms to discover things about you that you haven’t revealed directly. Their business model involves finding the ways of attracting and holding your attention so that you can be influenced by advertisers, politicians and other paid clients for their purposes, not yours. A vast amount of data is collected about you, moment to moment, including your facial expressions, the way your body moves, who you know, what you read, where you goes, what you eat, and your likely susceptibility to assorted attempts at persuasion”
It moves beyond social media as well. Within Google, algorithms have made it so that depending upon your interests, behavior, location, and other deciding factors, the search suggestions and then actual search results are different from person to person. Let’s take the keyword “climate change” for example. Depending on where you live, what the media coerce you into interacting with, and what you engage in, the results for searching that word will quite literally be completely different. It puts users into two different realities, two different worlds, where the perceived truth can’t even be treated as such.
What happens when the engineers behind AI can force a reality upon you? What happens when you cannot find facts? What happens when you go onto social media, and AI can predict to perfection how you’re going to react to said posts or videos, and can push said posts or videos knowing you will react like that? Our decisions aren’t freely made anymore. Quite literally, we aren’t free. We can’t be. The algorithms have got to the point where they know our minds better than we do, and make us make decisions based off of dopamine surges and addiction, among a plethora of other psychological hacks. Free will is no longer a thing in this contemporary form of capitalism, because free will isn’t profitable.
Every time you open up a social media or search engine app, it is a game of you versus the AI that is manipulating your mind. The AI enforces algorithms that will hit parts of your mind that you have zero control over, forcing you to stay on the app for hours longer, causing your brain to become mentally dependent on the dopamine the app gives you, and to repeat this process at an exponential rate over and over again, to maximize advertiser profit. It is a new and hypermodern form of class antagonism. It is a new form of capitalist versus the rest. It is a new form of profit vs. need, and profit is winning.