We live in an era where computing power has gotten so cheap that every person has a feed tailored for them in the apps they use. The feeds are no longer just “what’s new” but “what specific content will keep this one user glued to the screen.”
This is paired with everything converging to apps is creating more opportunities than ever to induce addiction.
Take recipes: many of those reside on short-form video platforms like TikTok. A user consults a recipe video to know how many tablespoons to use, and before they know it, 45 minutes have passed. This is by design – a combination of the short-form format, the recommendation engine putting desirable videos next to it, auto-play of those other videos, etc. Facebook and YouTube have a feature to limit short-form videos because of the way they are engineered to be addictive, but those features are intentionally made dysfunctional such that an addicted user’s feeds always end up inundated with these videos.
Or take the news: these are now largely consumed on social media platforms. Well Facebook has a bunch of AI-generated rage bait on its platform alongside or as news content that manipulates users emotional state for the purposes of keeping them engaged and therefore generating advertising revenue. They are aware of the damage this content inflicts on their users (famously Facebook manipulated users emotions for a study without informing them) as well as the harms peddling misinformation/disinformation does to society more broadly, but they embrace it because it’s profitable.
Now with recent advances in machine learning, ever-more sophisticated means to induce these unhealthy relationships with screens are surfacing. All of this costs money but it’s the user’s attention that is the commodity being sold to pay for the servers.
We’ve seen panics around screen time before; television and video game use in the nineties come to mind. The distinction here lies with the constraints inherent to pre-Internet tech as compared to a bottomless feed of content produced in a calculated way to manipulate specific individuals. I do not believe we are sufficiently alarmed.
Not that we can just go cold turkey, because these screens are becoming necessary for even the most mundane tasks such as operating a vacuum cleaner or entering a sporting venue. Their combined convenience and cost-cutting potential ensures their expanded integration. Facebook, meanwhile, remains one of the only online spaces accessible across generations for clubs and neighbourhood groups.
Given these realities priority should instead be to foster healthy boundaries, and that won’t happen when so much of what people use is designed to be habit-forming.
The only way forward is if knowingly inducing addiction becomes a financial liability to quarterly profits. For that, we need government policy with teeth. Lessons learned from how cigarette makers were managed need to be applied on tech companies. Their products are not too dissimilar; both ostensibly provide satisfaction and are addictive – one through chemical means, the other by weaponizing psychology.