@lotlizard
in detail.
'Our minds can be hijacked': the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia
It is a wake-up call for those who were not yet aware of the addictive and manipulative design spread through the internet's social media or just are in denial about it.

I think it deserves an essay of its own. It is also excellent in explaining how the manipulative thought control has influence on the political process. A lot of details in there.

Harris is the student who went rogue; a whistleblower of sorts, he is lifting the curtain on the vast powers accumulated by technology companies and the ways they are using that influence. “A handful of people, working at a handful of technology companies, through their choices will steer what a billion people are thinking today,” he said at a recent TED talk in Vancouver.

“I don’t know a more urgent problem than this,” Harris says. “It’s changing our democracy, and it’s changing our ability to have the conversations and relationships that we want with each other.” Harris went public – giving talks, writing papers, meeting lawmakers and campaigning for reform after three years struggling to effect change inside Google’s Mountain View headquarters.
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Tech companies can exploit such vulnerabilities to keep people hooked; manipulating, for example, when people receive “likes” for their posts, ensuring they arrive when an individual is likely to feel vulnerable, or in need of approval, or maybe just bored. And the very same techniques can be sold to the highest bidder. “There’s no ethics,” he says. A company paying Facebook to use its levers of persuasion could be a car business targeting tailored advertisements to different types of users who want a new vehicle. Or it could be a Moscow-based troll farm seeking to turn voters in a swing county in Wisconsin.
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Harris believes that tech companies never deliberately set out to make their products addictive. They were responding to the incentives of an advertising economy, experimenting with techniques that might capture people’s attention, even stumbling across highly effective design by accident.
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All of it, he says, is reward-based behaviour that activates the brain’s dopamine pathways. He sometimes finds himself clicking on the red icons beside his apps “to make them go away”, but is conflicted about the ethics of exploiting people’s psychological vulnerabilities. “It is not inherently evil to bring people back to your product,” he says. “It’s capitalism.”

That, perhaps, is the problem. Roger McNamee, a venture capitalist who benefited from hugely profitable investments in Google and Facebook, has grown disenchanted with both companies, arguing that their early missions have been distorted by the fortunes they have been able to earn through advertising.

The first time I became aware of the addictiveness of online usage was when we visited my niece, we expected to die within months. My son and I, her mother and her two best male partners in her life, came to NYC to visit her from Germany, the West Coast and from DC. We all were silently thinking it might be the last time we see her. ...

I remember very well, that all of them (aside from my sister who is illiterate in compuser usage) and my son, who didn't have a laptop or smart phone at that time, were intensely captured by what everyone was reading on their laptops. There was no conversation going on. A scary silence among all of us sitting in her living room. My sister suffered under it. When she finally had a "good talk" with her daughter in person, after haveing spent days with her in her apartment, she was so relieved that she started to cry. That was 2013.

Later on I could witness the total addiction to smartphone and laptop reading, as described in the article. People go with their phones and laptop to bed and wake up with them. They escape into them.
My son does, I am doing it now, his girlfriend as well. The smartphone manages and directs any hour or minute of your life.

And worse, it becomes the managing tool of your superiors at the workplace. The last three jobs my son had, ALL communication between his direct superior to him went over the smartphone via text messaging. The superior often was a no show as a manager, but his workers were there to do the phusical work all the time. My son showed me pages and pages of text meassages from his manager to him and his own responses.

At the same time managers, who are present at the work place, threaten their employees when they see them using their smart phones, even if the employee just texted or transferred images to their manager about the status of their jobs, as was requested of them. It really doesn't get anymore abusive and stupid.

For example, installing solar panels or working in landscaping, the employees have to send out before and after images of their work completed via their smart phones. (Of course it's the employees' private smart phones, they have to have it and pay for it on their own). They also get threatened if they haven'f finished their jobs in a timeframe the managers want them to get the job done. A landscaping job can be as stressful to fulfill as working a factory job trying to keep up with the speed of the conveyor belts that way.

My son and his girlfriend get text messages about their schedule changes like 3:30 am on their phone to come to work at 5:30 am, when they were told the evening before they would work 10 am to 6 pm. And that happens all the time.

Ok, I get pissed off again, I better shut up.

The article is excellent and I am actually amazed that it was published. Very much worth a read. It's a long one though. Be prepared.

A bit like J. Robert Oppenheimer regretting having helped bring A- and H-bombs into the world …

“Our minds can be hijacked”:
The tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia

Google, Twitter and Facebook workers who helped make technology so addictive are disconnecting themselves from the internet. Paul Lewis reports on the Silicon Valley refuseniks alarmed by a race for human attention