“Doctor — are these habit forming?”

Look back over the last 15 years and think of which tech companies have changed how you live your life every day. Most people would name four companies: Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook (listed from oldest to newest). Together, they have over $500B in revenue, $2.6T in market capitalization (as of Dec 31st, 2017), and they dominate their respective industries. But — One of these four tech behemoths is not like the other, and represents a disturbing category of tech products. Let me explain.

Three of these companies — Apple, Amazon, and Google — make products and platforms that lead to improvements in productivity, output, and commerce. You already know what these companies have done: The Apple iPhone was a once in generation, world-changing product. Amazon has tried to disrupt, well, almost everything. Google revolutionized online information discovery.

The world would work less efficiently without these three companies. Their products help us build things, and they help us get stuff done. The impact is practical and tangible. Put a different way: what if these companies ceased to exist? Can you imagine your life without your iPhone, Amazon online shopping, or Google search? Our lives would be more difficult without them, and they would be sorely missed.

One of these things is not like the other

But what about Facebook? What has Facebook contributed to the world since it was founded nearly 14 years ago? The answer to this question must take the evolution of Facebook into account.

If you are under ~25 years old you may not know what the original Facebook was like. Facebook started as a simple website that allowed you to create a profile page for yourself, see your friends’ profile pages, and share content with them. My college friend and band-mate (I was cool once), Kyle, deserves credit for first telling me to “get onto this Facebook thing” when I was a senior at Duke University in 2004, and I signed up soon after. I loved that I could see what old high school friends were up to and get in touch with them. Facebook’s original incarnation largely was about checking profiles.

The old Facebook profile

It all began innocently enough, but Facebook changed drastically between 2006 and 2009. During this time, modern social media was born with the introduction of three features, and a big helping hand from Apple and Android:

The News Feed (September 6th, 2006) — Instead of clicking into your friends’ profiles to see what they were up to, profile changes were automatically populated into a news feed that you saw when you logged in. News feeds are a core feature of most social media sites and apps today. When the news feed was first introduced, Facebook faced backlash amid privacy concerns around notifying friends of profile changes, but as you probably know, we got over it — how far we have come. The News Feed reduced the barrier to consumption, and gave Facebook the power to decide what was relevant for the user. The Facebook Mobile App (July 10th, 2008) — Facebook was thrust into your palm, by your side at all times, as close as tapping an icon on your home screen. It takes me 3 seconds to unlock my phone and open the Facebook app, and I can do this anywhere, at any time. This study from 2013, though dated, suggests that people check their Facebook app 14 times per day. The number has surely increased since then. The mobile app further reduced the barrier to consumption. Imagine moving the cookie jar from your kitchen cabinet to being strapped to your belt 24/7. How many more cookies would you eat? The Like Button (February 9th, 2009) — This is where it gets interesting, because we have a reward-based feedback loop. Our relationships became quantified, and gameified. You know how this works: you post a manicured picture of you and bae toasting champagne flutes in an infinity pool in Bali during sunset, and wait for the likes to roll in while you bask in reflected glory. This feature worked because it played to our innate, human need to be validated, heard, admired, and, well — liked. Honorable non-Facebook mention: Apple’s Push Notification Service (June 17th, 2009) — This capability allowed apps to pop up notifications and add those fiendishly addictive little badges to their icons. These notifications and badges are the hooks that keep users engaged. Each notification led to a small dose of dopamine in the form of a new photo, comment, or post from a friend. Even now, I can barely resist tapping an app that has a notification badge, even if I already know what the notification is. Google launched an equivalent service for Android in 2010.

Does this picture make you anxious?

The News Feed built the foundation in 2006. Then, from July 2008 until June 2009, the modern Facebook kicked into high gear with the app, likes, and notifications enabled by machine learning optimization that showed you the most “relevant” (read: clickable, shareable, likeable) content, creating the always-on, never-ending dopamine loop that keeps so many of us scroll-scroll-scrolling like zombies and compulsively opening Facebook to check our notifications, while trapped in the filter bubble that keeps us blissfully isolated from opinions and realities that may conflict with our own. This was the archetype for Addictive Media Companies (“AMC”s) that followed: feedback loops, machine learning optimization, and strong hooks. Some had greater success than others, most notably Instagram, Snapchat, and mobile game companies.

The effects of this addiction were bemoaned by former Facebook employee and founder of Social Capital, Chamath Palihapitiya just last month. What used to be a collection of profiles is now like-bait, life-porn, and “news that you agree with”.

Not your dad’s Nintendo addiction

Back in simpler times…

Why are these so-called AMCs any different from radio, television, console video games, or other forms of entertainment that have existed for decades? The difference is that science has overtaken the limits of our biology — our senses, our neurons, and our sociology.

The difference between today’s highly optimized, feedback-infused, micro-dopamine-loop AMCs and their counterparts 10 years ago is the difference between Snapchat and myspace.com, the difference between Candy Crush and Super Mario Brothers, the difference between today’s Facebook app and Facebook.com in 2006. The former are designed through cutting edge science to be maximally addictive, and the addiction is accomplished through extensive testing, design, and analysis, often using scientific techniques that we are unaware of, and that few people without a PhD in statistics can understand. In some cases, we don’t even know why the algorithms work. Facebook mines incomprehensibly large amounts of user data to optimize what is presented to us. Mobile game makers create feedback loops within their games to maximize rewards vs challenge and compel us to buy in-game items that have no intrinsic value. Our brains never had a chance.

Radio, television, and old-school desktop/console game makers could not customize their content to the individual, based on an ocean of knowledge about that individual, with the ability to microsegment and rapidly test content using machine learning — all of it reinforced by the full force of modern technology. This is not “just what kids do today”, this is different.

Here is a hypothetical question: If Facebook knows all my friends, everywhere I go, my work history, my political views, what kind of pets I have, my relationship history, everywhere I have lived, what kind of clothes I wear, my professional history, which friends I like the most, what kind of music I like, what movies I like, what kind of articles I read, and then decides what piece of content to show me when I open the app — not to get philosophical here, but — do I still have free will?

Digital narcotics

And this brings me to my title. Google tells me that a narcotic is “a drug or other substance affecting mood or behavior and sold for non-medical purposes”. Narcotics are drugs that we use to feel better. They have no intrinsic value that will improve our health or long term happiness, often because tolerance builds up, we get addicted, and we use the product just to feel normal.

I assert to you that AMCs are nothing more than digital narcotic makers. For most people, they provide no more value than casinos, cigarettes, and sugary drinks. Within half a generation we may be looking at them as our generation now looks at added sugars, and perhaps as the prior generation looked at cigarettes, in terms of their addictiveness. The effects, however, won’t be on our bodies, they will be on the minds of generations that were raised compulsively scroll-scroll-scrolling their days away.

Put a different way: If Facebook and other AMCs ceased to exist, would you miss them? Yes, perhaps at first, but would you eventually feel a little happier and more optimistic about the world? Would the world be better or worse off? Would anything in your daily life be more difficult? Do AMCs help you build things? Do they help you get stuff done? For the vast majority of us, the honest answer is no.

What now, captain?

Do people use Apple, Amazon, and Google products addictively? Of course. Do people use social media in a healthy ways that actually help build and maintain relationships? Of course (if you have read this far, you are likely among them). But I propose to you that for most people, most of the time, the opposite is true.

Playing this forward 10–15 years, what kind of problems might we see if AMC use continues unabated?

The workforce — Despite age limits for most social media platforms, they are virtually impossible to enforce, and most kids start using social media around age 10. AMCs have existed in their current form since ~2010. This means that the kids who grew up with them all their lives will be turning 18 this year, and they will start attending college this fall. In four years or less, they will start entering the workforce. What kind of problem-solving, social, or developmental issues will we see in new students and workers that have grown up with AMCs, accustomed to writing out their thoughts in comment fields? How will they work with people who have different points of view? What will their interpersonal skills be like? Will they be able to sustain effort over years to accomplish a goal? Our democracy — A functioning democracy is dependent on an informed populace. Truth should not be customizable. The march towards a customizable truth began with the proliferation of cable news and radio channels that offered a menu of realities to choose from. This continued in online media and has reached its logical conclusion in social media. Thanks to the filter bubble, every single one of us can have our own version of reality. A misinformed populace is not only divided, but it can easily be taken advantage of. We are seeing it already. Relationships — What happens when human relationships are transactionalized? Tinder was the perfect product for the Facebook generation, making setting up a date (or filling a short-term need) as easy as liking your friend’s baby photo. When relationships don’t require investment, do they lose value? If they lose value, what will that do to the already declining marriage rate and improving divorce rates? There is some evidence to suggest that dating apps may ultimately improve dating markets by creating a “thick market” with more “transactions”, and opening opportunities for connections across groups where there was none before. If anecdotal evidence is worth anything, dating and relationships have been cheapened, but only time will tell what the long term effects of this are.

Fixing Frankenstein

Should we do anything about AMCs? Can we? We can start by asking ourselves how we approach other addictive products — caffeine, sugary drinks, alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, or whatever your favorite mood elevator is.

We must start with self control: everything in moderation. I deleted my Facebook app, and all my mobile games, but I still feel a compulsion to type in “facebook.com” in my mobile and desktop browsers. I have unfollowed pages that post clickbait (sorry Tasty), I get my news from sources that I trust instead of the news feed, I have unfollowed friends that I have no desire to keep in touch with (#sorrynotsorry), and I try to be aware of when I’m posting just to get a quick dopamine fix in the form of 50 likes (if you’re judging my number of likes as low, you might have a problem). I have not tried to quit cold turkey, because I believe the original incarnation of Facebook — the one that was meant to help you keep in touch with friends — is still a useful and healthy one, if I have the discipline to use it that way.

When it comes to children, the answer must be different. My wife and I have a baby boy on the way, and we plan to limit his social media consumption (or whatever form it takes in ~8–10 years) just as my parents limited my TV and sugar consumption when I was a child (it didn’t work, I love both). In my non-medical opinion, a child’s brain is basically a collection of raw nerve endings waiting to be programmed and set into place (there is a reason why you will always love whatever music you listened to when you were 14), and I dread the idea of my son’s norms for social interaction being programmed by AMCs’ algorithms. Studies have shown that social media usage is inversely correlated to happiness among teenagers.

Finally, some transparent self-regulation by Facebook (as the 900lb gorilla of its industry) would build goodwill with its users. Mark Zuckerberg has already vowed to fix Facebook in 2018. If Facebook puts guardrails around its algorithms to limit their addictiveness and abusability it would contribute to a sense of safety for the community. It would also be encouraging if the company made an effort to understand the impact of its product on users. For example: commission studies on how different algorithms affect overall happiness, and real-world performance in school or at work. We don’t know the answers to these questions, but we must.

The tragedy in all of this is that these companies have an obvious and immense power to do good for their billions of users — to inform them, to encourage meaningful human connections, to build social movements for people of all political inclinations. The AMCs of today are Frankenstein monsters compared to their predecessors, and frankly, I believe they are out of control of even the companies themselves. The drive towards more users and higher profits is too great. Employees will always be tempted to squeeze a little more out of their optimization algorithms to contribute to the bottom line, through no fault of their own — it is the only rational thing to do. Now that the genie is out of the bottle, it is up to us to take control of it ourselves.

All of this says nothing about the the fact that we may have built the infrastructure of the police state for ourselves — that’s another article for another day— but the next time you find yourself scroll-scroll-scrolling, stop and think for a moment if you are casually checking on how your friends are doing, or if you may have an addiction to digital narcotics.