Free Is Evil
Tech’s Original Sin
In The Social Dilemma, the narrator asks a parade of tech reformers a simple question. What exactly is the problem with Tech? They have a lot of trouble answering. Here’s my answer:
Free is Evil.
How much do you pay for your email? Your search engine? Your social network? Your radio and TV? They’re all free. Americans spend about 11 hours each day engaging with free media, apps and websites.
Someone is paying, though. How much are the advertisers of the world spending for access to your brain? What are they buying, anyway?
When you use a free service, you are consenting to let someone inside your head, to change your behavior in ways that benefit them. You’re joining a behavior change program that turns your own behavior against you.
That’s why free is evil.
The Original Sin — Why Radio is Free
In the 1920’s, the technology emerged to broadcast AM radio widely and reliably. A transmitting station with a single antenna was now within reach of millions of potential listeners. Anyone who bought a radio receiver could listen. They could listen as much or as little as they wanted, to any station. And there was simply no way for a radio station to send the listener a bill for it.
Radio stations had to invent the free, advertiser-pays model to survive. Shows like Amos & Andy pioneered the use of cliffhangers to keep audiences listening through the commercial break. They learned how to use drama and storytelling to keep audiences coming back for the next episode.
People pay more attention to negative news, so radio news developed the bias for negative stories that has dominated broadcast news ever since. Short, catchy songs of 3 minutes or less fit best into an advertising-heavy model, so the music industry adapted to create music that played well on radio.
When broadcast television and FM radio came on the scene later, they adopted the same innovations. The rules are like this: develop content that exploits the evolutionary biases of the human brain to capture attention. Put more devices in more places (e.g., radios in cars, multiple TV’s in homes) to capture attention that hasn’t been harvested yet. And then re-sell that attention to the highest bidder.
Buying Your Life for 16 Cents an Hour
Free media grew from 0 minutes per day to more than 6 hours per day before the consumer internet. Americans consumed media by default in their cars, their homes, and often as background noise in their workplace as well.
And then the internet happened. Websites could easily track the number of visits and visitors, exactly the data needed for an advertising model. Consumers were not about to hand over a credit card every time they wanted to try a new website or read an article. There was too much friction and too little trust to do a traditional online transaction. So the free, advertiser-pays model grafted onto the internet era.
Today, it’s estimated that Americans spend 11 hours per day consuming free media, and using free apps and websites. The advertising industry spends about $633 for every adult in the US. When you put those two numbers together, it’s about 16 cents per hour to capture essentially all of our waking, nonwork time.
Imagine at the end of your life, someone asks you how you spent it. You spent a third of it asleep. Another third at work or school. And what happened to the rest? Advertisers paid tech and media companies to capture it and keep you glued to the screen. That was your life. They paid a laughably small amount, 16 cents an hour. For pretty much all of it.
Why did they do it? To make sure you’d spend every nickel you could earn or borrow on them. And it works! Most people end their lives having borrowed and spent money they will never repay.
From Selling Eyeballs to Selling Behavior
By 2020, Americans have laptops on their desk, iPads on the couch, and smartphones within reach from the moment they wake up to the moment they go to sleep. With searches and clicks we reveal almost everything we’re planning to do or buy. The mapping applications and GPS’s on our phones reveal where we are, where we’ve been and where we want to go. And so many of the things we do are based on an alert, suggestion, or search result.
That’s radically changed the advertising model. For example, you may need a plumber to fix a leaky faucet. You type something into a search engine. The search engine says, “Advertisers! I have a consumer in zip code 48244 with this buying profile who is looking for a plumber. Please bid on what a click from this person is worth to you.” In less than a second, an automated auction happens and the advertisers place their bids.
Then you click on the ad of the first plumber listed at the top of your search results. What just happened? The search engine is not just selling attention anymore. They’re not just selling the ability to put an ad in front of your eyeballs. They are actually selling behavior. The search engine gets paid when you do the behavior their customer wants. And their customer is the advertiser, not you.
It’s moving beyond clicks. With the right tracking enabled, online retailers can pay for conversions. For example, advertisers can pay the search engine based on how many people actually buy the item they show in the advertisement.
And it’s moving into the real world. When games like Pokemon Go launched, the companies behind them made a deal with the owners of bars, restaurants, shops, and other places that depend on foot traffic. A shop owner might pay per person who walks into their store based on the game directing them to go there.
Selling human behavior to the highest bidder is the business model.
Whose Goals Get Accomplished?
Every year on January 1, millions of people set out goals and resolutions for themselves. They want to lose weight. Eat healthier. Save more money. Exercise more. Finish their degree. Have a better relationship with their spouse, kids, or parents. Cut down on screen time. Spend more quality time with friends and family. Be happier.
And then those same people spend 11 hours a day using a set of user interfaces, that have their own goals. The goal of every social app and content website you visit? Harvest more of your attention for resale to advertisers. The search engine’s goal? Maximize its revenue from selling your clicks to advertisers. And the advertisers’ goal? Capture more of your current and future income.
The designer of a UI gets the behavior they design for. If you’re using someone else’s UI, they get to design your behavior.
Most people are sleep deprived. Why? They’re using UI’s that want to maximize waking, media-consuming time. Most people find it hard to save money and stick to a budget. Why? They’re using UI’s that want to maximize their spending. Most people find it hard to make time for offline priorities like exercise, quality time with friends and family, and time outdoors. Why? They’re using UI’s that want to maximize the time they spend glued to the screen.
The choice to use a device, app or website is a much bigger choice than most of us realize. As human beings, we can’t help being guided and influenced by the content we take in. We can’t help being influenced by the way choices are presented to us.
From Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely, to Thinking, Fast and Slow by Dan Kahneman, to Nudge by Thaler and Sunstein, the leading researchers in the field have shown that our decisions are not rational calculations of our best interests. Humans have a wide variety of cognitive biases and predictable irrationalities. Anyone who controls the UI can exploit these weaknesses to change our behavior.
If you’re using an app, website or media source that’s “free”, it’s designed to let someone into your head, for the purpose of changing your behavior. It’s designed to let them achieve their goals, at the expense of your goals.
It’s Just Not Safe
Not so long ago, a worker in a coal mine might say, “I’m strong and healthy. A little dust can’t hurt me. Why should I wear a respirator?” Marie Curie worked hands-on with radioactive isotopes, not imagining they could be harmful. Chairman Mao swam the Yangtze River, untroubled by pollution both fecal and industrial.
The twentieth century taught us that it’s not safe for human bodies to be exposed to radiation, dust, and chemicals of many kinds. Some exposures have immediate effects and others have long-term effects that take years to appear. People who disregard the risk because they’re healthy and strong today, may find they have an incurable chronic condition later.
In the twenty-first century, we are learning that it’s not safe for human minds to be exposed to some user interfaces. Technology designed to maximize attention capture and re-sell attention and behavior to the highest bidder is not safe for us to use. We’re like Marie Curie working bare-handed with radium.
One Trustworthy UI, not 100 Untrustworthy ones
Today, we use a lot of different UI’s. We use a search engine. We might look through a dozen websites for news and content, listen to a handful of radio stations in the car, and post our pictures to two different social networks.
The companies that dominate search, social networking, and online shopping have stratospheric valuations. The stock market believes that consumers will have to keep using these websites, so they will have a lock on our attention and behavior going forward.
I see a different future awaiting us. Just as we send a robot in to clean up a radioactive nuclear meltdown, we are going to have a “robot” standing between us and the UI’s that are out to manipulate us.
I might still have packages arrive from Amazon, have searches that use Google’s indexing and have messages delivered on WhatsApp. But that doesn’t mean I have to grapple with those UI’s directly.
It Takes a Robot to Fight the Robots
I will deal with my assistant — a piece of software running on my device or in the cloud. My assistant will deal with 100 hostile user interfaces for me. I will pay a monthly subscription, so I’m the customer and my assistant works for me. And I’ll bet I’m not the only one.
The model is similar to what Plaid created for personal finance. They put a friendly and intuitive piece of software between customers and the bank websites that were unfriendly and hard to use. At first,the banks couldn’t tell that it wasn’t a human logging in and using their site. After a while, the banks accepted Plaid and created helpful API’s for it.
Assistants represent both a huge opportunity and a huge peril. They will be the greatest engines of behavior change ever created. The schedules, alerts, tasks and communications handled by your Assistant will define your choices and your day.
We are already seeing assistants from Apple, Google, Amazon and others. Unfortunately, these Assistants from Big Tech are not likely to help. They are all “free” today, so their goals are not aligned with our goals.
If your goals are to eat healthier, get better sleep, and spend more quality time with your kids — will your Assistant shape your schedule and prompt you in those directions? Or will your assistant prompt you with a coupon for a drive-through Mocha Latte and suggest you watch some new videos on YouTube?
If the Assistant’s goal is to harvest your attention and sell your behavior to the highest bidder, your life will suffer. If the Assistant is asking you what your goals are, and helping you achieve them — your life will improve.
It’s our choice. But the choice may be irrevocable. Once you hand over control of your attention to an Assistant that is out to farm and harvest you — you’re not going to see articles like this anymore.
It’s not going to let you.
