Kicking Facebook, Part 1
It’s time to break the habit , reclaim control, and rebuild the social fabric — here’s why.
It’s New Year’s resolution season, and here’s mine: this year I’m leaving Facebook, and I want to take as many of you with me as possible.
To be honest, kicking Facebook is long overdue for me. It stopped being fun years ago. It became a habit, and one I struggle to control. I imagine it’s about the same for you. Everyone knows that Facebook is addictive and that nearly two billion of us are hooked.
Like companies that sell tobacco and gambling, Facebook recognizes that a lot of the people who use it do so compulsively, and they publicly acknowledge that this may be a problem. In general, companies that sell addictive products try to put the onus on consumers to control their own impulses, telling us to gamble, drink, smoke, responsibly.
But, as with gambling, tobacco, and other addictive products and experiences, we are not the problem here. Facebook isn’t addictive because we’re weak-willed — it’s addictive because Facebook is carefully designed to exploit our natural human tendencies and to override our self-control, so that we will spend more time using its apps and websites. Facebook’s founding president, Sean Parker, has told us this, publicly, in recent months.
As a company, Facebook has made a long series of decisions about what features and functions to build, and a lot of those have served to make the site and apps more “sticky.” With every decision to increase “user engagement,” Facebook has taken away some of our autonomy and reduced our freedom to choose when and how much to use the platform. And with every moment of our time it captures and every bit of our self-control it overpowers, Facebook gains more money, power, and influence.
Facebook treats us a lot like tobacco companies have treated smokers — with exploitation, manipulation, disrespect, and disregard for our well-being. It’s an abusive relationship that has to end.
This is part 1of a 4-part series.
Read Part 2: It wasn’t always this way… how and why Facebook became a dystopian dopamine engine.
Read the whole shebang, in one, nearly 5,000 word essay: Kicking Facebook
