Episode 5 | A stormy conversation with Silicon Valley’s cherished devil
BJ Fogg sold his soul to Facebook. His tools made us scrolling animals. Unrepenting, the father of «persuasive design» still believes in improving our habits and pacifying the whole world through addictive technology.
People don’t talk with BJ Fogg: they book time slots with him. Fifteen minutes, that’s what he can afford to give away to each and every wannabe digital entrepreneur with a great idea in mind. Needless to say, every wannabe tech master would rather give up the idea altogether than give up on the chance to discuss it with BJ. It would be hard to blame them: Fogg has earned the nickname “The man who creates millionaires”, and few in Silicon Valley have reached that milestone without crossing his path.
Apparently, that kind of success is easy. So easy to fit into a formula that it has become Fogg’s signature: behaviour is the result of motivation, trigger and ability. Combine all three and you’ll have people changing the way they behave. Not to mention how they use technology.
When the formula was published, in 2009, in a paper titled “A Behavior Model for Persuasive Design”, developers understood right away that it was true gold for the new tech era. So much so that the model is still part of the lessons at the two-day bootcamps that Fogg offers monthly to selected attendants, for 4400 dollars per person.
At the time, Fogg was also teaching classes at Stanford University — the brain incubator of virtually every personality of the Valley, with the sole exception of Mark Zuckerberg — and he was also running the Stanford Persuasive Tech Lab. The list of those who attended it includes celebrities such as Mike Krieger, Instagram’s co-founder, Cristina Cordova, Stripe’s business developer, and Tristan Harris, a former Google employee usually depicted by the press as “the conscience of the Silicon Valley”.
It’s Harris — «A good friend», calls him BJ Fogg — who got his famous teacher in trouble.
An upsetting Ted Talk
After years in the business, and after sending out to his colleagues and bosses a much discussed document questioning the implications of Google’s products in everybody’s lives, Harris decided, in 2016, to leave the “Don’t be evil” company to become a whistleblower of tech giants’ efforts to get people hooked on their platforms.
A year later he gave an upsetting Ted Talk — upsetting at least for those outside of the Valley and its methods — showing the addictive features developed by the industry, and their effects on everybody’s attention, relationships, quality of life.
To make his point stronger, Tristan Harris named Standard Persuasive Tech Lab as the originator of such techniques.
Is BJ Fogg the devil of tech? He appeared in a public letter written by American psychologists on the risks of kids getting hijacked by screens. His name pops up in almost every discussion about digital addictions — although it goes without saying that the waiting list of aspiring millionaires knocking at his door has not shortened by a single person.
«I feel falsely accused. I didn’t even know what notifications were until a student of mine showed it to me, and people say that I am the one who designed them destroying people’s lives», he complains vigorously to me.
More Dr. Jekyll than Mr. Hide
I didn’t need to book a time slot with him. He is now craving to let the press know the following:
«Tristan Harris got it wrong: he just wanted to say that he came to know about the existence of persuasive design when he attended my lab. He apologized to me after that talk. I have nothing to do with people’s problems with their devices».
Over the last summer, I exchanged emails with BJ Fogg and spoke with him on the phone twice. He was very friendly, more of a Doctor Jekyll than the Mister Hide who I pictured to myself reading his masterpiece Persuasive Technology.
I reached him as he was on a family vacation in Maui, Hawaï. A hurricane was on its way to hit the island. Fogg’s family had gathered in one place and we had to interrupt communications more than once, out of various emergencies.
«I have never taught anybody to make somebody addicted to their technology. There’s no evidence: the press made it up», he started off.
Mass Interpersonal Persuasion focuses on changing people’s thoughts and behaviors. This new phenomenon will change the future of persuasion
Yet, in 2008 Fogg was in charge of the keynote speech at the Persuasive Technology Conference and attendants remember him cheering the era of «mass interpersonal persuasion», focused on «changing people’s thoughts and behaviours». Here are his words:
“A new form of persuasion emerged: I call it “mass interpersonal persuasion” (MIP). This phenomenon brings together the power of interpersonal persuasion with the reach of mass media. MIP focuses on changing people’s thoughts and behaviors, not simply amusing or informing them”, Fogg said.“The advances in online social networks now allow individuals to change attitudes and behaviors on a mass scale. MIP has six components: persuasive experience, automated structure, social distribution, rapid cycle, huge social graph, and measured impact” he pointed out. “Before the launch of Facebook Platform, these six components had never come together in one system. As tools for creating MIP become available to ordinary people, individuals and small groups can better reach and persuade masses. This new phenomenon will change the future of persuasion”.
The “bottomless bowl” of our addictions
It sure did. It turned us into scrolling animals and changed the future of Facebook from a playground-platform for having fun with friends to a money-making machine with 55 billion dollars of advertising revenues in 2018.
A fortune. Mostly thanks to the tools that Zuckerberg made available. Those that BJ Fogg taught the world.
The infinite scroll that keeps all of us hooked, anywhere from dating apps to Instagram? It comes from Fogg’s tech version of the “bottomless bowl” concept: as long as their scoop will find something in the bowl, users will keep going.
Likes and tags? Also from Fogg’s basket. They are powerful triggers of social reciprocity and social approval. If you are tagged, not only you will check right away who tagged you, and where. But also you will want to tag them, or like their posts, as soon as you have a chance.
The Follow button, or the “invitations to connect”? People feel bad if they do not reciprocate others’ requests. So much so that persuading people becomes easy. And building giant networks not that hard either.
The keynote, in fact, came after an extraordinary project at Fogg’s Lab. In 2007, Mark Zuckerberg had opened Facebook — 60 milions users at the time — to third-party developers. BJ and his students were among the first to develop apps for the social network, using persuasive techniques. In ten weeks, the class had harvested 16 million users and 500,000 dollars in advertising. That paved the way for everything that would come afterwards: from fake news to the attention economy hijacking our brains.
Without a single word of warning.
“Day after day, I saw how Facebook’s innovation would allow persuasion to take place, from one friend to another, on a massive scale never before possible. […] We will soon have tools that allow ordinary people — not just political parties and big insurance companies — to create and distribute persuasive experiences to the masses”, BJ Fogg said at the time.
Welcome to the Mass Interpersonal Persuasion era
The approaching hurricane winds were sending static through the phone. «I have no relationship with Facebook or anybody else. I have never consulted with Facebook, I never did», he responded when I asked him about his excitement, somewhat irritated by the question.
Yet, in that same speech, whose transcript is available online, Fogg disclosed that «until that moment», he had been on a non disclosure agreement with Facebook».
Either way, the Stanford professor did get it right. Frighteningly right.
So right that it’s hard not be surprised by the naïveté with which he welcomed the Mass Interpersonal Persuasion era, let alone the lack of ethical concerns revolving around it.
He disseminated enthusiasm and optimism throughout the whole 2008 keynote, on every aspect of the new technological possibilities. “One of the leading apps on Facebook has over 200 measurement points built into the code. They know how long people spend on each screen, what buttons get clicked, how many invitations get sent by new users, and so on. This gives creators a clear view of how people use their app and how modifications affect adoption and use”.
This kind of control is worrisome. Troubling. Analysts at Cambridge Analytica apparently used user data to target people and influence their votes during the U.S. national election, backed by foreign agents. That power can be used to control populations. To undermine their freedom.
Oddly enough, somebody very distant from Fogg in culture and belongings clearly saw those dangers. Seven years before the professor gave the speech and four years prior to Zuckerberg inventing Facebook. At the dawn of Internet as we now know it, semiologist Umberto Eco, 68 at the time, wrote: “The real Big Brother is what is now being discussed at privacy-related conferences, driven by powerful groups that control when we enter a website, when we pay with the credit card, what we order via mail”. The luminary from Stanford, with its tech connections, was out-played in foreseeing the future by an old, classicist academic.
When asked about it, Fogg framed the dynamics differently. «I wrote a paper for people to know that something was happening in the world, that things were changing forever, and that it could have been beautiful but dangerous as well», he explained. After a few seconds of silence on the phone, he offered a proof of his good will: «I even wrote a book about Facebook and kids. You have read my other papers: why don’t you take a look at that as well?»
I actually had. The book, titled “Facebook for parents, Answer to the top 25 questions”, came out in 2009 and was meant to reassure parents about how they could check what their children were doing on the platform and whom they become friends with.
He never tried to excuse himself
“If human nature were fundamentally bad, I would be worried about mass interpersonal persuasion. Certainly, this new power could have a dark side. But I believe we humans are fundamentally good”, was one of the lines with which he reassured his audiences.
A decade later, he hasn’t changed his mind. Reminded of those words, he never tried to excuse himself for the enthusiasm he showed. Or for the consequences of the findings he handed to the industry. He feels, and repeats, that there’s no good reason to blame him. «Thirty years ago people were already addicted to videogames and at the time I wasn’t even teaching persuasive design».
Ten years on, though, the dark side of people on social platforms has proved very easy to maneuver and exploit, whether by foreign agents or racists or whoever has a personal agenda and enough money to invest on data experts and social networks.
Nevertheless, the piling up of episodes hasn’t given him a second thought about the benefits of tech-driven persuasion.
Instead, he still explains that mass persuasion and behavioural design can be used to shape people’s habits in order to improve their lives. In what can appear as a grotesque mixture of Nietzschean and Orwellian visions, he still sells — literally — behavioural design as a means to generate a better mankind: healthier, wiser, persuaded to live a more decent life.
«I am advising companies who will help the world be a better place, such as health or financial companies», he explained passionately on the phone.
How these companies shape people’s habits doesn’t bother him. «People don’t get addicted to devices but to experiences they make on them», he said, dismissing my questions. If the experiences are designed to make you live better, they will just be catalogued as good habits: saving, running, eating healthy foods whenever your phone tells you so. Which, one could point out, is another way to become dependent on technology: but he hardly believes that there can be negative effects at all.
«I don’t think all technology is addictive, only a minor part might be. Generalizing is not useful: I do not believe that the more time you spend on Facebook, the sadder you get. Facebook has reached its goal of bringing people together!», he repeated more than once.
World peace in 30 years?
By chance, or maybe not, these are the same words (Facebook brings people together) Mark Zuckerberg chose to defend himself and his company when he came under fire for a spread of fake news, data harvesting and Russian interference in American elections.
Which is not surprising. Especially considering that Fogg has another strong belief: peace can be built. On Facebook.
«As soon as we were done with the Facebook apps class, I told my students: “Peace is possible in 40 years, let’s work on it!” We can invent peace using persuasion techniques on social networks.»
So far, ten years have gone by and Facebook has been blamed for a number of things that range from giving away people’s data, to the spreading of hate that led to the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar, or disseminating mass-shooting live-stream in Christchurch, New Zealand.
Not exactly a step in the direction of peace. But Fogg and his students still have thirty years to go.
Written by Gea Scancarello
