Siddharth’s Preface: Assessing Incentives Behind Media & Technology
Over the past decade, consumer technology companies have built a digital world dedicated to driving engagement. Employing an army of the brightest, most talented individuals in the world, they develop more and more captivating experiences that stimulate a sensationalist digital escape. As we complete one of the most transformative decades in human history, it’s imperative to reflect on what makes us human, and what the forefathers of technology intended with their inventions. I’m an undergraduate student with a deep interest in the long-term relationship between humans and technology. I’m currently building a company that seeks to fundamentally change the way we interact with technology and have spent the majority of my college career understanding the inequities that exist in real access to the digital world. The following consists of my take on the near-sighted efforts of technology companies and governing bodies to exploit innate human nature as a means to capital gain.
Technology has enabled a new way to research, make calculated predictions, and allowed the simple organization and distribution of information. As computers shifted from a research tool to a more organized encyclopedia, they have given our species superhuman abilities, and smartphones have made us omniscient. Given the low barrier of entry to engaging with media, armies of engineers and doctorate educated academics can be seen flocking to social media companies and have been able to engineer extremely efficient dopamine responses. We’ve developed a consumer technology industry quantifying its success through engagement as a metric, enslaving the minds of billions as a vehicle to financial success. Simultaneously, its effects haven’t gone unnoticed, with skyrocketing rates of depression and loneliness that have never been seen before, social media addiction is endemic across all age groups at the same rates as tobacco addiction was seen during peak decades in the 1960s-1980s.
Half a century ago, those envisioning what infinite and uniform access to information meant for humanity would have likely hypothesized that it would bring extreme unity.
When the most successful forms of media are focused on sensationalist content to captivate its consumers, the dispersion of information obviously becomes a source of entertainment rather than education. The introduction of the 24-hour news cycle meant filling every minute of every day with captivating news stories resulting in the creation of polarizing news stations run by ideologues. Built for events like the insurrection at the US Capitol, school shootings, and most notably, 9/11, the 24-hour news stations will never tell its viewers, in between such heavy and sensational events, that nothing is going on.
Instead, they leverage relatively mundane events to generate intense emotion in its viewers, and thereby, controlling their uniform opinion as well. This lack of moral incentive can be seen further in the disappearance of local newspapers, which tend to be focused on bringing the highest quality information to its readers especially with some of the biggest investigative stories (The Miami Herald, The Willamette Week, The Chicago Sun-Times, and The Boston Globe which was featured in the film Spotlight).
It is widely known that when information delivery has a financial incentive, satisfying a consistent audience takes precedence over delivering quality, oftentimes difficult, information. The creation of a large loyal audience is extremely important to social media and news outlets; the consistent audience they have is the product they are selling. This is especially seen with the largest social media companies today. Companies with millions of non-paying daily active users find that milking every second of attention users can give their application strengthens their value proposition as a media company, but results in the only avenues to the digital world extremely toxic and addicting. The digital world has created immense amounts of value, through incredible communication around the globe, and infinite access to information. The financial incentives that motivated the companies that serve as the only avenue to the digital world corrupted the quality of interactions and communications the forefathers of technologies originally intended on being pivotal to unity and upgrading humanity.
As we use humanity as a currency to serve the markets, the motivations of the corporations controlling the social fabric, and the development of the digital world are sourced from GDP, not the wellbeing of humanity. This is really absurd given the gravity that is the creation of a world that is populated by unfiltered human emotions. Morally incentivizing the progression of humanity, rather than financial success, means creating less addicting platforms, and at a high-level, a fundamental restructuring of global economic metrics. To measure the well-being of a people requires a metric far more nuanced than gross domestic product.
In addition to GDP and job statistics, the government should adopt measurements such as median income and standard of living, levels of engagement with work and labor participation rates, health-adjusted life expectancy, childhood success rates, infant mortality, surveys of national well-being, average physical fitness and mental health, quality of infrastructure, proportion of elderly in quality care, human capital development and access to education, marriage rates and success, death of despair/despair index/substance abuse, national optimism/mindset of abundance, community integrity and social capital, environmental quality […]
Excerpt from Andrew Yang’s The War on Normal People (p. 201–202)
If the digital world was built on principles incentivizing the betterment of humanity, I believe that the development of the digital world would have been starkly different. Providing real value to a human’s life doesn’t involve capturing intense attention for several hours a day and doesn’t require a separate digital world. Rather than detracting focus from the physical world to a digital world, humans would leverage technology to enhance the experience of existing in the physical world. I imagine humans would have access to a really well-integrated communication platform that is more an extension of ourselves and have seamless access to information (similar to how we access our human memory, we’d access organized online information), all of which remains an invaluable aspect of technology today. By shifting the focus of media companies away from engagement and towards meaningful interactions with information would allow humans to be the emotional species we’re supposed to be, however more informed.
