Quotes to whet your appetite.
So now we
reward people, as if they were lab rats, with little tiny morsels of
reward, whether they’re coupons, clickbait headlines, discounts, special
offers, prizes, and so on, and somehow, they always come back for more.
We don’t really know why — and so we don’t know what fire we’re really
playing with, that we’re toying with the basics of human neurobiology
itself, that every click’s effect is something like a heroin injection,
dopamine triggering adrenalin surging through the system. This
dopaminergic, which is to say, unidimensional approach to human
potential, is a behaviourist approach to human potential, and it is a
linear approach to human potential: the presumption is that through
systematic rewards that trigger just one kind of experience, over and
over again, fight-flight, adrenaline high, addictively, people can be
trained to become…what, precisely? I’ll come back to that.
And
yet the result even for us, the masters of this dopaminergic approach
to human possibility is a vicious cycle. We have to offer ever more
intense and more fleeting rewards than the next person. This is Amazon’s
game, Facebook’s game, Tinder’s game, Instagram’s game more or less.
Swipe. Don’t let it get away! There’s an endless universe of stuff out
there, and you’d better click now, unless you want to wander lost in it
forever. “You need your pretty little fix now, don't you?”, the
algorithm whispers. You’ve heard it and I’ve heard it, and we’ve both
responded desperately, too.
So what should we be doing? Giving people ways to express themselves. Not
their “better selves” or their “true selves” or any of the rest of it.
Just themselves. Aren’t we doing that? No. Are you kidding? We’ve
created a performative game, in which true self expression is mocked,
scorned, thwarted, and stifled. I’ll
leave that topic for the future. Suffice it to say that algorithmic
addiction is one the gravest new problems of now.
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