After my last post analyzing the YouTube recommendation algorithm, I began working on a column describing various ways we can defend ourselves and our children from it. But as I finished the first draft it became obvious that something was missing. I suspect most of you might not know what it is exactly we are defending ourselves from aside from some woke videos that Google may try to sneak into our feeds (or the feeds of our kids) from time to time. That is an important concern, but it leaves out the well-studied and documented psychological techniques the Big Tech cartel uses to addict us to its products in the first place. Once we're hooked, they can engage in manipulation based on the "push" they believe society needs to be more just and tolerant, or to enforce the establishment narrative on a particular issue.
Unsurprisingly, the overarching goal of the cartel is to get us to use its products as much as possible. They call that "engagement." The longer we spend using their products the more data they can collect from us, the more ads they can show us, and more we can be manipulated. If you've ever been at a restaurant or a family gathering and seen most of the guests on their phones instead of talking to each other, you can see the results in action. They succeeded. They got us and you're probably not an exception.
Engagement is crucial in technology because it powers what the industry calls the "network effect." The more people that sign up for a service the better that service gets, both for the company and for the users. And the more people that sign up, the more other people sign up. Once a company has scratched and clawed its way to a certain position in the market, the network effect takes over and new users arrive en masse on their own, prompted by their friends and family's use of the product. Facebook rode this rocket ship to capture almost half the planet as opposed to when it was limited to top-tier universities. Amazon Web Services has become the default cloud service provider for much of the technology industry in part because of the network effect, which is why it can cancel a Twitter competitor like Parler and leave it struggling to find an alternative (and probably why Parler chose to use AWS in the first place). It is difficult to compete against one or two major players in an industry in which most of the users were granted to them thanks to the network effect. Just ask Rumble.
So how does the cartel increase engagement in pursuit of market domination by way of the network effect?
Introducing "Persuasive Design." Persuasive design is "an area of design practice that focuses on influencing human behavior through a product's or service's characteristics." In other words, the cartel weaves certain psychological techniques into their products in order to get us to do what they want us to do. To be fair, this is not some industry secret on which I'm blowing the whistle. There is a lot of good information about persuasive design on the web, but the following overview of its principles and applications come from a 2020 book of one of its pioneers, BJ Fogg, a behavior scientist at Stanford and the founding director of the university's Behavior Design Lab.
That's right. Stanford has a Behavior Design Lab.
Billed as a self-help book, Fogg's "Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything :)" (smiley face his) is a primer on how the average person can use the techniques of persuasive design in order to affect positive change in his own life. Perhaps the runaway success of Fogg's techniques in addicting us to social media and online games has caused him to redirect his efforts in a more positive direction. Regardless, it serves as a window into the world of mass manipulation even if it wasn't written specifically about how the cartel does it.
The principle thesis of the book is that behavioral change does not have to be willed into being. It can be purposefully designed. In other words, you don't have to depend on sheer willpower to start losing weight or flossing regularly. You can hack your own brain and change your surrounding environment which will result in you losing weight or flossing regularly, no willpower required.
How? Behavior is achieved when motivation, ability, and a prompt all converge at the same time.1 Fogg represents this insight as the formula B=MAP. Motivation is your desire to do the behavior. Ability is your capacity to do the behavior. And a prompt is your cue to do the behavior.2 When all three happen at the same time, a behavior occurs.
This relationship can be represented visually in this graph.
When motivation, ability and prompt meet above the action line, the behavior happens. When they meet below the action line, it doesn't. For example, Fogg places "scrolling in bed in the morning" as a behavior in which MAP meets in the upper right of the graph. Put another way, people are highly motivated to scroll in bed, it's easy to do, and they are prompted when their phone's alarm goes off in the morning. So, it easily happens. Contrarily, "running in the morning" for most people is a behavior in which MAP comes together below the action line. Motivation is generally low, its relatively hard to get out of bed and go run, and the prompt is the same alarm as earlier. Therefore, running in the morning usually doesn't happen.
On the other hand, for those in military boot camp the MAP convergence point is different. When four crazed and bug-eyed drill instructors burst screaming into the squad bay where the platoon is sleeping, motivation goes way up. In this case, high enough so that MAP converges above the action line, even if ability is low, so running in the morning happens. Furthermore, after weeks and weeks of training, running becomes easier and ability slides to the right, pushing the convergence point to the right and closer to the upper right of the graph, where a behavior is practically guaranteed to happen (like scrolling in bed).
Similarly, Fogg insists, breaking bad habits is possible because all behavior, both positive and negative, consists of the same three elements (MAP). Adjusting one, two, or all three of them to place their convergence below the action line is key to breaking a bad habit. He writes, "you can decrease motivation or ability, or you can remove the prompt."3
An example of removing the prompt would be turning off notifications for social media if your goal is to stop checking it at work.4 Making a bad habit harder to do (moving A further to the left) is given by Fogg as keeping his TV in storage so in order to watch it he has to dig it out, carry it to the living room, connect it, and turn it on.5 Finally, an example of decreasing motivation (moving M further down) is by turning off the colors of your smartphone and making it greyscale in order to make it less appealing.6 This is one of my favorite things to do with a phone and I'll make a video about how to do it in the future.
The Big Tech cartel has done a masterful job in building these techniques into their products. As we now know, their goal is to keep us on their platforms longer by elevating our motivation, making their products simple to use and free of charge, and constantly prompting us to turn our attention back to them. Whether its infinite feeds, autoplay videos, gamification, "free-to-play pay-to-win" schemes, reducing friction in the purchasing process, or constantly pinging us with notifications, they have commanded our attention for years to our detriment. That isn't to say that these techniques can't be used for good. Duolingo is an example of persuasive design employed to positive ends. I certainly don't mind the brief periods each year when I'm addicted to learning a new language. That is until I inevitably stop when my motivation goes down and the MAP converges below the action line.
In conclusion, we can use this formula to our benefit in order to achieve technological autonomy. We can lower our motivation to use their products, make them harder to use or access, and silence or avoid the prompts that trigger us to return to them. We cannot depend on them to do this for us. In addition, we can disrupt the pipeline which their algorithms use to reach us, which will be the subject of the next post.
Last time I covered the insights provided by YouTube into their recommendation algorithm, and this week I touched upon the psychological foundation used by the cartel to keep us addicted (engaged). We will use that same foundation to defend ourselves from their tricks and to get our lives back in pursuit of preserving our American way of life.
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BJ Fogg "Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything" p. 19
Ibid. 20
Ibid. 205
Ibid. 208
Ibid. 213
Ibid. 217