S/R2 Behavior Modification as Means of Creating Identity in Lanier's "You Are Losing Your Free Will"

Lanier, Jaron. “You Are Losing Your Free Will.” Ten Arguments for Deleting Your 

            Social Media Accounts Right Now, Henry Holt and Company, 2018, pp. 5-24.

Summary

The first of ten arguments in his epicheireme, Lanier’s “You Are Losing Your Free Will” is subdivided into smaller metaphorical inductions that seek to persuade his audience, ostensibly anyone considering going off grid, that deleting social media from their lives is a necessary step towards salvation of human interaction in the real world (inflection on the word real is intentional a la The Matrix). The subdivided headings build a syllogism within his first argument that pools interviews from the creators of social media sites and cites their intent as well as the methods and trepidations for propagating their creation’s permeation of everyday life. The subdivisions are as follows:

WELCOME TO THE CAGE THAT GOES EVERYWHERE WITH YOU

In this section Lanier dives right in by likening actors engaged with social media to lab animals happily oblivious to their controlled conditions. The term social media, however, starts with the possession of a smart phone for Lanier, a clear connection to Harraway, as smart phones seem to be the impetus for the self-imposed cage he refers. Through willful participation in social media (i.e. the never-leave-home-without-my-phone-mentality) participants are “tracked and measured constantly, [sic] and receiving engineered feedback all the time” (5).  The engineered feedback is his focus in this section because the algorithms used by unnamed parties “gorge on data about you” (ibid) and use it to manipulate your actions for the purposes of commerce, among other things (more on that later). This manipulative is obsequiously referred to as “advertising,” but Lanier claims it is much more. He asks his audience not to be insulted when he suggests that they “might be turning, just a little, into a well-trained dog, or something less pleasant, like a rat or a robot” (7).

THE MAD SCIENTIST TURNS OUT TO CARE ABOUT THE DOG IN THE CAGE

Interviews from social media giants fill this section. They shed light on the mindsets of these creators as they began their sites as well as the immediate awareness of their unethical approaches to behavior modification.

Sean Parker (the first president of Facebook):

“We need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever…It’s a social-validation feedback loop…exactly the kind of thing a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.”                                (8)

Chamath Palihapitiya (former VP of User Growth at Facebook) on the effects of that social-validation platform:

“The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works…No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth…It is eroding the core foundation of how people behave by and between each other.”               (9)

How, you may ask, is a digital platform affecting body to body relationships? That’s coming up.

CARROT AND SHTICK

Here, Lanier takes the testimony from Parker and Palihapitiya as a lens for analysis of the algorithms used to modify behavior, invokes the name of Pavlov, and calls social media use addiction. “Using symbols instead of real rewards has become an essential trick in the behavior modification toolbox” (11) which allows for otherwise fully-functional human beings to be engrossed by the possibility of a shiny token or a mystery box or a new skin. And, further acquiescence to the deus apud machina allows for negative reinforcement by forging a relationship between not playing and denying a subject points or tokens.

THE ALLURE OF MYSTERY

This section catalogs the minutiae software developers sift through when designing algorithms intended to collect, process, replicate the data collected from a given subject and the metal vulnerability intended for exploitation. According to Lanier, the human brain will stop reacting to a specific stimulus if that stimulus does not, from time to time, exhibit variances in its origin or parameters. So, as a corollary, algorithms are engineered to create slight variances in the way they provide feedback to shock the subconscious into doubt. And, “when an algorithm is feeding experiences to a person, it turns out that the randomness that lubricates algorithmic adaptation can also feed human addiction” (15).

HEAVEN AND HELL ARE MADE OF OTHER PEOPLE

The allusion to Sartre’s No Exit serves to discuss the social pressures brought on through engagement with social media. The perceptions of other people, according to Lanier, amplify the lowest hanging fruit on the emotional tree: the negative ones. Here the actor is tricked into self-abasement as the behavior modification comes from the negative interactions rife on social media platforms and translate into the physical world, the body-to-body interactions thereafter as expectation.

Response

As “the addict gradually loses touch with the real world and real people” (11), so too does the domesticated animal change the way it understands its own actions and their products. Although at some point Lanier does concede that all human being engage in behavior modification at some point—whether in romantic relationships, parenting, social settings, friendships—the overwhelming intention behind the modification endeavored by social media developers and maintainers is to strip active participants of their free will under the guise of choice (choice to download, choice to add to the keyboard heroics or polemics). But that choice has been influenced to no end when in a digital space. If “advertisers” are measuring how long you sat before you bought something, how often you check for a notification, what you ate on a day you contributed to political dissent or discourse,  and using that data to manipulate the way you do those things in the future, then what choice is there.

Identity in the digital age seems to center on the ability to stave off the aspects of technology that create addiction, or at least, the factors that contribute to modification. I say this because if Lanier is correct, (and I realize I’m flirting with confirmation bias type research. My next article will champion for more tech, I promise.) then what Harraway claimed 30 years ago is true. The true self exists only as a mental projection because the perceptions of others are both manipulated and manipulating, affected and effected, and we return to the idea of a contrived solipsism.

For those of us who are uninitiated, solipsism theorizes that the self is all that can be known to exist. Yet, in the digital age where electronic signals bombard not only our own perceptions of self as well as the perceptions we carry for each other, then what awareness can be had in the first place? The actor addicted to social interaction via means of mediation is tricked into a mental projection of “self” dependent on what surrounding conditions have determined it to be. The lab rat subjects itself to tests as much as the seal pup befriends the Great White as much I invite my mother-in-law on fishing trips.