Episode 250: TANA Addiction Through Engagement

September 18, 2024

Central Thesis

Ad-supported media exploits human psychology to create addiction to devices, prioritizing engagement and profit over safety and genuine connection. This engagement fuels surveillance capitalism and potentially incentivizes the development of technologies like self-driving cars to maintain or increase device usage, even at the cost of societal well-being.

Key Arguments

• Addiction by Design: Phone apps are deliberately engineered with addictive qualities, drawing inspiration from slot machine design to manipulate users into constant engagement.
• The Illusion of Connection: Social media encourages excessive online interaction, fostering superficial relationships at the expense of deeper, more meaningful connections due to the limits of human mental bandwidth.
• Surveillance Capitalism's Incentive: Tech companies profit by collecting user data and selling targeted advertising, creating a financial incentive to maximize user engagement, even if it leads to addiction and societal harm.
• Accidents and Distraction: Increased device usage contributes to rising accident rates, as individuals become distracted while walking or driving.
• Self-Driving Cars as a Solution for Tech Giants: Self-driving cars could be a solution to maintain or grow user engagement on mobile devices, allowing users to safely use devices without focusing on driving, therefore generating more user data and increased ad revenue.
• Regulatory Failure: Individual efforts to resist device addiction are unlikely to succeed without legal regulation to curb the addictive features of apps.

Notable Passages

• "It was really this race for who can manipulate our social instincts better. Who can find a more creative way to get you pulling like a slot machine to check that thing more times in a day."
• "The designers of these machines did not, limit the tricks of their trade and keep them in casinos. Their books on game development were read by other people. Sometimes, big companies lured these programmers away from the slot machine industry to help them design, you guessed it, phone apps."
• "Encouraging people to speak online as much as possible is in the tech giants' best interest."
• "Is it possible that self-driving cars are being developed as a way to allow increasing personal device use and therefore encouraging the hours of platform engagement to grow? Is that a huge reason people are trying to develop self-driving cars today?"

Rhetorical Approach

Jim uses a combination of personal anecdote (his union article, the driver being disciplined), expert testimony (Ian Bogost, Shoshana Zuboff, Natasha Dow-Schul, Jesse Singer), analogy (comparing phone apps to slot machines), and rhetorical questions to build his argument, often employing a sarcastic and cynical tone to express his frustration with the current media landscape.

Connections

• Previous Episodes: Mentions Episode 47, Episode 134, Episode 170, Episode 212, and Episode 53.
• Ian Bogost: Refers to his 2021 Atlantic article, "People Aren't Meant to Talk This Much."
• Shoshana Zuboff: Quotes from her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.
• Jesse Singer: Refers to his book There Are No Accidents.
• Tristan Harris/KMFDM: Uses KMFDM backing Tristan Harris talking about what tech companies are really doing in the opening.
• Jesse Brown: Quotes Jesse Brown of Canadaland podcast.
• Robin Dunbar: Explicitly names Dunbar and the Dunbar number of 150 social connections.