Capitalism's Addiction Problem

When it comes to our relationships with technology, the signs of addiction are manifest. We are spending more and more hours online, sacrificing time with loved ones. Deprived of a decent Wi-Fi connection, we grow irritable. We risk life and limb to send texts from the road. In a 2019 Common Sense Media survey of 500 parents, 45 percent confessed to feeling at least somewhat addicted to their phone. Among parents whose children had their own phone, 47 percent said they believed that their kids were addicted too.

在與技術(shù)的關(guān)系中，我們上癮的跡象顯而易見。我們上網(wǎng)的時間越來越長，寧愿放棄與親人相處的時間。沒有良好的無線網(wǎng)絡(luò)連接，我們就會變得煩躁不安。我們寧愿冒著生命危險也要在路上發(fā)信息。非營利機構(gòu)“常識媒體”于2019年對500位家長做了一項調(diào)查，發(fā)現(xiàn)有45％的家長承認(rèn)至少在一定程度上對手機上癮。孩子擁有手機的父母中，有47％表示他們認(rèn)為自己的孩子也上癮了。

Many technology companies engineer their products to be habit-forming. A generation of Silicon Valley executives trained at the Stanford Behavior Design Lab in the Orwellian art of manipulating the masses. The lab's founder, the experimental psychologist B. J. Fogg, has isolated the elements necessary to keep users of an app, a game, or a social network coming back for more. One former student, Nir Eyal, describes the benefits of enticements?such as " variable rewards"—think of the rush of anticipation you experience as you wait for your Twitter feed to refresh, hoping to discover new likes and replies. Introducing such rewards to an app or a game, Eyal writes approvingly, "suppresses the areas of the brain associated with judgment and reason while activating the parts associated with wanting and desire." Indeed, that brief lag?between refresh and reveal is not Twitter crunching data--it's an intentional delay written into the code, designed to elicit the response Eyal describes.

許多技術(shù)公司的產(chǎn)品設(shè)計旨在讓人上癮。整整一代硅谷高管在斯坦福行為設(shè)計實驗室接受了奧威爾式大眾操縱方法的培訓(xùn)。該實驗室的創(chuàng)始人、實驗心理學(xué)家B.J.福格，分離出了使用戶對某個應(yīng)用程序、游戲或社交網(wǎng)絡(luò)欲罷不能的必要因素。福格曾經(jīng)的一位學(xué)生尼爾，埃亞爾描述了“不確定獎勵”等誘惑的成效—想想當(dāng)你等著推特消息刷新，以期發(fā)現(xiàn)新點贊和新回復(fù)時那奔涌而出的期待心情。將此類獎勵引入應(yīng)用程序或游戲中，埃亞爾贊賞地寫道，”會抑制大腦中與判斷和理性相關(guān)的區(qū)域，同時激活與渴望和欲望相關(guān)的區(qū)域”。事實上，刷新與顯示之間的短暫間隔并不是推特在進行數(shù)據(jù)運算，而是寫進代碼中的有意延遲，意在觸發(fā)埃亞爾所描述的那種反應(yīng)。

A growing chorus of critics is warning of the dangers inherent in such manipulation. Tristan Harris, a former technology designer at Google—and another former student of Fogg's—is a co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology. Harris has likened his iPhone to having “a slot machine my pocket," and indeed many of its features are similar to those of the most addictive games on any casino?floor.

越來越多的批評人士警告稱，這種操縱行為存在固有風(fēng)險。特里斯坦·哈里斯也曾是福格的學(xué)生，他擔(dān)任過谷歌技術(shù)設(shè)計師，現(xiàn)在則是人文科技中心的聯(lián)合創(chuàng)始人。哈里斯將自己的蘋果手機比作“口袋里的老虎機”，而這部手機的許多功能的確與最令人上癮的賭場游戲相仿。

Harris has worked to reveal the tactics companies use to keep us hooked. On YouTube, for example, the auto-play function deprives viewers of a natural moment at which to disengage. But it's not just that the site Keeps queuing up new clips for you to watch. YouTube's algorithms are designed to hold your interest by serving up content you can't resist, and the algorithms have gotten very good. As of 2017, users were watching a collective 1 billion hours of YouTube videos a day, more than 70 percent of which had been served to us in the form of algorithmic recommendations. Pause over that number for a moment: Nearly three-quarters of the YouTube videos we're watching have been fed to us.

哈里斯一直致力于揭示公司使用了哪些引人上癮的策略。例如，YouTube的自動播放功能剝奪了觀看者自然而然地從視頻中脫離出來的時刻。但這并不是該網(wǎng)站不斷在待播清單中新添視頻片段供你觀看這么簡單。YouTube的算法旨在通過提供令人無法抗拒的內(nèi)容持續(xù)吸引用戶的興趣，并且該算法已經(jīng)發(fā)展得非常完善。2017年，YouTube視頻的日均觀看總時長達到了10億小時，其中70％以上是以算法推薦的形式主動呈現(xiàn)給用戶的。暫停片刻想想這個數(shù)字吧：我們正在觀看的視頻中，近四分之三是“投喂”。

Digital life, we must remember, is still in its infancy, and the powers of the corporations that govern that life are still growing. Companies are studying what we search for, what nudges we respond to, and what times of day we engage in certain online behaviors. Soon, cameras and sensors will likely be tracking what frightens and amuses us, allowing data collectors to know more about us than we perhaps even know about ourselves.

別忘了，數(shù)字生活仍處于起步階段，而控制它的公司們?nèi)栽跀U大勢力。這些公司正在研究我們搜索著什么、對何種助推式營銷有所反應(yīng)以及每天什么時間進行特定上網(wǎng)行為。用不了多久，攝像頭和傳感器可能將追蹤記錄什么會讓我們恐懼，什么又會讓我們發(fā)笑，讓數(shù)據(jù)收集者對我們的了解甚至超過我們自己。

The suggestion that we need to be protected from such tactics might seem paternalistic, and if consumers were the rational actors who populate economics textbooks, it might be: A person could decide for herself whether to exchange some amount of privacy for the joy of viewing friends' photos or the convenience of tracking her heart rate. But the addiction economy relies on an asymmetrical exchange of information. Users are expected to willingly surrender their private information for access to services. The data collectors, meanwhile, fiercely guard their own privacy, typically refusing to disclose what information they have, whom they sell it to, and how they use it to manipulate our behavior.

我們應(yīng)被保護免受這類策略的操縱，這一提議似乎是家長式的，而如果消費者是住在經(jīng)濟學(xué)教科書里的理性行為人，情況可能會是：一個人可以自主決定是否讓渡部分隱私，從而獲得查看朋友相片的快樂或追蹤自身心率的便利。但癮性經(jīng)濟依賴于信息的不對等交換。用戶被期望為獲得服務(wù)而樂意出讓個人信息。與此同時，數(shù)據(jù)收集者則會嚴(yán)格保護自身的隱私，他們通常拒絕透露擁有什么信息、出售給誰以及如何利用這些信息操縱我們的行為。