Technology: December 2017 Archives
Sean Parker unloads on Facebook "exploiting" human weakness
Sean Parker, founding president of Facebook, told Axios that he's become "something of a conscientious objector" on social media:
"When Facebook was getting going, I had these people who would come up to me and they would say, 'I'm not on social media.' And I would say, 'OK. You know, you will be.' And then they would say, 'No, no, no. I value my real-life interactions. I value the moment. I value presence. I value intimacy.' And I would say, ... 'We'll get you eventually.'...
"I don't know if I really understood the consequences of what I was saying, because [of] the unintended consequences of a network when it grows to a billion or 2 billion people and ... it literally changes your relationship with society, with each other ... It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it's doing to our children's brains....
"The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them, ... was all about: 'How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?'
"And that means that 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. And that's going to get you to contribute more content, and that's going to get you ... more likes and comments....
"It's a social-validation feedback loop ... exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you're exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology....
"The inventors, creators -- it's me, it's Mark [Zuckerberg], it's Kevin Systrom on Instagram, it's all of these people -- understood this consciously. And we did it anyway."
'Former Facebook vice president of user growth Chamath Palihapitiya said that social media is "eroding the core foundations of how people behave" and that he feels "tremendous guilt" about creating tools that are "ripping apart the social fabric."...
'"You don't realize it, but you are being programmed ... but now you got to decide how much you're willing to give up, how much of your intellectual independence," he warned the audience. He said he didn't want to be programmed himself, emphasizing he "doesn't use this sh**" and his kids are not allowed to use "this sh**" either--also recommending that everyone take a "hard break" from social media....
'"The things that you rely on, the short-term dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created, are destroying how society works: no civil discourse, no cooperation, misinformation, mistruth," he said....
'"We curate our lives around this perceived sense of perfection because we get rewarded in these short-term signals--hearts, likes, thumbs up--and we conflate that with value, and we conflate it with truth. And instead what it really is is fake, brittle popularity that's short-term and that leaves you even more--admit it--vacant and empty before you did it, because then it forces you into this vicious cycle where you're like 'What's the next thing I need to do now because I need it back?'"'
