A Sense of Doubt blog post #1646 - 20 minutes into the future - anger is a commodity

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1646 - 20 minutes into the future - anger is a commodity

So, Warren Ellis has been serializing a three-part essay by Daniel Harvey in his newsletter.

Harvey writes on SUBSTACK -- https://20minutesintothefuture.substack.com/ -- and looks critically at technology and how we need to re-think how we use technology, what business models we apply to it, and how we counteract the changes it is making for our lives and our sanity.

The most powerful idea here, though not surprising, is that anger is a commodity. Of all the clickbait lures, outrrage fuels the most activity and drives the advertisers trolling for clicks to ever great shocks in the endless clutter and noise that the Internet has become if one participates in it as the great corporations wish each of us to do.

There are key lines in the upcoming content that I adore:

"At the centre of all this are “data factories” and “attention merchants” like Facebook and Twitter. They are all attempting to capture your most scarce resource — your attention — and take it hostage for money. Your captive attention is worth billions to them in advertising revenue."

and

"Because of this, social media makes outrage more prevalent AND more potent at the same time.
It’s more prevalent because social media platforms make it a lot easier to express outrage."

Part one posits that anger is the main commodity of the new social media; part two examines the cost of the "bad stuff" living rent free in our heads and if social media turning us into assholes. Should we nuke all out social media accounts?

Part three examines how nuking the social media may not be the right choice, and for many, not possible.

And so, the solution is a re-consideration of how we utilize and relate to social media as well pushing the space into a new business model that is not advertising driven, which Harvey's company THE DOTS is working to do.

The thing is that fear and a desire for human communication across vast distances as well as narcissism drive social media interactions, too.

I feel I have found ways to be nearly anger free in how I use media. Sure, there are times that outrage takes hold and I post here on the blog about something that I find horrible or untenable, such as this one on detention centers and this one on mass shootings.

I invented my "state of the hate nation" category to house these posts. And yet, it has 44 entries and music has 361, comic books contains 215. and even gratitude has 24. I should hope to boost posts that relate to gratitude or things that I like (119) while keeping the number of hate nation posts under the totals of these others.

Think for yourself. Read on and see if Harvey's commentary resonates with your own experiences. Despite trying to avoid anger online, I get what he's saying. It's real and it's all too common.

++ 20 Minutes Into The Future with Daniel Harvey

20 Minutes Into The Future is a critical look at how technology is shaping our lives today and what actions we can take for a better tomorrow. It is written by Daniel Harvey, a digital product designer currently based in London. But he lived in NYC for 20 years so expect him to say “fuck” an awful lot. You can subscribe on Substack. Let's see what Dan has on tap for us this week.

Outrage is the business model

“We sell ads, senator.” The business model of social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Google is advertising. These companies have innovated everywhere but in their revenue streams. Advertising is very much a 20th century revenue model. What's more, out of those three companies, only Google has any other sources of profit.

Each company started by focusing on rapacious audience growth first. The business model was an afterthought. Something to graft on after the fact. As a result advertising has become an assumed default by VCs and other tech companies. Now it's the community that's the afterthought as ethical failure after another proves.

That business model is why they have North Star metrics like Daily Active Users. They need your eyeballs to make money. The more time you spend on their platforms means you’ll see more ads. God forbid, you might even accidentally click on one of the damn things. This is also why you see ads in more and more places: not only in the core feeds but in stories, messages, and more.

This is why our once quirky, random, charming web has devolved into one colossal attention harvesting mechanism. The Internet is chock full of “commercial junk” in the words of Tim Wu. At the centre of all this are “data factories” and “attention merchants” like Facebook and Twitter. They are all attempting to capture your most scarce resource — your attention — and take it hostage for money. Your captive attention is worth billions to them in advertising revenue.

Facebook's "reactions" are based on decades old junk science. American Psychologist Paul Ekman surmised that all humans, everywhere, experience and express the same six basic emotions in the same way. Margaret Mead’s anthropological studies debunked Ekman's theory with vim and vigor. But it’s simplicity makes it resilient and so it comes in and out of vogue with tech companies as they try to monetise around our emotions. The obvious downside is systems that only let us express ourselves with these limited emotions risk reinforcing them in a terrible self-fulfilling loop.

What's worse is the fact that some emotions are more equal — and more profitable — than others. Yale Neuroscientist Molly Crockett says outrage is what drives viral social media posts. Happy posts are a very distant second. “Anger is a gift” is a lyric to an old favourite song of mine from the 90s. Today it’s more truthful to say “anger is a commodity.”

Because of this, social media makes outrage more prevalent AND more potent at the same time.

It’s more prevalent because social media platforms make it a lot easier to express outrage. The tools for doing so are at our fingertips 24/7. The cost of expressing outrage is lower on social media than in real life — no one’s going to punch you in the face online (if you’re working in mixed reality to solve this problem then I’d like to invest in your tech).

It’s more potent because it’s self-reinforcing. We react more angrily online than offline. And we know this to be algorithmically true thanks to research done by William J. Brady, a researcher at NYU. Brady studied hundreds of thousands of tweets, and found that posts using moralistic and emotional language receive a 20% boost for every trigger word used. Put simply, "we click more when we're angry."

This is good business for the social media platforms. Outrage begets more outrage. It’s not a virtuous cycle but it is a very profitable one.

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Everything above written by Dan Harvey.

20 Minutes Into The Future with Daniel Harvey

20 Minutes Into The Future is a critical look at how technology is shaping our lives today and what actions we can take for a better tomorrow. It is written by Daniel Harvey, a digital product designer currently based in London. But he lived in NYC for 20 years so expect him to say “fuck” an awful lot. You can subscribe on Substack. Let's see what Dan has on tap for us this week.

Social media is making you into an asshole

Outrage isn’t just more prevalent and potent online but it’s also much more performative. This could be a problem if it creates collective illusions of public outrage, where everyone is expressing it but few are actually feeling it. And that’s likely a real problem because of something called the availability heuristic. It is a shortcut for our brains which makes us believe: “If it comes to mind easily, it must be true.” It’s a science-y way of saying “perception is reality.”

2016 was the 6th time Trump explored running for president. He also considered it in 1987, 2000, 2004, and 2011. In 1999 he ran as a Reform Party candidate, testing his platform and evaluating the response, and eventually deciding he couldn’t win. After that failure Newsweek noted there simply wasn’t enough outrage in the country to propel an independent candidate to victory.

Outrage defined the 2016 campaign: the more outrageous his words, the more coverage he received. The more coverage he received, the more viable his candidacy became. The analytics firm Mediaquant estimated that between October 2015 and November 2016, Trump received $5.6 Billion dollars in “free” earned media from this strategy, three times his nearest rival.

Zeynep Tufekci is one of the best minds exploring how social media effects politics. She’s said: “Donald Trump excels at using Twitter to capture attention. But his campaign also excelled at using Facebook as it was designed to be used by advertisers, testing messages on hundreds of thousands of people and microtargeting them with the ones that worked best. Facebook had embedded its own employees within the Trump campaign to help it use the platform effectively (and thus spend a lot of money on it), but they were also impressed by how well Trump himself performed. In later internal memos Facebook would dub the Trump campaign an “innovator” that it might learn from.”

Ann Landers was one of America’s most famous advice columnists (what you in the UK call an agony aunt). She said “hanging onto resentment is letting someone you despise live rent-free in your head.” “Living rent-free” has become a popular meme and insult of late because it so perfectly expresses our fears about the outrage economy and the people who thrive in it.

Outrage breeds resentment. And we live in deeply resentful times: Here in the UK Remainers resent Leavers, The North resents the South, nationalists resent immigrants, whites resent people of color, men resent women, etc. etc.

It even makes us resent ourselves. It’s turning us all into assholes. That’s argument 3 out of Jaron Lanier’s Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. The others are:

• You are losing your free will
• Quitting social media is the most finely targeted way to resist the insanity of our times
• social media is undermining truth
• social media is making what you say meaningless
• social media is destroying your capacity for empathy
• social media is making you unhappy
• social media doesn’t want you to have economic dignity
• social media is making politics impossible
• and social media hates your soul

File under: #outrageeconomy #weareallassholesnow

P.S.: I have a proposal to speak about this topic at SXSW. If you could sign up and vote for it I’d be appreciative. Thanks!

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Everything above written by Dan Harvey.

20 Minutes Into The Future with Daniel Harvey

 20 Minutes Into The Future is a critical look at how technology is shaping our lives today and what actions we can take for a better tomorrow. It is written by Daniel Harvey, a digital product designer currently based in London. But he lived in NYC for 20 years so expect him to say “fuck” an awful lot. You can subscribe on Substack. Let's see what Dan has on tap for us this week.

New patterns, models, and networks

As appealing as I find Lanier’s nuclear option, I also acknowledge there’s some implied privilege in it. Many people don’t have that luxury. They run their businesses on social media. They stay in touch with family on social media. They organise on social media. Walking away doesn’t help solve the problems for those left behind and it shirks our own responsibility in this mess. So outside of the nuclear option Lanier proposes what else can we do?

Tristan Harris and other former tech insiders at the Centre for Humane Technology and Calm Technology proponents like Amber Case have formulated strategies for living more intentionally with social media. It’s called “time well spent” and it’s well worth your time to look into that if you haven’t already.

I’ve done 1, 3, and 4 on that list. Those are all great ideas from an end-user perspective but what can we do as people who design & build products to make it easier to be kind? Designer Tobias Rose-Stockwell has written eloquently on the topic and sketched up several ideas worth considering. He says:

“Research on perceptual dehumanization has shown that we’re more cruel towards people in digital environments. Increasing empathetic responses like this might help re-humanize our experience of social media.”

“For people who genuinely want to connect with other audiences, this might give them pause and motivate them to reword their posts before publishing. Though this may not deter the majority of people who post inflammatory content, some might reconsider their language. This can be framed with basic information about how to make it more accessible to other audiences.”

“We do angry things that we often later regret. Having a moment to pause, review, and undo content flagged as hurtful might reduce the likelihood of sharing it in our worst moments.

Might we be more civil in 1-on-1 conversation? If everything isn’t in front of a crowd might we mitigate some of the performative nature of big dust-ups? Giving a private reply — taking it to direct message by default — might encourage people to open sidebars to have conversations with less external encouragement.”

Beyond just designing different interfaces we have to design different networks. That starts by challenging lazy assumptions that advertising should be the default or exclusive model for everything. There are other models: from subscriptions to SAAS direct revenue to DTC sales. And some companies like Amazon have multiple business models. At The Dots we’re able to avoid the problems we’ve been discussing today because our business model is primarily based on recruitment revenue.

Everyone who’s dissatisfied with social media keeps asking the wrong question: “what’s the next Facebook?” We don’t need a “next Facebook.” Obscene scale doesn’t have to be a given. The only reason it is is because of advertising. We can create smaller scale networks dedicated to the needs and wants of specific audiences — whether that be developers or designers or freelancers or what have you. At The Dots our market is creators, entrepreneurs and freelancers.

When your business model isn’t advertising and your market isn’t literally everyone on the planet you can model engagement differently. Not everyone has to visit multiple times a day and engagement doesn’t have to be predicated on shady UX patterns like infinite scrolls or algorithmic timelines. You can create experiences that are bite-sized, valuable, and respectful of your community’s time. Experiences that have a sense of closure and completeness and reward the community’s attention rather than demand it. We redesigned our homepage with those concepts in mind.

If I can leave you with one last thought… At the end of the day we should be building communities not just products. At The Dots (where I work) we bring members of our community together in a monthly portfolio masterclass where they learn from each other and from industry experts and maybe even land their dream jobs. They then stay connected with one another our platform and at future masterclasses. We’re proud to be bringing people together around positive shared real-life experiences not just dividing them with negative virtual experiences for the sake of ad revenue.

File under: #outrageeconomy #makeiteasiertobekind #nichenetworks #newbusinessmodels

P.S.: I have a proposal to speak about this topic at SXSW. If you could sign up and vote for it I’d be appreciative. Thanks!

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Everything above written by Dan Harvey.

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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1908.21 - 10:10

- Days ago = 1509 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.