Digital Addiction and My Year without an iPhone
Jonathan Cook:
Welcome to This Human Business, a podcast that explores the territory that might be claimed by a business that puts the human experience at the core of its work.
Of course, there are many companies that talk about being human-centric. In practice, almost all of them put technology first, designing digital devices and only thinking about the impact these innovations will have on people long, long afterwards.
The technologies that have been developed in the last generation are amazing, and the skills that are required to engineer these technologies should be held in high respect. Culture doesn’t have to be a zero sum game in which there are only winners and losers.
Technologists in business don’t always see it that way, unfortunately. Often, they talk about humanity as a problem that needs to be solved, a source of regrettable error that must be overcome. People, they predict, will soon be obsolete. They speak, with a fervor that only believers in the End Times can summon, about the Singularity to come, when a post-human world will be born.
It wasn’t too long ago that digital technologies were widely regarded as a force for positive social change in the world, liberating us from stiff, old social limitations. Recently, however, attitudes have become more mixed.
When I met Mark Lehmann at a cafe at the end of a busy street in Lisbon, he told me of his concerns about the exploitation of the data that describes human lives.
Mark Lehmann:
I’m Mark Lehmann. Chief Technology Officer at Global Citizen, based in New York. Global Citizen itself has offices in Berlin, Melbourne, Australia, soon Johannesburg, New York, London, and of course, we are the organization eradicating global poverty.
I think people are becoming a lot more aware of the value of themselves as individuals and the way that translates into a digital world, their data. Your data actually is you. And even if a person doesn’t think so. Your chromosomal strand is data. That’s obviously you but the whole thing about your personality, your likes or dislikes, the way you propagate your mental and heart force in the world is another, just another form of data. That’s precious because it’s you and it’s me.
They don’t want to just manipulate you as an individual. But they also want to manipulate your digital self.
But, I think the point I’m really getting to here is we can sometimes be a little bit lax about our digital lives. We pull the door shut behind us and we think nobody is going to open that door. But you do get some organizations and people who will use that.
Jonathan Cook:
Mark works in technology. He’s no luddite. Nonetheless, his metaphor for digital technology has become that of a room that must be kept closed and locked in order for us to be safe. Chantal Woltring also came from a technical background, and was initially predisposed to optimism about the integration of new technologies into human society. She still perceives opportunity for positive change through technological advancement, but has recently become more wary.
Chantal Woltring:
Being an engineer by origin I always liked the idea of the power and the leverage machines could give to humans, as an amplifier of our possibilities. But then, they were an extension and we were in control. Now, the more and more we are subjected to screens and systems and procedures that basically dictate to us which steps to take. I find we are as humans much less in control, and we are often, over-constrained into a direction that we might not want to go. Somehow we feel unable to get out of there. So, I think technology in itself could be both beautiful and destructive, and I think it’s the way that it’s used and implemented that makes a difference.
Jonathan Cook:
Chantal reminds us of an important point. When we’re talking about digital technology, even in its most sophisticated forms, we’re not talking about a thing that exists on its own, with its own sense of purpose. Technology is a tool, invented by humans and used by humans. So, when we talk about our hopes and fears about the innovation of new technologies in business, we’re really talking about our hopes and fears concerning the people who are in control of technological businesses.
It’s easy to lose touch with the human beings who are behind the development and implementation of new digital technologies in business. The designer Jordan Wright is reacting against the tendency for the human role to fade as technology takes center stage in business. So, this year, he’s decided to pay more attention to the people he works with.
Jordan Wright:
I’m Jordan Wright. I’m a senior designer at LPK. I moved to Cincinnati about three years ago straight out of college. I went to the Savannah College of Art and Design where I have a BFA in graphic design. I went into graphic design because it was like the perfect bridge of art and people designing for people and really trying to understand what they need. That’s kind of one of my missions for this year to be more people-focused if I can.
Where the industry is going with all this autonomy and so tech-forward, it’s going to come to a halt where people are like “Oh, wait! I haven’t talked to a person today. I haven’t spoken to an actual person. I haven’t touched a person.” So, I think if companies can get ahead of that and think, on the other end, because trends always come to an end, and we’re going to do a 180, I feel I can come straight back to like, oh my gosh we are hearing we need human interaction.
Jonathan Cook:
When we work in business, working with technology is the default, but always choosing the default leads to stagnation. Sometimes, Jordan looks for a different way of working.
Jordan Wright:
Personally, I’ve done fasts from social media, because I found myself just scrolling just to scroll, and I was starting to get to a point to where I was tired of kind of this fake interaction with people. So for an example, a lot of my family is still in South Carolina of course, and we would send each other memes, like send something funny, and that would be considered like I talked to you today and then one day I just sat down and like, “No, I didn’t talk to you. I sent you something funny. I didn’t ask you, ‘How are you doing?’ I don’t know what’s going on in your life. I just sent you something and you responded.” It wasn’t a real interaction and I was kind of using that as a way of saying that I was keeping in touch. And I started to feel a little artificial.
So. I took a fast to see, to almost do a test to see if I would reach out more to people and if people would reach out more to me, and it kind of let me see where I was landing in my relationships with people. And then, on the business side, I think pushing people to do things that are outside of technology, so using social media but then kind of tying in a way to get people outside or talking to somebody else, is a good way to kind of break that cycle of just staying so closed off in your own technology or in your own phone or in your home.
Jonathan Cook:
As our experience with digital technology matures, people are coming to the conclusion that, though its functions can be empowering, there’s something about the digital world that leads us to become profoundly out of balance. To counter this imbalance, there’s a new profession of people working to help their clients break free from the grip of their technology. Johan from Social Media Breakup is one of the pioneers in this field.
Johan from Social Media Breakup:
I’m Johan. I’m born in the Netherlands, and I now live in Dublin, and since 2011 I bought my real first smartphone and pretty fast I became addicted. In that time I was not really thinking about addiction but I was a lot of time on my mobile. But it was 2011, and the iPhone was introduced in 2007, so people really had smartphones but not that many so many have still had feature phones. So it was actually only in 2013 I really became aware of my addiction and how I was spending time on social media, because I started to focus on a specific purpose, and that’s when I started to focus on reducing this usage of my phone and social media and as a result eliminating the addiction.
It is like an addiction the way you behave with your phone and social media is like you’re addicted. So, then with my partner who was also a phone addict and a social media addicted, we started SocialMediaBreakup.com. So, with the website, we help people with their phone addiction, social media addiction and the irony is we use social media to create awareness about the problem, about us. We use social media because the addicts are on social media and also it’s not that we focus on complete abstinence. It’s just, it’s about moderation. It’s OK to use social media but you’ve got to be mindful about it you’ve got to be aware how you spend your time.
Jonathan Cook
Peter Coerper, who we first met in last week’s episode, tells us more about the addictive qualities of digital experiences and the lines they have led him to cross.
Peter Coerper:
I use technology day in day out, because I have a smartphone, and I have other things that I kind of enjoy every once in a while. That kind of helped me every once in a while but that I use maybe not in a deliberate enough way. No, it’s not an effort in a deliberate enough way, and sometimes almost unconscious. And I have to think about how what does that do with me. As a parent of four children, I try to have for instance, the smartphones off the table when we have dinner. But, I find myself doing it every once in a while because there was this important e-mail after I enter and I have to watch whether it comes in and not. So I overstepped that board, that line ever so often. I can live with that to some extent as long as it is still obvious to me. But I find myself in scenarios where I have a good talk with somebody and I have that message coming in and I’m looking at my watch with which displays that because it’s so important to have that right away, and I realize, boy, there is a part of the world that is theoretically almost at my watch and there is this individual person that I’m approaching that I can look into the eye and touch and feel and talk to.
I fear that we are not able to contain the Pandora’s box, because I’m in the IT area since lots of years, and I see developments. I’m usually working either for companies or support them who are at the leading edge of technology because they have all these little programs that all the big companies in this IT world provide to infiltrate and to gather data and use that data and do algorithms that kind of predict what people will do, and ultimately they will do that. So I’m I don’t know on that page, I think it’s rather a grim outlook, because I’m afraid that we don’t have the means, as many humans or humanity, to contain what could come out of that.
Jonathan Cook:
Johan explains that the addictive pull that Peter observes in his family life, and in the business setting, begins with the simple desire to be liked.
Johan:
Because of the like feature, now there is a way of measuring how much we are appreciated online. So what happens is because of the feedback that you get from people you start to invest in this persona because now you’re basing your types of posts on the feedback that you receive from friends and from acquaintances. So what happens is you start to now invest in this persona that is not you, but the problem is we think, we become identified with this persona that we’re creating online and since there are so many people online. There is this sense of FOMO where we are not.
You see like, everyone now assumes you have to know everything because they assume that you’re on Facebook seeing their posts. So everyone has now this kind of fear of missing out because they don’t. Everyone wants to feel part of a community, a certain tribe. So, if they see that, if they see that everyone is there and you’re not, you feel excluded, and people who are not good at being alone, to enjoy their aloneness, they often feel lonely. So, because they feel lonely they retreat back to social media to create some form of significance by posting and then hoping to get those likes, and then they compete with their own posts by trying to gain even more likes.
Jonathan Cook:
Johan is talking about a problem that’s always been present in business culture. We’re told that we can only manage what we can measure. So, with just a tiny slip in our reasoning, we presume that the things that a business is able to measure must be the things that we need to focus on managing.
20 years ago, businesses ran just fine without gathering any online social media likes. Over the last decade, social media marketing has come to seem absolutely essential. How did that happen? Social media provided a means of measurement, the like, and therefore created the appearance that it had something that must be important to manage. Both personal and business users of social media, and digital technologies more broadly, have been caught in this trick.
The specific logical error that’s operating in this context is known as the McNamara Fallacy. This fallacy is named after Robert McNamara, who was an early adopter of the Quantified Self ideology. McNamara believed that he could win the Vietnam War by carefully managing certain military statistics, such as enemy body count and rate of military enlistment. These were statistics that were relatively easy to measure, and so, McNamara leaped to the conclusion that the statistics were in themselves essential. McNamara confused measurability with relevance. He stuck with the old business school adage that you can’t manage what you can’t measure, and measured his way into losing the war.
Digital media puts consumers and corporations alike in the position of Robert McNamara, focused like lasers on the quantitative data delivered by online analytics systems while ignoring cues from the offline world because they don’t come in the form of a cute, concise, glowing dashboard.
The fact that consumers fell en masse for the McNamara fallacy of social media, at the same time that the business world was besieged by hordes of self-appointed social media marketing experts, made the allure of the social media like difficult to deny. This difficulty, however, was of the same nature as the difficulty of being the first to point out that the emperor is not wearing any clothes.
The addictive nature of digital media, for consumers and businesses alike, goes far beyond a simple logical fallacy, of course. Digital devices come with an emotional hook hidden within the regular appearance of quantified progress. It’s difficult to deny that progress is being made when the numbers keep going up.
The fact that there isn’t any necessary connection between on-screen numbers and off-screen needs fades in comparison to the emotional boost we receive every time we look at our increasing numbers. As Johan explains, the measurement junkie that is the Quantified Self is addicted to the dopamine reinforcement that accompanies every digital notification.
Johan:
In terms of the phones, it’s the way with these notifications, the way you receive those dopamine hits, it’s a rush. You know we become addicted to those dopamine hits. So what happens, if you don’t get those hits then you will check your mobile app more often. So, every five minutes you’re checking and checking and checking and then you don’t get that dopamine hit that makes you happy for a specific moments of time, a short period of time. What you do as a result is you start posting on social media and then you expect interaction. And then, there it goes. The dopamine hits come because you will receive a notification or hear a notification.
Jonathan Cook:
Johan explains that the quantified notifications of digital media get in the way of our attention to things that are essential to success, but difficult to measure. Things like face-to-face human interactions, which for centuries have formed the foundation of professional and personal success alike, only have the opportunity to be restored, Johan says, when people stop focusing so much on the objective but often irrelevant metrics delivered by digital technology.
Johan:
I think we as human beings we are immersed so much in our in our social media platforms. Then what happens is we create less empathy. We reach we lose connection to the world. So we think that the offline world is a fake world and the virtual world is the real world.
Social media maybe improves relationships that are with people that are far away, but it kind of destroys the relationships with people close to you. So, they start to focus on relationships with people that are close to them. So. for example, I hear stories that they start cooking with their kids. They go out to a restaurant and they don’t bring their phones with them. They can they start to appreciate each other more.
Jonathan Cook:
Johan has observed a reversal of the enthusiastic adoption of digital technology. As the initial blush of rapid innovation fades, the use of digital technology no longer carries the excitement it once did. Now, digital technology is often perceived as a burdensome source of new tasks to be done, delivering a dreary routine of clicks and swipes that people wish they could escape.
Johan:
It is it is hindering our creativity creative process because we don’t have those moments that we’re just daydreaming because we always have these mobile that are just interrupting us all the time. So there’s no moments of just thinking about anything, just daydreaming and just and just let your mind fly wherever it wants to go. We really don’t, because we become bored fast so we need we need our phones. We need distraction all the time.
When it comes to having this creativity and to actually apply it that’s harder as well because it’s harder now to focus to keep focusing on actual work. So, when you create, if you want to write, or you want to paint, you want to produce in any way then unfortunately it becomes harder and harder when you’re a social media or phone addict because you become good at being distracted. The brain expects being distracted. It cannot focus, the neural pathways that are oriented in making you focus properly, they are declining their effectiveness is declining. By the neural pathways when it comes to being distracted, are being formed, so you become better at being distracted. So, that’s how deep work becomes harder and harder.
Jonathan Cook:
Vasco Gaspar, the specialist in human flourishing we met in last week’s episode, talks about the role that digital notifications play in our habituation to a constantly distracted mind, making applications like Slack more of a drain from our professional efforts than an asset.
Vasco Gaspar:
Mostly I noticed that increase especially when social networks began to appear in mobile and smart phone, because actually, yes, we have 24 hours, but the thing is that there’s so much more to answer. So I notice a notification in my phone, so I need to go in there and suddenly there is the email and I need to go to the email and then the boss sends email with the cc of thirty people then those people start to respond to each other and then there’s a lack of ability to deal with all of the stimulus, because most of them are not important, but it’s difficult to distinguish what’s important from what’s not, because everything starts to be important, even the most of things that are not.
So the thing is, I think that more and more, we need to have to train first of all our capacity to be present and to be aware because otherwise, we are always chasing for the stimulus.
Nowadays we have so much things in our head and we became so much kind of a conceptual society, everything is in the head, that we lose contact with so much that is inside of us, the heart, the body, the emotions the quality of the relationship, the silence. We are kind of, as Alan Watts said in the 60s, addicted to thoughts. It’s like a drug. We are addicted to always be on, thinking and thinking and thinking, and we are kind of almost afraid to be with ourselves, especially the parts of ourselves that we are not so comfortable with.
Jonathan Cook:
As we navigate this new digital world, we’re seeking affirmation, but we’re looking for resolution, too. It’s difficult to find satisfaction while immersed in these virtual environments, Vasco warns, because they’ve been purposefully designed as psychological traps. These traps aren’t just harming our personal lives. They’re getting in the way of our ability to work effectively as well.
Vasco Gaspar:
I think we need to make peace with ourselves and friendship with ourselves, and the first step is to become aware of that, is to strengthen our capacity to be aware. But the technology companies, most of them, they want our awareness. They want our attention. Actually that’s what they are getting their money from. So it’s difficult because we have some of the most skilled psychologists nowadays working in companies like Facebook and others to find ways to hook our attention. So it’s not a fair game because they know how to get attention.
I notice that for me it’s much more difficult now to just read the book. Because at some point if the book is not stimulating because I’m so used to be stimulated on and on by notifications and so on. It’s kind of when I notice that I was the capacity to become aware and focus my attention. So if you are losing this thing that is so basic for us humans to make decisions and to become aware it’s easy to kind of to be controlled and to kind of just be chasing the sticks that the others are throwing to us.
Jonathan Cook
Many people feel that they have no choice. They believe that owning and using digital technology has become a fundamental requirement for participating in society. The possibility of escape from the habits of digital drudgery suddenly became a possibility for many people, however, when Vitamin Water announced that it would pay one person one hundred thousand dollars to live for an entire year without using a smartphone.
Johan:
That’s the beautiful thing you see with the Vitamin Water contest of the winning 100k is that people start dreaming and they see suddenly all these opportunities. They can visualize all these opportunities. By then I just hope and I just pray for these people that, even if they lose, they will still pursue those visions that they have for the future.
Jonathan:
I want to make it clear that I’m not participating in the Vitamin Water contest. I’m not being paid by Vitamin Water to promote a phone-free lifestyle. In fact, this podcast isn’t sponsored by any business at all. I’ve seen too often how corporate sponsorships lead to pressure to shift content so that it doesn’t offend conventional business culture.
Nonetheless, at the end of last year, I decided to make all of 2019 a year without a smartphone. What’s more, I decided that I wouldn’t use any mobile cellular-enabled digital technology at all. I gave up my iPhone and my iPad. I’m not even using a smartwatch, a Fitbit, or a GPS navigator in my car.
Why am I doing this? Part of it is that I’m looking for room to breathe. I’m reminded of what Matthew Burgess, who specializes in designing environments where creativity can flourish, told me earlier this year.
Matthew Burgess:
Fear makes you want it and open the lid and let it all out, and just to be overwhelmed by it all, but actually to take time to feel for yourself, for me to go and shut my computer and go walk on the beach, to make sure there’s little rituals that I can do, to bring myself into, you know, the cliches in this situation ring true, to find things you’re grateful about, to feel the air going into your lungs, to watch your thoughts come and go.
Jonathan:
What Matthew is describing here is very simple. He’s talking about the experience of paying attention to your own breath, about having a moment of basic self-awareness. Yet, this kind of healthy reflection isn’t a part the experiences that are fostered through digital technology.
I decided to spend this year without an smartphone because I realized that with my iPhone, I felt every moment as if it was urgent. This constant urgency wasn’t positive. It was wearing me out. I was trying to optimize every moment, because there was something that the iPhone could add to any moment.
If I was waiting in a line, instead of being still with my own thoughts, I could take out my phone and check the messages I had received from others. If I was traveling, instead of reflecting on my journey, I could listen to an audiobook or a podcast, to learn about something happening somewhere else.
With my iPhone in my hand, every moment became measured. I felt like I was always behind where I should have been in a race to do better. The trick was that my iPhone wasn’t helping me do better at the things that really mattered to me. It was merely providing me with material to fill up the empty moments of my life so that I could feel that I was making progress at something, without much regard to whether that something was in alignment with the journey I wanted to be on. I was moving all the time, but without direction.
I had fallen into the trap of the McNamara fallacy. My numbers were always ticking up, and I became anxiously attached to them, even though those numbers weren’t measuring what I wanted from my life. I lost track of my own purpose, seduced by the false clarity of my digital device’s quantitative measurements.
When I announced that I was going to spend all of 2019 without a smartphone, or any other mobile cellular device, reactions were mixed. Some people were supportive, but others seemed disturbed by the idea that a person could live without a phone. For these people, it was as if I had announced that I was going to stop wearing pants. They empathized with the sense of alienation I felt, but going an entire year without using my iPhone was going too far for them. They suggested that I try a half measure. Perhaps, they advised me, I could download a time management app on my smartphone to make sure that I used the device less often. They didn’t grasp that these apps would be little more than just one more hack, one more twist in the relentless campaign of self-optimization to which my iPhone had enlisted me.
Francine Stevens, an innovation specialist who we met in last week’s episode, told me that she has considered these time management apps. She’s more interested, though, in purely offline activities, going analog all the way, rather than engaging in the self-defeating effort of having to use her smartphone to manage her time away from her smartphone.
Francine Stevens:
It’s funny because there are quite a few people who are bringing out innovations, which is quite entertaining, like applications to turn off your phone. So there are lot of people who are recognizing that being always on is not necessarily a healthy thing, and I think even if you look at, I just walked past last night a small store. It’s a calligraphy store, and they have a wait list now of people who just want to spend some time doing something that is not online, something that allows them to work in art and work it slowly, and just enjoy the process. So I think there is very much an opportunity for that, and also just reconnecting with people. It’s amazing how lonely we are as a race at the moment, when we’re technically more connected than ever.
Jonathan Cook:
Remember, once upon a time, when we believed that digital devices would help us to connect to other people? The opposite is what’s actually taken place. Progressively, open platforms have been closed. Social media networks now purposefully conceal our friends’ updates from us, and maintain barriers on expensive toll roads of business communication, rather than providing an open highway.
With our digital technology, we’re always connected to something. Nonetheless, as Francine says, we’re always lonely.
Widespread success in business through digital technology has been as illusory as enhanced social connection. For a while, there was hope that digital innovation might open up business, providing more opportunity to people who had been on the outside. As the years have progressed, however, we have seen that the digital economy amplifies income inequality and shrinks business opportunity. There are very few lords of digital technology, and they do not share power.
How do we respond? The artist Mio Loclair cautions that the solution to the commercial and societal problems created by digital technology can’t come from digital technology itself, because the digital playing field is dominated by the bullies at the top.
Mio Loclair:
Never fight with a bad bully. They will drag you down to their level, and then they win by experience. What does it mean to digitization and the mirror? Never try to keep up with that form of accelerated digitization. First, you will reduce the complexity of your behavior, and then you will be outperformed by computing power.
Jonathan Cook:
Mio warns that the more we try to compete on the terms of digital technology, the further we will fall behind. Only the largest companies have the brute resources now to produce competitive services in machine learning. The energy that it takes to train an artificial intelligence system in just one limited domain releases as much carbon pollution into the atmosphere as an entire fleet of cars would in an entire year full of commuting. It’s no wonder that most startups can only move forward now with the sponsorship of the feudal lords of our time, the venture capitalists.
The digital fix is in. If current trends continue, the majority of people in business will be squeezed by increasing automation, not just by losing their jobs, but even more often, by losing the quality of their jobs, as algorithmic workplace optimization programs eliminate every remaining spare moment of joy from our schedules.
The best chance ordinary people have of entering a world of commerce that values their humanity will come through the decision that they’ve had enough of the digital chains that restrict their movements and constrict their lives. The low prices available to us through online businesses come at too high a cost to bear.
Turn off your smartphone. Put it down. Walk away.
Don’t think it’s possible? It’s true that it won’t be easy. You’re an addict, and going cold turkey is going to hurt for a while.
Here’s how I did it.
First, understand that half-measures won’t get the job done. Using an app to reduce your smartphone use will work about as well as an alcoholic asking a bartender not to serve too many drinks. Attempts to use your phone only on certain days, or at certain times of day will only be successful for a limited amount of time, because digital devices are expert at disorienting us from awareness of the normal passage of time. We all know how checking a device just one more time can lead to hours of compulsive, repetitive checking.
So, I suggest that you kill your smartphone. That’s what I did, and I held a funeral for it to seal the deal.
First, I canceled my cellular service. Then, I allowed the battery on my iPhone to run down to absolute zero. Next, I put it in a watertight container and buried it in the ground in my back yard. When springtime came, I planted a vegetable and flower garden on top of the grave.
If you live in a city, you might not have a patch of ground available to you. If that’s the case, use a friend. Give them your phone to keep, along with a few dollars or a nice gift for their trouble. Tell them not to give it back to you, no matter how much you beg.
The point is not just to make it difficult to reactivate your phone, but to create a symbolic separation from it as well. What you’re doing through this action is to conduct a kind of funeral ritual, not just for your smartphone, but for the version of yourself that grew accustomed to using a smartphone without a thought.
My next step was to make a conspicuous announcement that I would not have any cellphone or other mobile digital device for the entire rest of the next year. It was important to let people know why I wouldn’t be answering calls or texts to my old phone number any more, but I was also putting my credibility on the line. After telling people that I was going without a smartphone, it would be a terrible embarrassment to be caught using one.
Be prepared for some resistance, and use it to stiffen your resolve. This is an opportunity to develop some well-deserved pride. I’ll never forget the message I got from a remote acquaintance, telling me that I didn’t have the right to cut myself off from her communications by shutting off my iPhone. How dare I, she asked me, be so selfish to think that I have the right to be unreachable if she needs to get in touch with me?
This person wasn’t a client or a colleague, a close friend or a family member. She was someone I met at a conference a couple years ago, and had chatted with on Twitter a few times since then. Yet, she wasn’t alone in her objections. Most of my business contacts have accepted my lack of digital mobile devices with a bit of confusion, a touch of amusement, or even a hint of appreciation, but not everyone is on board.
Luckily, the outraged questions all have an easy answer.
“How will I get in touch with you?” Send me an email, call me on my landline if I’m at home, or if you’re really desperate, write me a letter and take it to the post office.
“How will you make your appointments on time?” I’ll pay attention to the clocks that are all around me.
“How will you find your destination?” I’ll look at maps before I leave, write myself a few notes of orientation, and memorize my route, just like people used to do.
“How will you check in for your flight at the airport?” I had to just smile at this one, coming from a colleague fresh out of college.
There are some professions where people really do need to keep smartphones with them all the time, but most people who believe that they need mobile digital devices don’t actually have to have them, any more than a smoker truly needs a cigarette.
Are you a neurosurgeon, the only one in your city who can perform the lifesaving procedure to save the life of that patient who otherwise will be dead by dawn? You should carry a smartphone. Are you a crack homicide detective waiting for the lab results that will let you know if you should pursue the person you suspect of being a serial killer? You need a smartphone.
Are you a business professional who needs to be available just in case there are last minute revisions to the PowerPoint presentation deck that the liaison on the client team needs to be confirmed by midnight? You don’t need a smartphone. You need to work for a company that respects your dignity as a human being.
I’m a freelance research consultant who frequently travels for work, often to places I’ve never been before. I need to plan ahead a little bit before my trips, but it’s been over half a year since I gave up my iPhone, and I have yet to encounter a single situation that I couldn’t deal with without it.
I am not going completely without digital technology. I’m merely giving up mobile cellular communications devices. So, I can still use my laptop to get on to a WiFi connection and communicate in that way if I really need to. The difference with a laptop is that it’s large and conspicuous, and can’t be used just anywhere. So, I won’t just casually whip out my laptop just because I’m feeling bored.
I won’t lie, and tell you that I haven’t had moments where I longed to have my iPhone back in my hand. The first couple of months without it were the most difficult. I had never stopped to consider how much light, color, and cheery sound my iPhone had given me. I live close to the border with Canada, and January and February felt especially cold and dark without my familiar little screen shining in my face. I had forgotten how dim, drab, and grey the world is in the middle of the winter.
For weeks, I desperately wanted something to check. I remember one moment in January, when my wife left her iPhone out on the kitchen counter without turning it off. I remember looking at it, and thinking that I could pick it up and just check one thing, really quickly, and no one would know. I didn’t even have an idea about what I wanted to check. I could check her Facebook, or her messages. I didn’t care. I just wanted to check something.
I restrained myself.
In the eight months that I’ve been without a smartphone, I’ve gotten better at restraint. I’m not perfect at it, but I am improving. I no longer feel that heart-pounding sense of urgency to share something, anything, just because that’s what I’m supposed to do as a good social media citizen. I feel myself slowing down, choosing to remain silent more often. I allow myself to think about something, for hours, for days, or even for weeks before taking action on it, or letting it go.
I find myself more willing to say no. No, I’m not available to do that extra piece of work this evening. I need to sleep. No, I can’t take a call right now. I need to tend that garden that’s growing over the grave of my iPhone.
I’ve got a long way to go, and many struggles to deal with, but on the whole, I feel better without my iPhone.
I can’t help but wonder what would happen if more people tried this out.
Do I believe that will actually happen? No, unfortunately, I don’t. The truth is that digital technology has been engineered to be highly addictive, and almost everyone, even our children, is hooked.
Three years ago, the World Economic Forum published an article declaring, “Tech addiction is the new frontier of human dependency.” Then, the World Economic Forum did what it does best: It did nothing.
There’s no sign that anything serious is being done to confront the dangerously addictive nature of digital technology. I read through the IEEE’s most recent version of Ethically Aligned Design, the most comprehensive ethics document for artificial intelligence, and in 263 pages, all that it has to say on the issue of addiction to digital media is that, in the future, “There will more than likely be issues similar to the kind of video-game addictions we see now.”
That’s it. Nothing more than that one sentence. Nothing about the many other problematic addictive digital technologies, beyond video games, that already exist. No guidelines for non-addictive design at all. There isn’t even a recommendation that addictive AI should be avoided. Even this one sentence is an improvement, though. The first edition of Ethically Aligned Design didn’t have a single thing to say on the subject at all.
I don’t mean to single out the IEEE for shaming on this subject. The organization is doing a great deal of good work, and they have a lot of ground to cover in an industry that’s changing rapidly.
Besides, lack of adequate attention to the impact of digital addiction isn’t just a problem with the IEEE. IBM’s artificial intelligence ethics document, Everyday Ethics for Artificial Intelligence, doesn’t address addiction at all. The ethics guidelines from the European Union’s High-Level Expert Group on AI doesn’t either. Google’s principles on the ethical development of AI also fail to bring the subject up.
The problem is with the digital industry as a whole, made up of corporations that employ vast armies to develop and deploy new technologies, but invest almost nothing in comparison to develop and implement ethical guidelines to prevent their inventions from harming humanity. This widespread failure to implement ethical guidelines for dealing with addictive artificial intelligence is particularly unnerving when we consider the way that the digital technology companies routinely violate their own ethical guidelines and promises of restraint. Rigorous, detailed ethics guidelines for technological development in business would be an improvement, but they wouldn’t enough. We need legal regulation of the development of digital technologies that are designed to promote addictive behavior.
Yet, the big technology companies are all doing it, and they’re trying to develop a new frontier in digital addiction: Emotion AI systems that are designed to scan our bodies in order to read our emotions, and then deliver matching content that keeps us more hopelessly hooked than ever.
You’ll hear more about that issue in next week’s episode, which deals with the integration of human emotion into the design of business.
There’s a great deal more to talk about, but this is the end of this week’s episode. Thanks for listening, and thank you to Meydan, for the music that you’re listening to now. The song’s name is Underwater, and it’s from the album For Creators.