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6 days ago
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ARTICLE AD BOX
Summary
As Big Tech platforms go on trial with social media alleged to be addictive, we should ask if the drug analogy is being stretched too far. What if it only reflects who we are and we don’t like what we see? That’s not proof of villainy.
A few months ago when the editor of Rahul Pandita’s debut novel asked me for a blurb, I wrote that his book was “addictive”. I thought I had found a way to say something meaningful about a book in a blurb, a form of praise that has become meaningless, filled with tired phrases like “tour de force.” But then I realized that I had not been paying attention to book covers. ‘Addictive’ is the new ‘unputownable.’ Apparently, the world believes addiction is a good thing, as long as it is said of a book.
Mark Zuckerberg is unlikely to ever give a blurb saying, “It’s addictive.” Because the founder of Meta is accused of being one of the world’s primary dealers of a drug. He is facing trial in Los Angeles, one that legal observers say might be a “landmark”. At the heart of the trial is the charge that social media is actually a drug.
The trial centres around a 20-year-old woman identified as Kaley or KGM who accuses Big Tech companies of ruining her mental health from the time she was a child. It resulted in a host of ailments, she alleges, including suicidal thoughts. Tech companies have been so accused before but have been protected by a US law against being held responsible for user content.
This time is different. They have been accused of a wilful “design” that harms people, especially minors, by making content consumption addictive. KGM’s lawyers have compared social media to tobacco giants, which considered cigarettes “a delivery device for nicotine.” Meta, which owns Instagram, and Google, which owns YouTube, are the primary defendants in the trial.
Zuckerberg testified last week and said that his company Meta shouldn’t be blamed for the young woman’s mental health, which may have been caused by a host of complex factors. I agree with him. I must confess that I believe he belongs to a forgotten era when tech guys were good guys. But this view is not why I agree with him, a position that today is as perilous as saying one agrees with anything Big Tobacco had to say.
Psychologists testified, using phrases like “dopamine release” and “reward system,” that social media can be addictive. Even so, I feel social media is vastly different from drugs. Social media is not even as dangerous as sugar and junk food. People who say they have been harmed by social media are usually people who have had problems outside it, too, assuming they ever ventured there.
That social media is the cause of many modern ills is one of the world’s worst arguments, something that ironically resembles zombie-like groupthink.
What’s actually going on is that technology is reflecting human nature very accurately and we don’t like what we see, just like many intellectuals don’t like electoral democracy anymore. The human mind is restless and drifts from one distraction to another. Some companies have found a way to make money off that. And in doing so, they have upset the old media.
Once, a different sort of people owned distraction, which was then called ‘attention,’ and they had the power to influence people, form governments, decide which book you will read, where you will eat and which film will fail. Now they have no influence. And they mostly blame social media for it, especially Facebook and all its avatars.
It is not as though the world before social media was filled with focused ascetics. It was a distracted world with no less noise. The newspaper screamed for your attention; the page-turner novel was designed to make you turn pages; the TV episode ended in something called a ‘cliffhanger.’
Even an alarmist documentary called The Social Dilemma led by a good guy who called himself an ‘ethicist’ that was meant to instil fear in us about social media tried to keep us hooked through ominous music and a sense of imminent danger. Funnily, this hyperbolic documentary played on Netflix, which is probably more addictive than social media.
Social media, of course, is designed to keep you glued as long as possible. It is just that it is the goal of all media, including the most revered newspapers and books. Most of them have failed and Instagram has figured it out. To compare this immersion to physical addiction is stretching a metaphor too far.
Social media is not an addiction as much as a new way for the mind to drift. It is so easy to get humans to drift that we don’t need to imagine a villainous outfit. We can see this in a demographic group that wastes vast quantities of time in visual stimulation and gets away with it because no one cares enough about them—the elderly. Millions of old people spend their waking day watching TV, switching channels, and there is no secret scheme behind it. This is the generation that once watched static, waiting for Doordarshan’s programming to begin.
Still, isn’t it good that the world is making a moral fight of it? That we are using the mental health of teenagers to challenge big companies? No. I feel nothing good can come out of a poor analysis, even if it means well.
For instance, blaming social media for the mental health of the young will ensure we never understand the root of the problem, or whether it is a problem at all. We can see this in the defamation of artificial intelligence (AI).
The stupidest AI stories I have seen are about people who date AI bots. Such stories tend to blame AI for this and never speak of the mental history of their subjects, overlooking the fact that the sort of people who date AI are likely to have had issues long before AI cleared the Turing test. As we get to know the true nature of the world, it appears that sanity is a minority condition.
The author is a journalist, novelist, and the creator of the Netflix series, ‘Decoupled’
English (US) ·