海角大神

In 2015, Anastasia Dedyukhina, then a client director for a London digital ad agency, found herself at the peak of her career but at a low point in her emotional life.

鈥淏asically my job was to launch all these new tech products into the markets and convince people to use more technology,鈥� she says. 鈥淗aving said that, I don鈥檛聽think I was managing my own devices very well.鈥�

Like many smartphone owners, Dr. Dedyukhina, who holds a PhD in philology聽from Lomonosov Moscow State University, found herself habitually checking her phone, she says, for no reason. And her attention to her screen began to come at a cost.

鈥淚 was very reactive and I was constantly feeling very tired,鈥� Dedyukhina says. Except, she noticed, when she was traveling abroad without a data plan.聽

鈥淚 realized that I was feeling much lighter. I didn't feel that anxious,鈥� she says. 鈥淚 like to compare it to this feeling that you鈥檙e surrounded by 10 children of different ages, and they all pull you in different directions.鈥�

As with many , the breaking point came when the ghosts started visiting. 鈥淚 started feeling phantom vibrations, you know, when you have the sensation that your phone is ringing in your pocket, and you don鈥檛 even have a pocket.鈥�

Now a coach, author, and public speaker, Dedyukhina runs a consulting company, Consciously Digital, that promotes what she calls 鈥渄igital minimalism,鈥� a practice that doesn鈥檛 promote abandoning technology altogether, but incorporates 鈥渢ime management,鈥� 鈥渟pace management,鈥� 鈥渞elationship management,鈥� and 鈥渟elf management.鈥澛燦ow, her smartphone sits in a drawer, switched off, without a SIM card, and is used only to summon the occasional Uber.

An infrastructure problem

That so many of us overuse our devices is no accident, says Dedyukhina, but rather the outcome of deliberate design choices made by tech companies that have been incentivized to promote habit-forming behavior.聽聽

And she is far from alone in making this claim. Other critics include former Google design ethicist Tristan Harris, who warns of the subtle ways that technology ; San Diego State University psychologist Jean Twenge, who argues that smartphones are pushing those born in the 1990s and later to 鈥渢he ;鈥� Facebook鈥檚 first president, Sean Parker, who last year warned that the social network was 鈥渆xploiting a vulnerability in human psychology鈥� to 鈥�;鈥� and University of North Carolina techno-sociologist Zeynep Tufekci, who in a TED talk last September said that 鈥渨e're building this infrastructure of surveillance authoritarianism .鈥�

In and around Silicon Valley, tech workers are taking pains to protect their children from the products they tout. The New York Times reported last month that childcare contracts drafted by parents in San Francisco and Cupertino are increasingly including demands that from their kids.

These concerns over excessive screen time and its effects share one broad theme: Technology companies and those who provide content for them are doing everything they can to seize and commodify our attention, and it鈥檚 working.

What鈥檚 more, it鈥檚 working in ways that are causing social problems that go far beyond the distraction and isolation normally attributed to smartphones. To better target their users, tech companies gather data on their online behavior, which is then fed into algorithms that choose content aimed at keeping them engaged. And these algorithms are largely unconcerned whether the content is a cat video or a xenophobic conspiracy theory. At the same time, the ability to micro-target potential customers also enables governments to spy on their citizens and manipulate public opinion at home and abroad.

鈥淚t's not a content problem. It's an infrastructure problem,鈥� says Nathalie Mar茅chal, a researcher at Ranking Digital Rights, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit that aims to set standards for how tech companies safeguard human rights. 鈥淲e need to continue to build the consensus and build this understanding of the connection between targeted advertising and media manipulation, and, ultimately, fascism. Because make no mistake, that鈥檚 where this is heading if we don鈥檛 do something about it.鈥�

Causing much of this dysfunction, Dr. Mar茅chal argued in a November essay for Motherboard, is the , in which web publishers offer 鈥渇ree鈥� content to users in exchange for behavioral data that gets passed on to advertisers.

鈥淭argeted advertising,鈥� she writes, 鈥減rovides tools for political advertisers and propagandists to micro-segment audiences in ways that inhibit a common understanding of reality. This creates a perfect storm for authoritarian populists like Rodrigo Duterte, Donald Trump, and [Jair Bolsonaro] to seize power, with dire consequences for human rights.鈥�

Chasing eyeballs

The era of targeted advertising began in 2000, just as the dot-com bubble was bursting. Facing pressure from investors to post a profit, the two-year-old search company Google turned to the vast stores of data that it had gathered from its users as they entered search terms and clicked on results. This data, Google discovered, could be used to predict users鈥� behavior with an accuracy and precision that previous generations of advertisers . Just as the dot-com collapse was wiping out trillions of dollars, Google was turning a profit for the first time. Today, advertising accounts for of the company鈥檚 revenue.

In the decades since then, targeted advertising has been honed to a fine edge. For instance, when you visit the pages of a typical online newspaper the site collects information about your browsing history, your location, and other demographic details, and sends it to an ad exchange, which submits your profile to advertisers. The advertisers then offer bids, typically cents or fractions of a cent, to show you an ad that has been selected for your profile. The whole bidding process happens automatically, in about a tenth of second, before the page loads.

Facebook has pushed the model to an even further extreme. Think of everything it knows about you even if you're not a particularly heavy user. Every status update; every reply; every like, heart, and angry emoji; every location that you鈥檝e logged in from, Facebook stores it all. Even when you start to write a post, think better of it and delete it, Facebook keeps that, too.

The company even goes out of its way to acquire additional data on you that you don鈥檛 knowingly give it. In August, Facebook asked major banks such as JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo to , including checking account balances and transaction histories.聽

A released Wednesday by Damian Collins, a member of the聽British Parliament,聽revealed that Facebook engineered ways to mine data from Android users without their permission. Those communications, gathered as part of an investigation into the company's role in spreading misinformation, revealed a quid-pro-quo system where developers who wished to connect their apps to the network must also agree to hand over user data to Facebook.

Even if you don鈥檛聽have an account, Facebook is likely keeping tabs on you. Earlier this year chief executive Mark Zuckerberg told US Representative Ben Luj谩n (D) of New Mexico that Facebook collects 鈥渄ata of people who have not signed up for Facebook鈥� for security reasons. 鈥淭his kind of data collection is ,鈥� Facebook later told Reuters.

All of this data collection is in the service of delivering ads. Each individual profile is worth , but when you have more than 2 billion monthly users, as Facebook does, those pennies add up.

Profits from ads create a powerful incentive to maximize user engagement, or 鈥渃hase eyeballs,鈥� in the parlance of online publishing. For news outlets, that creates a pressure to prioritize content that is viral over that which is trustworthy or in the public interest.

For platforms like Facebook and YouTube, it means hiring psychology postdocs to devise ever more ingenious ways to keep users glued to the screen. Design techniques include infinitely scrolling news feeds and video autoplay, features that, like a , subtly encourage users to consume more than they would otherwise.

Often, the algorithms promote ever more extreme content. In her TED talk, Professor Tufekci of UNC reports watching videos of Donald Trump rallies, only to have YouTube's 鈥渦p next鈥澛燼lgorithm set to autoplay videos promoting white supremacy. When she did the same for Hillary Clinton and 聽Bernie Sanders rallies, leftist-conspiracy videos streamed forth. 鈥淚 once watched a video about vegetarianism on YouTube, and YouTube recommended and autoplayed a video on being vegan,鈥� she told the audience. 鈥淚t's like you鈥檙e never hardcore enough for YouTube."

In November, the online magazine The Intercept reported that Facebook鈥檚 algorithm had automatically generated the category 鈥減eople who have expressed an interest or like pages related to ,鈥� as one of its targeting options for advertisers. The group had 168,000 members.

A way forward?

Even some of Silicon Valley鈥檚 biggest promoters acknowledge the sway our devices hold over our thinking. 鈥淲e don鈥檛 let our young son get near the phone鈥� says Rep. Ro Khanna (D) of California, whose district includes the tech giants Apple, Intel, and eBay. 鈥淭hese engineers, they were very clever, they designed programs in a way that鈥檚 designed to maximize eyeballs on the screen.鈥�

鈥淲e probably need to take a step back,鈥� he continues, 鈥渨hether it鈥檚 social media or whether it is addiction, and have people ask these ethical questions and ask about what the ethical responsibilities are and have tech leaders participate in the solutions.鈥�

Yet Representative Khanna already sees some alternative business models emerging. 鈥淚 don鈥檛聽know if it will succeed in the marketplace, but if there鈥檚 enough interest in saying that we don't want to be bombarded with ads, you can move more to a subscription model,鈥� he says 鈥淚 think you may see some of the folks come that way.鈥�

Already, there are signs of a shift under way, driven in part by falling ad rates. A growing number of news outlets are erecting paywalls and trading advertisers for subscribers, reasoning that a direct relationship with their readers would better serve the bottom line in the long run.

In September, Apple in its iOS 12 release, in response to pressure from investors to address smartphone overuse. Now, iPhone owners can monitor how much they鈥檙e using their devices and set screen-free times and time limits on individual apps. That same month Twitter announced that it would begin allowing users to and view tweets chronologically. Similarly, this summer Instagram introduced its 鈥溾�� notification to prevent mindless browsing.

For Nir Eyal, the author of the influential 2014 book 鈥�,鈥� these shifts are signs that the market is working.

鈥淭hey are responding to customer feedback,鈥� says Mr. Eyal. 鈥淭hey make the products safer. They make it better.鈥�

While Eyal acknowledges that children should be protected from psychological manipulation by tech companies, he doubts that, except for a small number of genuine internet addicts, most people can鈥檛 put down their phones whenever they want. 鈥淲e can't perpetuate this message that there鈥檚 nothing people can do,鈥� he says. 聽鈥淲e are giving these companies more power and more control than they deserve.鈥�

Dedyukhina argues that shifting our behaviors around smartphones will require a broader cultural shift. 鈥淚 don't think that we should be relying just on the tech companies,鈥� she says. 鈥淢aybe, working together, we can get to the point when checking your phone in front of other people will stop being cool.鈥�