How Evil Is Tech?

By David Brooks

Nov. 20, 2017

Not long ago, tech was the coolest industry. Everybody wanted to work at Google, Facebook and
Apple. But over the past year the mood has shifted.

Some now believe tech is like the tobacco industry — corporations that make billions of dollars
peddling a destructive addiction. Some believe it is like the N.F.L. — something millions of
people love, but which everybody knows leaves a trail of human wreckage in its wake.

Surely the people in tech — who generally want to make the world a better place — don’t want
to go down this road. It will be interesting to see if they can take the actions necessary to prevent
their companies from becoming social pariahs.

There are three main critiques of big tech.

The first is that it is destroying the young. Social media promises an end to loneliness but
actually produces an increase in solitude and an intense awareness of social exclusion. Texting
and other technologies give you more control over your social interactions but also lead to
thinner interactions and less real engagement with the world.

As Jean Twenge has demonstrated in book and essay, since the spread of the smartphone, teens
are much less likely to hang out with friends, they are less likely to date, they are less likely to
work.

Eighth graders who spend 10 or more hours a week on social media are 56 percent more likely to
say they are unhappy than those who spend less time. Eighth graders who are heavy users of
social media increase their risk of depression by 27 percent. Teens who spend three or more
hours a day on electronic devices are 35 percent more likely to have a risk factor for suicide, like
making a plan for how to do it. Girls, especially hard hit, have experienced a 50 percent rise in
depressive symptoms.

The second critique of the tech industry is that it is causing this addiction on purpose, to make
money. Tech companies understand what causes dopamine surges in the brain and they lace their
products with “hijacking techniques” that lure us in and create “compulsion loops.”

Snapchat has Snapstreak, which rewards friends who snap each other every single day, thus
encouraging addictive behavior. News feeds are structured as “bottomless bowls” so that one
page view leads down to another and another and so on forever. Most social media sites create
irregularly timed rewards; you have to check your device compulsively because you never know
when a burst of social affirmation from a Facebook like may come.
The third critique is that Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook are near monopolies that use
their market power to invade the private lives of their users and impose unfair conditions on
content creators and smaller competitors. The political assault on this front is gaining steam. The
left is attacking tech companies because they are mammoth corporations; the right is attacking
them because they are culturally progressive. Tech will have few defenders on the national
scene.

Obviously, the smart play would be for the tech industry to get out in front and clean up its own
pollution. There are activists like Tristan Harris of Time Well Spent, who is trying to move the
tech world in the right directions. There are even some good engineering responses. I use an app
called Moment to track and control my phone usage.

The big breakthrough will come when tech executives clearly acknowledge the central truth:
Their technologies are extremely useful for the tasks and pleasures that require shallower forms
of consciousness, but they often crowd out and destroy the deeper forms of consciousness people
need to thrive.

Online is a place for human contact but not intimacy. Online is a place for information but not
reflection. It gives you the first stereotypical thought about a person or a situation, but it’s hard to
carve out time and space for the third, 15th and 43rd thought.

Online is a place for exploration but discourages cohesion. It grabs control of your attention and
scatters it across a vast range of diverting things. But we are happiest when we have brought our
lives to a point, when we have focused attention and will on one thing, wholeheartedly with all
our might.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote that we take a break from the distractions of the world not
as a rest to give us more strength to dive back in, but as the climax of living. “The seventh day is
a palace in time which we build. It is made of soul, joy and reticence,” he said. By cutting off
work and technology we enter a different state of consciousness, a different dimension of time
and a different atmosphere, a “mine where the spirit’s precious metal can be found.”

Imagine if instead of claiming to offer us the best things in life, tech merely saw itself as
providing efficiency devices. Its innovations can save us time on lower-level tasks so we can get
offline and there experience the best things in life.

Imagine if tech pitched itself that way. That would be an amazing show of realism and,
especially, humility, which these days is the ultimate and most disruptive technology.
Reader Comments

Mj
Nov. 20, 2017

I work in Tech and I assure I am not working to addict anyone. There are many more companies
than the 4 you listed working on all sorts of technology. It isn't the Tech industry's fault that
parent's use a smart phone to raise their children. It isn't the tech industry's fault that people give
their babies tablets so they don't bother them while they are working on their Facebook page. It
IS the tech industry's fault that they capture every tiny bit of info they can on your and sell it for
big bucks to marketing companies. I am old enough to remember similar complaints about
television. Here is the thing, raise your children. Listen to them. Spend time with them. Teach
them that their phone is device to make things simpler, not a magic portal into "babe-land" or
"dude-heaven". It's not something you use because you're too lazy to leave the house. It's not a
toy. It's not the be all and end all of existence. It's not important. People are important. But first
of course, Mom and Dad have to learn this too.

Liam Jumper
Houston, TX
Nov. 20, 2017

Yes, indeed it is evil only you’ve missed most of the picture. Trump won because of the gross
income inequality running rampant in this nation. It is going to become even worse unless we
take notice and very soon build in some safeguards. The third largest factory in South Korea, a
Hyundai factory, has 100 employees. Raw materials go in one end. At the far end a few
employees drive completed cars to the storage area to ship them to overseas markets. Most of the
employees are robotics engineers. They wear lights because the factory interior is unlit. Where
does the wealth this factory generates go? It’s not into pockets of the several thousand it doesn’t
employ. You’ll find them at the nearby railroad station peddling dried octopus. They return home
to shanties. That’s America’s automated future if we don’t wise up. Self-driving trucks are hot
tech news. How many hundreds of thousands of those good-paying jobs will be displaced? What
will the unemployed do for income? Likewise, retailers are eager to replace cashiers with
checkout kiosks. I was in Target the other day at about 10 AM. There were zero clerks; only a
supervisor for the self-checkout stations. I no longer shop at Target. Indifference to this tech
problem has already brought ugly outcomes. Continue blithely replacing people with "tech" and
pretending the magical marketplace will pop up an employment solution and ugly will turn to
brutal, evil behavior on a scale not seen since WW II.

Mark Hugh Miller

Frequently I see people using smartphones as a prop to avoid acknowledging or interacting with
strangers. Enter an elevator car and immediately the person opposite you lifts his mobile and
fixes his eyes on it. You ride in silence. Ditto in corporate hallways. It might be shyness or fear
or perhaps a prejudice peculiar to that person, but it can also be foolishness, as when people
stride across streets with their eyes riveted to a smartphone instead of on crosswalk traffic around
them. Does this head-in-the-sand behavior during one of the riskier common activities in urban
street life confers a false sense of safety? ("I'm connected to someone I know so I'm safe among
the strangers around me.") I'm an older man and know some young people, particularly here in
the USA, are uneasy around adult strangers, which perhaps explains why so many look to their
mobiles in order to avoid eye contact with older people. Whatever the psychology behind these
rituals of willful self-isolation, the loss of casual cordiality and polite acknowledgement of others
in situations traditionally considered appropriate to it seems to me a loss to all.

ShawnH
Seattle
Nov. 21, 2017

Tech is is just like every other industry. Some people are malicious, others are not. I’ve worked
in tech for 20 years and I can tell you that it’s not being evil that is an issue here. Most people in
tech are there because they love inventing, they love creating, they love math and science and
coding. But they are also deeply naive about the potential pitfalls. Much of this has to do with
societal upbringing. Tech is primarily men, who are not raised to think about or care about
empathy, cultural or societal impacts. In the US that is still the domain of women, who are under
represented in tech, and certainly promoted more slowly and listened to less frequently. This
naievity also extends to all the bad ways their tech can be used since they themselves are not
targeted for hate and harassment online like minorities are. They are even less represented than
women are. Combine this lack of diverse experiences and viewpoints with our capitalistic society
where social responsibility is for chumps and shareholder value is all that matters, with people’s
lack of understanding about the tech they use, and failure to read terms and conditions, and here
we are.

PE
Seattle
Nov. 20, 2017

Tech has changed the way some teens hangout. Now some kids gather to play games online.
They wear headphones and talk. They form teams and concoct strategies. This seems more
healthy than watching sitcoms alone. Also, tech has enabled many to find their own artistic
voice. Some artists are posting their own music on SoundCloud. Teen authors are emerging in
creative writing forums. Some websites encourage creative photography, graphic design and
digital art. I know one teenager who is creating his own comic series/graphic novel and is
"publishing" it online. There is another side to the coin. It's not all bad. Parents just need to
encourage the artistic opportunity social media offers. And be open to new forms of
communication. I think it's a mistake to paint a dismal picture for our youth. Instead, better to
shine a light on the cool things, the opportunity, the art.