Category: Wellness when Always-On

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Audience as Capital Products and Design Wellness when Always-On

An example of why Reclaiming Attention is important to me

We just read about anxiety-inducing tactics by social media and games like FarmVille.

Growth hacking infects our attention

Today we look at a related but distinct issue: the use of “dark patterns” used by marketers on the internet.

Dark patterns are ways of designing emails, websites and other messages that confuse or manipulate people into taking an action other than what they intended.

The New York Times reported the use of such patterns by the 2020 Trump re-election campaign:

The Trump team repeatedly used phantom donation matches and faux deadlines to loosen donor wallets (“1000% offer: ACTIVATED…For the NEXT HOUR”). Eventually it ratcheted up the volume of emails it sent until it was barraging supporters with an average of 15 per day for all of October and November 2020.

Contributors had to wade through a fine-print disclaimer and manually uncheck a box to opt out…It introduced a second prechecked box, known internally as a “money bomb,” that doubled a person’s contribution. Eventually its solicitations featured lines of text in bold and capital letters that overwhelmed the opt-out language.

By October there were sometimes nine lines of boldface text — with ALL-CAPS words sprinkled in — before the disclosure that there would be weekly withdrawals. As many as eight more lines of boldface text came before the second additional donation disclaimer.

This was what it looked like:

The article does not do a good enough job writing about the cost to people’s financial and mental well being, the most important aspect of this story. The one that they do explore in some detail is this horrifying story of a person dealing with late-stage cancer:

Another $500 was withdrawn the next day, then $500 the next week and every week through mid-October, without his knowledge — until Mr. Blatt’s bank account had been depleted and frozen. When his utility and rent payments bounced, he called his brother, Russell, for help. What the Blatts soon discovered was $3,000 in withdrawals by the Trump campaign in less than 30 days. They called their bank and said they thought they were victims of fraud.

I often write about attention on this website. Stories such as this should indicate why this issue is important to me. A life that is spent navigating interfaces like this and dealing with the severe consequences of one false move is not a life of any great quality. We deserve better of the Internet.

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Making Money Online Products and Design The Next Computer Wellness when Always-On

Growth hacking infects our attention

In my mind, Farmville was the first game to really annoy people. It was also the first game I saw that sucked in for days people I knew – people who otherwise had little interest in even casual games.

In other words, Farmville was the first large-scale success of online gamification. These are techniques that are designed – deliberately – to promote anxiety, fear of missing out, hijacking attention, guilting players and their online ‘friends’, among others.

This New York Times article from December last year takes an unsparing look at the game. Even though it shut down that month,

FarmVille lives on in the behaviors it instilled in everyday internet users and the growth-hacking techniques it perfected, now baked into virtually every site, service and app vying for your attention.

The article cites examples of the techniques I listed above:

drawing players into loops that were hard to pull themselves from. If you didn’t check in every day, your crops would wither and die; some players would set alarms so they wouldn’t forget. If you needed help, you could spend real money or send requests to your Facebook friends — a source of annoyance for nonplayers who were besieged with notifications and updates in their news feeds.

It gamified attention and encouraged interaction loops in a way that is now being imitated by everything from Instagram to QAnon

I see a recurring pattern of blaming people – the ‘consumer’ – for their supposed weakness in getting sucked in by products like Farmville, and social media in general. This has happened before with tobacco, with packaged snacks, even with recycling.

This article makes clear that companies like Zynga deliberately design games and social media to prey upon our emotions and attention in ways that TV and outdoor advertising couldn’t.

They use phone and email notifications, unread counts, access to your phone contact list and facebook friend list, your location and individual pattern of use, design techniques like pull to refresh, arbitrary countdown timers – all to systematically weaken your resolve and act according to how the game or app wants you to, including spending real money to buy in-game baubles.

Unfortunately, Farmville’s techniques now pervade the tech industry. Fortunately, enough of us have been burnt by such games and are aware of our addiction to social media that – should we want to – we can in fact start of wean ourselves off it.

Unlike with viruses, there is no vaccine that immunises you from distraction. But you can build a natural resistance to it. It’s harder, but it’s also equally effective. And we will each be the wiser for it.

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Product Management Products and Design Startups The Dark Forest of the Internet Wellness when Always-On

Failure to empathise

On a new feature in Slack via which anyone on Slack can message any other Slack user, across companies:

When Slack introduced the feature today, it hadn’t implemented any features that can help someone who gets harassed. There is no block button or built in mechanism to report the message to Slack or your company’s Slack administrator.

https://twitter.com/44/status/1374737695444901891

Slack reacted:

… “we received valuable feedback from our users about how email invitations to use the feature could potentially be used to send abusive or harassing messages. We are taking immediate steps to prevent this kind of abuse”

– Slack Says Letting Anyone Message Anyone With Few Limits Was ‘a Mistake’

This is a failure to empathise, a rather basic failure when designing products. Gmail took off in its early days in large part because it decimated spam. That is a fifteen year old lesson. Twitter’s issues with harassment and spam are an ongoing lesson.

At Slack’s scale, one should expect product managers to consider the potential for harassment. For information overload. For ambiguity. For bias.

If Slack – or any other company – consciously builds and promotes its products to be used by organisations of all sizes, across all industries, globally, they cannot also dismiss or discount these as incovenient or unnecessary.

These considerations will slow down design and development, they will make the product somewhat less agile and they will increase monetary costs.

That’s the price of making a product that widely available.

You expect that with the increase revenue from this scale, you hire the best product, design and engineering talent to build efficiently while also considering everything above.

(ends)

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Audience as Capital Discovery and Curation Life Design Making Money Online Wellness when Always-On

When you pay attention to one thing, you ignore something else

A wonderful longform article by the New York Times writer Charlie Warzel about the perils of the attention economy. The article itself is centered on his conversation with the writer Michael Goldhaber, who predicted this over thirty years ago, before even the infancy of the web.

The need to reclaim our attention is a topic dear to me, and naturally so was this article.

It’s hard to quote one or two essential sentences by Goldhaber, so I’ve had to go beyond in order to do him justice. I think it’s worth your attention to read on:

Understanding attention scarcity

He was obsessed at the time [in the 1980s] with what he felt was an information glut — that there was simply more access to news, opinion and forms of entertainment than one could handle. His epiphany was this: One of the most finite resources in the world is human attention.

This is a zero-sum proposition, he realized. When you pay attention to one thing, you ignore something else.

Understanding attention hijacking

“When you have attention, you have power, and some people will try and succeed in getting huge amounts of attention, and they would not use it in equal or positive ways.”

[In 1997] He outlined the demands of living in an attention economy, describing an ennui that didn’t yet exist but now feels familiar to anyone who makes a living online. “The Net also ups the ante, increasing the relentless pressure to get some fraction of this limited resource,” he wrote. “At the same time, it generates ever greater demands on each of us to pay what scarce attention we can to others.”

“Our abilities to pay attention are limited. Not so our abilities to receive it,” he wrote in the journal First Monday. “The value of true modesty or humility is hard to sustain in an attention economy.”

Politics and Attention

Most obviously, he saw Mr. Trump — and the tweets, rallies and cable news dominance that defined his presidency — as a near-perfect product of an attention economy, a truth that disturbed him greatly…

Living in a rural area, he suggested, means being farther from cultural centers and may result in feeling alienated by the attention that cities generate in the news and in pop culture. He said that almost by accident, Mr. Trump tapped into this frustration by at least pretending to pay attention to them.

he was deeply concerned about whether the attention economy and a healthy democracy can coexist. Nuanced policy discussions, he said, will almost certainly get simplified into “meaningless slogans” in order to travel farther online,

“We struggle to attune ourselves to groups of people who feel they’re not getting the attention they deserve, and we ought to get better at sensing that feeling earlier,” he said. “Because it’s a powerful, dangerous feeling.”

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Audience as Capital Life Design Wellness when Always-On Writing

Mental health Whatsapp group

A couple of days ago I started a Whatsapp group about mental health, something that’s rather important to me.

Here is the link to the Whatsapp channel.

And here is how I describe the channel:

Links to articles and short commentary on living a less rushed, less stressful, less distracted life. A shared journey from surviving to thriving. From someone who’s been through the lows of burnout, depression and chronic pain.

On this site, we explore mental health in the context of technology under the tag Wellness When Always-on.

My first message on the channel referenced a quote I had linked to in a blog post from almost exactly a year ago:

Burnout as a workplace injury

This is the second Whatsapp group I have recently begun publishing on, the first one being one on bitcoin, cryptocurrency and decentralised finance, which now has subscribers from ~13 countries.

Cryptocurrency Whatsapp group

(Featured Image Photo Credit: Laura Ockel/Unsplash)

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Life Design The Next Computer Wellness when Always-On

iPhone home screen, March 2021

(Previously:August, September, October, November, December, January, February home screens)

I’m very nearly at a home screen setup that doesn’t change at all month on month.

The only change from February has been changing the Shortcuts widgets on the home screen from two 1×1 widgets to a single 2×2 widget. That means instead of two Shortcuts, I have four.

The two new Shortcuts are water consumption and meditation logs.

As temperatures rise in the tropics here, I’m prone to headaches from even slight dehydration – these are different from my migraines. We have discussed water tracking via the Fitbit app earlier, but I’m taking a break from wearing a device constantly on my wrist, and I want an alternative way to track my water habits – so this shortcut simply brings up a pre-set list of water levels for me to tap, and then logs it to a comma-separated file in iCloud Drive along with the timestamp. So I can track not just my daily water consumption levels but also the number of drinks and their time.

The other is my meditation log. Years ago, I had a pretty solid meditation routine. It helped me during some very challenging years dealing with mental health issues. While I’m much healthier now I’d like to get back to a daily twenty-to-thirty minute meditation practice. This Shortcut, which I have had a long time but rarely used, is to be invoked after I have completed the meditation session. It presents a prompt for how long I meditated, and then a pre-set list from 0 to 3 to log (subjective) quality, zero being no meditative state at all. So far I’m usually at a one. This is logged to another comma-separated value file with the timestamp. Much like water, I can not just plot my meditation streak, but also its quality, number per day and the time of day I typically meditate. The infrastructure exists, now to execute.

(ends)

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Privacy and Anonymity Wellness when Always-On

Privacy and the imbalance of power

We explored this in a lot of detail in our three-part series on Alternate Realities, where we dive into how the Internet has made it possible to express safely who we are – often multiple selves – and find others like us.

Alternate realities – Part 1

Privacy, closely related to anonymity, works just like this. We need privacy not necessarily because we are up to something that is criminal or something that causes harm. It is because people differ about what is considered acceptable. The norm for this is always set by those in power. Privacy is the only thing that lets people act in ways considered unacceptable, without incurring censure, ridicule, ostracisation, even harm. Whether by themselves or with people like them.

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Products and Design The Next Computer Wellness when Always-On

Stress and pressure

In my opinion, this is mostly true. In fact, acknowledging this distinction reveals something important:

The distraction and attention suck that’s skillfully designed into social media, games and other apps is hard to shake because it blurs the line between pressure and stress.

On the surface, this addiction seems to be in our control – we got into it, it’s self-inflicted. Most advice advocates deleting apps, turning off notifications, locking our devices away temporarily, setting our screens to black-and-white, turning off 4G, deliberately downgrading our phone – actions that we’re supposed to take and then maintain. Any subsequent failure is personal because the original responsibility was ostensibly ours, and therefore there’s deserved pressure to stick to our de-addiction goal.

But it isn’t really like that is it? Social media and notification addition cause stress that is inflicted upon us by apps, apps that have been designed by companies with enormous resources and incentives to keep us engaged for as long as possible. The battle is unequal and the onus should be as much on these apps to encourage good, healthy behaviour as it is on you and me to reduce screen time.

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Life Design Making Money Online Products and Design Wellness when Always-On

The Precariat and today’s tech age

The precariat is a neologism for a social class formed by people suffering from precarity, which means existing without predictability or security, affecting material or psychological welfare. The term is a portmanteau merging precarious with proletariat.

Unlike the proletariat class of industrial workers in the 20th century who lacked their own means of production and hence sold their labour to live, members of the precariat are only partially involved in labour and must undertake extensive unremunerated activities that are essential if they are to retain access to jobs and to decent earnings. Classic examples of such unpaid activities include continually having to search for work (including preparing for and attending job interviews), as well as being expected to be perpetually responsive to calls for “gig” work (yet without being paid an actual wage for being “on call”).

The hallmark of the precariat class is the condition of lack of job security, including intermittent employment or underemployment and the resultant precarious existence.

– Precariat, Wikipedia.

We usually ascribe the ability of technology-first companies to disrupt existing industries to the fact that tech brings the marginal costs to service customers down to nearly zero. Tech-first companies can ‘scale’, get things done more efficiently: cheaper, faster, with fewer errors and people.

Another, darker side of many types of technology companies is that they externalise costs that were usually absorbed by more traditional companies.

These costs are often borne by employees themselves. This is more obvious in the ‘gig’ economy, where companies have fought hard to have their drivers, delivery persons and other roles classified as contractors so they wouldn’t be required by law to receive all the benefits employees were due. But this is also evident at several other tech companies, especially those that have moved to remote work (or were remote-first to begin with). Many companies have employees pay for their own computers, phone and equipment, internet, power, and their own home office while saving on rent, IT and utilities.

The precariat isn’t a consequence of the Tech age or tech companies. Its emergence and persistence are more than anything the symptoms of an inadequate welfare system which itself, as Wikipedia article suggests, is a result of “neoliberal capitalism”.

But it is also true that the very things that make some types of technology companies efficient and innovative are those that create precarious employment.

(Featured Image Photo Credit: Carl Campbell/Unsplash)

Categories
Data Custody Privacy and Anonymity The Next Computer Wellness when Always-On

A no-bullshit look at Facebook’s and Apple’s privacy propositions – Part 2

(Part 1 – How Facebook’s using guilt to get people to voluntarily opt out of Apple’s privacy protections)

There is a kernel of truth in Facebook’s argument that “with the upcoming iOS 14 changes, many small businesses will no longer be able to reach their customers with targeted ads”. Targeted ads work better than generic, non-targeted ones. And facebook is able to provide user targeting like no other for two reasons: because people share very personal information on Facebook, and because outside of that, Facebook aggressively collects information on people through their activities outside of Facebook, both via businesses who themselves install Facebook tracking to understand their customers better and through other companies they call “Audience Data Providers“

However, Facebook’s ad targeting can be used by businesses large and small. A small burger joint in a city in theory could use Facebook’s sharp targeting to reach its type of customers in its catchment area. But a nationwide burger chain or its franchisee can use the same targeting software to drive people to its store instead, often outspending the independent small business. Facebook makes no promises to small businesses that this is only about them.

It follows that should a person agree to allow themselves to be tracked, Facebook also makes no claim to its users that that information will only be used by small businesses. Just like Facebook’s ad software is available to businesses large and small, user data once collected is also available to any company with a Facebook ad account.

So while Facebook’s ability to track people in such detail doesn’t really give small businesses any sort of sustainable competitive advantage, it doesn’t give its users any choice about trading their data to support an ostensibly noble cause.

Finally, Facebook’s argument holds weight only because of its dominant position in the online ad business, alongside Google. A small ad network would hardly be taken seriously if it claimed to stand up for small businesses nationwide, leave along globally. It’s disingenuous for Facebook to accuse Apple of using its dominant position to push its own agenda while it does the exact same thing. 

Apple’s position on privacy is simple. As one of its ads says, “What happens on your iPhone stays on your iPhone”. [1] It is a commitment one party makes to another, no one else, and that party proves it by aligning its interests to the others’.

Facebook’s (opposite) position on privacy is more messy and conflicted. It urges one party (its users) to make sacrifices (allow data tracking) in order to benefit a third party (small businesses) whose thriving only it (Facebook) can ensure. That does not sound like a healthy relationship between any of the parties

As we’ve discussed many times on this site, in the Internet we’ve ended up building, the question of privacy is one of data custody – who you trust with your data. And in that regard, I’d much rather cast my lot with Apple that with Facebook.

End note: One could argue that Google’s stance on privacy, while being the opposite the opposite of Apple’s, is also straightforward: give me data, I’ll make your life dramatically better. Search, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Photos, even the much-missed Google Reader. I’d trust Google with my data way before I trust Facebook.

[1] This is in the context of how Apple’s AI to categorise photos and other data works on-device instead of first sending all data to some central server.