I am watching the recent Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma. Obviously, it discussed many of the issues I write about regularly on this site. So I have a few opinions about it that I will think about and post here later. For now, this bit from Tristan Harris stood out:
… we’ve moved away from having a tools-based technology environment to an addiction and manipulation-based environment. That’s what’s changed. Social media isn’t a tool that’s just waiting to be used. It has its own goals. And it has its own means of pursuing them by using your psychology against you.
He’s articulated what have felt for a long time. Software used to be tools. Some were free and open-source, others were paid. Either way, business was separate from product, in the same way that business and editorial are separate in a well-run news organisation. Now some of the companies that we depend on every day no longer make money by customer paying for their software, they make money from other software paying for their customers.
You can see this with open source software. When you use the email client Thunderbird with an email account from your domain name provider, you’re using it as a tool. The relationship is simple and straightforward. You owe Thunderbird nothing; Thunderbird takes nothing from you. When you use Gmail.com with your Gmail email address, it’s a lot less simple. If you were old enough to use IRC, it was simply a tool you used to chat with friends and strangers online. Whatsapp on the other hand is hardly a tool. The relationship is much more unequal, in Whatsapp’s and Facebook’s favour.
While it may be already too late to live your existing life and maintain your existing relationships without using software from companies like Google and Facebook, you can learn from documentaries like this and make much more deliberate choices about these same tools – specifically, are you getting what you want from them, or are you doing what they want you to do?