The Peril of Engagement

The world is a complicated place, colored in shades of grey. The topic of this essay, social media, is no different. The speed and magnitude with which social media came to dominate our attention is unprecedented. But it seems to me, individually and institutionally, humanity is poorly suited to handle this monumental change.

I find myself fighting incessantly against the tug of distraction, against an ever-present nagging, a desire to see ‘what’s happening’ in the digital world. What magic and novelty is waiting behind the rectangle of glass? If, like me, you believe that focus and consistent effort are necessary to achieve anything great, then this indefatigable force is an enemy of greatness.

In writing this essay, I was reminded of David Foster Wallace’s ‘This is Water’ commencement. We are like the fish, and we are consumed by a distraction so pervasive we hardly notice it. But sometimes, I do notice it, and it makes me want to show the whole world what it is we are swimming in.

Perhaps I am being harsh, maybe this invisible water all around us isn’t so bad. Surely, some good has come of it. The world is greyscale, as is social media. But I can’t help but think that, on balance, the bad far outweighs the good. This essay is an attempt to identify the source of the bad. - Ian

In his talk The Value of Science from 1955, admired physicist Richard Feynman argues for the value that science provides to society. He states:

The first way in which science is of value is familiar to everyone. It is that scientific knowledge enables us to do all kinds of things and to make all kinds of things. Of course if we make good things, it is not only to the credit of science; it is also to the credit of the moral choice which led us to good work. Scientific knowledge is an enabling power to do either good or bad— but it does not carry instructions on how to use it. Such power has evident value— even though the power may be negated by what one does….

Scientific knowledge is fundamentally amoral— it can be used for good or evil, right or wrong. It is the choices that humans make when transporting that scientific knowledge into the world via technology, institutions, or policies, that any moral qualities emerge.

In the same way, technological achievement is also amoral — it has no aim in and of itself. “Technology doesn’t want a better world for humanity; it simply makes such a world possible.” Human choice dictates the value of technology. This means, of course, that some specific technologies are overwhelmingly good— for instance vaccines, antibiotics, electricity, lightbulbs— but it also means that some specific technologies are mostly bad, and many exist in a grey space between. I believe social media sits into this grey area, but that it increasingly exerts a non trivial negative force on the world.

In 2012, Facebook went public and began to monetize the platform by ramping up advertising volume to their users. Their revenue model can be described as follows: total revenue is roughly proportionate to the sum of the time users spend on the platform. The model is now defined in terms of formal ‘engagement’ metrics such as DAUs or MAUs, Daily and Monthly Active Users, respectively. Engagement metrics are a proxy measure for the financial value of a social network. The health of Facebook and all consumer digital applications that are ad-supported (and increasingly those that are not, e.g. Netflix), can be reduced to the health of their engagement metrics.

Inevitably, this model forces companies like Facebook to ruthlessly seek ways to keep users engaged. This is especially true since the engagement they seek is zero sum, humans only have a finite number of hours in a day. Platforms are all competing for the same ‘pie’ of consumer attention. But chasing a larger share of the engagement pie has not been without consequences, two of which I will briefly outline below.

In a 2022 essay published in The Atlantic, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues that social media is plunging American society into chaos, causing “…the fragmentation of everything.” He cites how at first, social media “… helped people achieve the eternal goal of maintaining their social ties,”  but that soon after, it morphed into a place for “putting on performances and managing… personal brands.” Social media transformed from a benign communication medium into a new type of status game.

This new status game incentivizes outrage, and gives a vocal minority the ability to cloud reality with their online hysterics. Anonymity and digital distance encourages combativeness that simply does not occur in person. Haidt describes several more challenges caused by social media, and concludes that, due to social media’s societal impact, “American democracy is now operating outside the bounds of sustainability.”

It is unclear whether the shift from communication to entertainment that Haidt describes was intentional or not. However, it is clear that the entertainment utility is much more engaging to users than the communication utility. Providing users with entertainment improves engagement metrics— no matter how absurd or frivolous the content is, or perhaps, due to this absurdity. And so, it is not surprising that the platforms continue to encourage entertainment, for the sake of their financial success, but at great external cost.

Not only is the unabated pursuit of engagement imperiling western democracy, but it is also harming individuals. The average internet user spends almost two and half hours on social media, every day. This alone is a tremendous, pervasive, behavioral change from just fifteen years ago, and certainly the impact on us cannot yet be fully understood. Haidt also sketches out what social media may be doing to adolescents.

And while social media has eroded the art of association throughout society, it may be leaving its deepest and most enduring marks on adolescents. A surge in rates of anxiety, depression, and self-harm among American teens began suddenly in the early 2010s. (The same thing happened to Canadian and British teens, at the same time.) The cause is not known, but the timing points to social media as a substantial contributor —the surge began just as the large majority of American teens became daily users of the major platforms. Correlational and experimental studies back up the connection to depression and anxiety, as do reports from young people themselves, and from Facebook’s own research, as reported by *The Wall Street Journal.*

This is a worrying picture of the next generation of adults. In addition to the daily time spent and the potential associated psychological impacts, there is the difficult to measure cost of near-constant context switching. The ability to focus is under attack, and for many, completely impossible. Cal Newport, famous for his deep thinking on personal productivity, asks the sobering question which summarizes this concern best. “How much genius are we losing to the compulsive need to scroll just a little bit more?” Here, here.

This is far from a comprehensive review of the ways in which social media is damaging our culture, and ourselves. I have not the energy nor the qualifications to expand further, but I suspect my readers will intuitively grasp my contention, perhaps by reflecting on the impacts of their own social media use. I also have obviously excluded any of the positive aspects to social media, which surely do exist. However, I believe that on balance, the bad outweighs the good, and we cannot withstand the attack on our collective attention spans and our societal fabric much longer.

Which brings me to one of the most famous quotes in technology. “Build something people want.” This is the motto of Y Combinator, the most successful startup accelerator in the world. It is also the unofficial anthem of entrepreneurs everywhere.

Its meaning is self-evident, but allow me to expand. An entrepreneur must create something that other people want (to buy, or to use), otherwise that entrepreneur has not succeeded. A product or business with no users or customers is neither of those things.

Of course, people want all sorts of things. The purpose of entrepreneurship is to identify and create new wants. In his essay, Lean Startup vs. Vision of the Future, author Luke Burgis (who, appropriately, wrote the book Wanting) offers the following insight (emphasis mine), “… Desires [wants] are formed, not born out of nothing—not created ex nihilo… the greatest role of an entrepreneur is shaper of desires... “.

Entrepreneurs bear a special responsibility because they invent the goods and services that enter the world as potential objects of desire (or, as wants). The world is full of good and bad products, and all of them result from entrepreneurial inventiveness. As I said in the opening, technological progress is amoral, but specific technologies are not. Entrepreneurs are in the business of creating specific technologies, which means that the products they produce will have some (perhaps unpredictable) moral impact. They will either make humanity better or worse off.

Ideally then, entrepreneurs build specific technologies that people want, and that make the world better. In an essay called Be Good, the founder of Y Combinator, Paul Graham, argues that entrepreneurs must above all else, “Do whatever's best for your users.” Notice he does not say ‘do whatever your users want’. It is this distinction which is essential. The gulf between ‘do whatever your users want’, and ‘do whatever is in the best interest of your users’ can be wide.

On one side of this gulf, the ‘do whatever your users want’ side, the entrepreneur abandons his agency to the will of his users. It is on this bank that the entrepreneur may seek engagement at all costs. But the line between engagement and addiction, between what users want, and what users want in spite of themselves, is vanishingly small for digital technologies. Not everything people want is good for them. I admit this is cynical, but who can understand human nature, and not know this to be true. The costs of the user desire for entertainment, and of platforms willingness to provide it— a democracy threatened, a generation in psychological turmoil, genius lost to amusement – support this description of human nature.

On the other side of the gulf, the 'do whatever is in the best interests of your users' side, the entrepreneur accepts responsibility for his users. On this bank, the entrepreneur makes a conscious moral choice on behalf of his users, and strives to create new wants that pull users toward good.

Feynman claims all science is either good or bad based on the choices we make with it. The blind pursuit of engagement is the indefinite suspension of that moral choice. Those who pursue this end don’t make an explicit choice, they delegate that decision to their users, presuming that what they want must be good. In this way they wash their hands of responsibility. But the evidence available now suggests that is an untenable strategy. Entrepreneurs must act deliberately in the best interests of their users, engagement alone cannot be the north star, guiding the progress of digital technologies. It is too blunt a measure, we follow its light at our peril.

How much more genius must we lose?