I was like the fringe hairs on the anemone. Detecting prey.

Back in 2016 I had a health crisis that caused me to spend unexpected time in the (mental) hospital. I was freelancing, not the first time I’d been working for myself, but I had no idea that my work-focused lifestyle was causing me to become overwhelmed. In every manner.

At the time, I thought I was (maybe) taking part in a hackathon. I was also micro-dosing liquid THC, so my thinking became warped within a few days of being at this new employer. (One who has since changed their name, one who pays a “brand premium” in their salaries, because they know many folks don’t/won’t want to work there. An employer who, at the time – a full 10 months prior to Trump/Hillary Clinton presidential election was, I thought, at the very tippy top of my list. An employer who recruits from Academic PhD pools and government Senatorial lackeys because – among other reasons, they can offer five times the salary.)

As part of my 90 day contract, this employer handed me (and the other 200 contractors/employees being oriented every Tuesday) a company iPhone. I fingerprinted in for easier credentialing. It felt like I was joining the CIA, we’d been sworn to secrecy and handed a bunch of documents containing legalese about what we could and couldn’t photograph on campus. Amongst their clever conference room names, there was one that was called “Facebook is the CIA.” This only added to my creative/deluded thinking, which quickly led me to the psyche ward.

Let’s fast forward to the present day – where 36 States and the District of Columbia are suing this company, with the claim that their endless feeds and addictive notifications are harming the tender minds of our youth. That they’ve purposely developed harmful features like “infinite scroll” and deployed algorithms that lead children down toxic rabbit holes, all in the name of profit.

Has anyone noticed that Vanguard Group Inc and BlackRock, Inc are the top institutional shareholders of this stock? That despite Frances Haugen’s whistleblowing book (The Power of One) and her testimonies to Congress, this price per share has already recovered? (as of today, it trades at $239 per share)

Yes, I read Frances’s book. She is brave and smart and I am glad she blew the whistle, but it’s like a dog whistle. It seems like only if you have children (I don’t) partaking in these apps, on their mobile phones, are you noticing that this is a problem. Many folks have called for boycotts, and/or deleted the apps from their mobile devices, claiming this helps with the all-the-time access, since we don’t carry our full laptops with us everywhere, like we do our phones. Advertisers and civic organizers have already started a boycott, back in 2020 and 2021, but doesn’t seem to have made a dent. Human behavior is hard to change.

I’m not going to assign blame, but let’s break this down a little bit. Nir Eyal, who takes a lot of credit for teaching companies like this one to create addictive technologies has long ago flipped his script to teach the individual to put their own controls in place. He went from writing Hooked: How to Build Habit Forming Products, to writing Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life within a two year time frame. He calls himself a “behavioral designer.” He still sells both books, and I am considering scheduling a free consult with him to see how he sleeps at night. I find this unconscionable, so I guess I am throwing shade. But I know it’s bigger than Nir’s Habit workshops – (I don’t even know if this company was his client,) and I know it’s bigger than Mark Zuckerberg not being CEO, which is what the boycotters were demanding.

For me, it took nearly seven years of talk therapy with a very kind and patient shrink, who listened to me rail at all the technology in the world that angers me, and watched me go through three different tech jobs as a UX (user experience) researcher during those same years. She kindly helped me to reach my own conclusions about deleting apps, setting time limits on the use of my iPhone, (even Apple put some ScreenTime features in place to help with this, but it wasn’t until 2018!) and finding joy in my face-to-face IRL (in real life) relationships, not my online network. Back then, I was spending all my waking hours online – so go figure — I had trouble sleeping. (Hence, one of the reasons I was micro-dosing THC:CBD tinctures, but that’s for another post.)

I do feel like I was a canary in the coal mine, and while I wasn’t a middle school pre-teen girl with body image issues, I was (at the time,) a 47 year old single woman who had zero limits on the amount of social media time I was spending, and no constraints around how many jobs I was holding simultaneously. (I had two other freelance gigs at the same time!) I was a hated techie-workaholic, and when I discovered this after a few months of therapy, my colleagues and friends sarcastically welcomed me to the club.

What’s wrong with that picture? Hindsight bias is 20/20 for sure.

Many thanks for the photo by Lia Schmidt on Unsplash