Illustration and animation by: Adrià Tañà
Attention is an odd commodity. Unlike information, attention cannot be copied and shared. Unlike money, you cannot create new types of attention or pump more into circulation when times are tough. Attention is closer to gold, in that there is only so much to go round. But attention is much rarer than gold, which, after all, is forged all the time in violent stellar events. We know there is plenty of gold out there among the stars, and if we could somehow get to it and bring it back, the gold on Earth would lose its value. But, as far as we can tell, there is no conscious attention beyond our planet — and certainly no human attention, aside from a handful of astronauts hurtling round us in low Earth orbit aboard the International Space Station.
Attention, then, is a finite and much fought-over resource, which explains why competition for your attention is so fierce. Attention, however, is an odd commodity and does not follow the normal rules of supply and demand. A valuable resource in short supply usually commands a high price. Yet we frequently give our attention away for free. And not just for free: as competition for attention heats up, the things to which we attend degrade.
To understand why, it might help to think of the attention economy as a vast mining operation. Instead of tunnelling into the ground, habit-forming products bore into your mind, exploiting psychological vulnerabilities to extract and sell as much of your conscious attention (which means, also, as much of your time) as possible. As Cal Newport notes in Digital Minimalism, ‘People don’t succumb to screens because they’re lazy, but instead because billions of dollars have been invested to make this outcome inevitable.’
The following eight-step breakdown is a crash course on habit-forming products: how they are built and why they are so hard to resist. It’s important to note that no one is claiming smartphones and social media are not useful. The problem lies in the growing imbalance of power between user and company, the misalignment of goals that exists between the two, and the individual’s subsequent loss of control.
How Habit-Forming Products Hack Minds
1: Drive
Tech companies target a need / emotion / desire that drives you to act. For example, the need for human connection. This is the core around which the new habit forms.
2: Entice
A cue or ‘trigger’ in your external environment entices you to act. The lure should be well-timed: delivered, ideally, when you are already teetering on the edge of action.
3: Whoosh
Having zeroed in on a drive and lured you over the edge, designers work hard to make completing the action easy, frictionless — like plunging down a slide. Whoosh!
4: Welcome to the Infinite Casino
The unknown fascinates; predictability bores.
Rewards delivered intermittently, at variable intervals, hook your attention far more effectively than rewards you can predict. It’s the same principle at work in slot machines. Except instead of cash payouts, the reward (a new like on your post, perhaps) is a hit of dopamine. Platforms on which billions of users upload content, interact, and compete for attention, contain near-limitless variability.
Add to this the deliberate removal of stopping cues, as in ‘infinite scroll’, which provides a frictionless way for you to keep going and going to see what you get next (Whoosh!), and the sprinkling of positive intermittent reinforcement becomes very hard to resist.
5: Everybody Needs Somebody
A human being is, as Aristotle wrote, ‘a social animal.’ With its likes, friends, followers, and connections, social media exploits (but does not satisfy) your longing for social validation.
The most successful habit-forming products target deep-rooted vulnerabilities in human psychology. Tristan Harris, a former Google ethicist and the co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, calls this ‘the race to the bottom of the brainstem,’ because any company that fails to exploit a known vulnerability will lose out to a more ruthless competitor and fall behind.
6: In Too Deep
When you build a profile, gain followers, make connections, or upload content, you are storing value in the platform. Some forms of investment, such as ‘streaks’ of unbroken activity, are designed to further encourage frequent use, which is key to forming a new habit. The more you invest, the harder it is to leave, and the more accurately your behaviour can be predicted and influenced via the data you share.
It is not only individuals who are in too deep: social media is now so entangled in economy and society, with so many companies, powerful figures, and government institutions invested in their ‘social media presence’, that abandoning the platforms has become near unthinkable.
'It’s the gradual, slight, imperceptible change in your own behaviour and perception that is the product.'
7: Mind-Altering Technology
Initially, something in the outside world enticed you to act. However, over time, the urge to check for updates becomes automatic (habitual). Wondering what you might be missing out on (loss-aversion) creates an unpleasant sensation in your body, linked to a measurable spike in the stress hormone cortisol: a pang of discomfort temporarily relieved by checking your phone. As Nir Eyal writes in Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products: ‘Emotions, particularly negative ones, are powerful internal triggers that prompt an action to quell the negative sensation.’
Add to this that you are less able to control your impulses when you are stressed and the action is easy to take (as easy as swiping a screen), and it becomes clear why the world is full of people compulsively reaching for their phones, to check again what they checked moments ago. It is a self-reinforcing loop.
And it does not stop there.
Habit-forming products can alter what you think, how you feel, who you are. As Stuart Russell, the computer scientist noted for his contributions to artificial intelligence, explains: recommender systems, or reinforcement learning algorithms, do not just send you more of what you like. ‘Sending you stuff you like is not the best way to maximise ad revenue,’ says Russell. ‘The best way to maximise revenue is to modify you into someone who is more predictable — because the more predictable you are, the higher percentage of the things I send you, you are going to click on. A simple reinforcement learning algorithm would learn how to do that by sending you content that is a little more extreme than your current political views, and then if you see enough of that, your political views will become a little more extreme, and then this process iterates until you are way at one end or the other of the spectrum . . . And then, when you are an extremist, you are very predictable and we can generate more revenue from you.’
There is a well known saying: ‘When you don’t pay for the product, then you are the product.’ This is true but also rather vague. Jaron Lanier, a pioneer in the field of virtual reality and the author of Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, puts it more precisely: ‘It’s the gradual, slight, imperceptible change in your own behaviour and perception that is the product.’
Social media companies sell their ability to influence the future at scale
8: Leverage the New
The technology on which this system relies arrived fairly recently. Touch screens, fast mobile data, front-facing cameras on smartphones, artificial intelligence. This is important to keep in mind because, as your technology landscape evolves (and it is changing faster now than at any point in human history), new methods of mind-hacking will be made available.
Steps one to three sound straightforward: (1) target a drive; (2) entice you to act; (3) make acting easy. They are not. The steady integration of digital technology into all aspects of life, coupled with increasingly powerful AI systems, means you can be targeted in ever more precise, frequent, and personalised ways. Micro-pauses in your scrolling behaviour can be analysed to reveal things about you that you might not know about yourself. Automated personalised adverts can be generated and served to you when you are most susceptible to persuasion, and AI avatars might, over a longer period of time, build trust in order to influence what you buy or who you vote for.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Resistance
The argument is sometimes made (by people who work in technology) that the model used to build habit-forming products is not in itself harmful because it can also be used to build beneficial habits. This is disingenuous. While it is true that some of these techniques can be used to help form healthy habits, when maximally deployed, as they are on social media platforms, these techniques are not compatible with human well-being. To build an addictive product, you have to make addicts, which means unbalancing the minds of the people who use your product. ‘Users’ must be kept yo-yoing between craving and aversion to keep them coming back for more. This is the exact opposite of what one seeks to achieve through meditative practices.
Knowing how habit-forming products are built will not stop them working on you. However, it might motivate you to search for techniques that will make you more resilient, and spaces that offer some respite from the attention economy. This need to resist is among the reasons we started our Mindfulness and Awe Walks. Finding awe outdoors and learning to focus your attention is one way of cultivating the clarity and genuine connectedness stifled by the attention economy.
Adaptation
In an essay on Adaptation, Salman Rushdie once wrote: ‘an adaptation works best when it is a genuine transaction between the old and the new, carried out by persons who understand and care for both, who can help the thing adapted to leap the gulf and shine again in a different light.’
In the essay, Rushdie focuses primarily on artistic adaptations, but the point applies more broadly. Attention capitalists understand the old and the new, but they do not care for both. They use the latest technology to hack that abiding constant, human nature, for commercial gain. This adaptation of human connection is an ongoing tragedy, wasting our time and fuelling (among other things) political polarisation and an epidemic of mental illness. Today we are urgently in need of new tools that can help us shine again in a different light.
