Now that governments are finally investigating the use of personal data by online behemoths like Facebook, the time is nigh for evaluating how such companies have convinced billions of people to hand over their personal data voluntarily. Scientists are discovering that social media, video games, and other online platforms have been designed to make them addictive, to the point at which privacy and other scruples are forgotten. User addiction is sometimes accidental but there is growing evidence that designers have learned to engineer and manipulate it.
In Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked, Adam Alter, a professor of marketing at New York University, combines traditional business and psychology research with an investigation of modern addiction engineering. While addictive activities are nothing new, Alter finds that they are now becoming more and more ubiquitous, if not inescapable altogether. As described by a “design ethicist” whom Alter quotes on page 3, the problem isn't that social media users and video gamers lack willpower, but that “there are a thousand people on the other side of the screen whose job it is to break down the self-regulation you have.”
The early chapters of the book cover the history of our understanding of addiction, noting the important distinction between substance addiction and behavioral addiction. Substance addiction is relatively rare, and the person who is addicted to alcohol or illicit drugs must make a concerted effort to obtain them. Also, moving to a new environment where those substances are unavailable can lead to a miraculous recovery, as seen in the notable story of heroin-addicted soldiers in Vietnam (covered in Chapter 2). That addiction epidemic was caused by the presence of the drug and its dealers in the war zone, but when the soldiers came home to American towns where heroin was simply unavailable, they were able to kick their habits.
On the other hand, behavioral addictions are not so easy to escape, and the online versions are enabled by ubiquitous technologies. And furthermore, unlike drug or alcohol addiction, online addictions are socially acceptable and mainstream. Alter declares that we have entered “the age of behavioral addiction” and it is surely too late to stop the responsible technologies (p. 10). But perhaps the situation can be managed for the greater good, with Alter occasionally calling on experts and policymakers to steer technology in more beneficial directions.
The statistics are quite alarming. We learn that 48 percent of American college students could be diagnosed with some sort of Internet addiction, while in the general population, 40 percent are already Internet addicts and another 40 percent are borderline cases (p. 26). The problem is the environment in which we live: an alcoholic can pay bills without the assistance of alcohol, but nobody can pay bills without the assistance of the Internet. And while soldiers could kick a substance habit by simply moving to a new environment, they sometimes relapsed when visiting locations where dealers were present. Alter notes that it is time for addiction experts to acknowledge that addicts are no longer a “wretched minority” who cannot resist the quick rush of an illicit substance (pp. 66–67). Now, all of us are surrounded by addictive technologies all the time, with nearly continuous endorphin rushes when someone likes our posts or comments on our photos. The designers know this all too well, and have built an industry that depends on the cultivation and maintenance of these addictions.
At the psychological level, the pursuit of goals is the human tendency first noticed by tech designers. Just as people think one more dollar is better, it is natural to feel a certain satisfaction from gaining one more social media follower or conquering one more level in a video game. Many people also see the failure to reach a goal as a sign of weakness, which is easily exploited by designers (pp. 117–18). This can be accomplished by simply displaying a constant count of something like your number of followers; whereas video game designers have been known to design games so the first few levels are very easy, thus creating an artificial “beginner's luck” that hooks the player (p. 162). Children are particularly susceptible to these effects, but while laws keep cigarettes and alcohol away from kids, most countries have no policies on games that have clearly been designed to keep kids hooked (p. 240).
The tail end of the book tries to find solutions within the system, and Alter's avoidance of idealistic and unrealistic solutions is initially refreshing. Of course it has become impossible to even consider eliminating the modern technological milieu. Thus, Alter calls for reverse engineering to create “temptation-free” or nonaddictive online environments (p. 287). In other words, the human tendency for behavioral addiction could be harnessed and channeled into healthier pursuits. Perhaps exercising, eating better, and saving money could be gamified through the same technologies (p. 295). Alter also cites some recent apps that have tweaked the gamification process to be less addictive (p. 300).
This is a realistic but rather unsatisfying solution, replacing one type of obsessive behavior with another. Alter even admits that the gamification process, no matter its purposes, turns human experience into a trivial point system that distracts from deeper appreciations (pp. 314–15). The book's very last paragraph (p. 319) drops a few minor recommendations like removing numerical rewards from social media sites (known as “demetrication” in the business) and encouraging parental supervision of kids' technology use. This brings the book to a noticeably anticlimactic close as Alter, regardless of his viable outlook on the permanence of modern technology, roundly avoids the big questions that must be asked.
This is disappointing after the rest of the book's convincing research on how an entire industry has built a staggeringly profitable business model devoted entirely to manipulating our tendencies toward behavioral addictions. But Alter has certainly helped build our knowledge of how this problem was designed into existence. As policymakers examine the industry's unethical and unaccountable use of our personal data, they should also examine how the industry got us to hand it over in the first place.
