Tuesday, 9.17pm
Sheffield, U.K.
There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real. – James Salter
Do you pay for any of the media you consume? I don’t. At least, not in the sense that I pay for the news. I pay for internet access and entertainment subscriptions, but I don’t get a newspaper. I used to read the Economist, for example. I even paid for it for a while. But now I don’t. Why is that?
The big technology firms have conditioned us to think everything is free. They’ve changed our behaviour. They’ve taught us that we don’t need to pay for things like news. We can simply tell each other what’s going on. Social media is gossip on a planetary scale.
At the same time, technology allows us to create more than ever. The number of journals and papers have exploded. There is more “thought leadership” being produced. We are incentivized to create more to serve the algorithm. We work to serve algorithms.dd
Why do we behave the way we do? Landsburg wrote in “The Armchair Economist”, “People respond to incentives. All else is commentary”. There are three incentives: pain, pleasure and effort. We try and avoid pain, seek pleasure and minimise effort.
It’s all about the high. The algorithm is carefully designed to dose you with pleasure and pain. Keep posting, and each like delivers a shot of dopamine – which gives you the same feelings as having a cigarette, alcohol or drug. The algorithm knows that you need an unpredictable dosage, so sometimes lots of exposures and likes to make you feel good, and sometimes low impressions to punish you – keep you oscillating between a state of “high” and “wanting more”. We are now increasingly digital media dopamine addicts.
The solution is to slow down and do hard things. Thinking is hard. Going for a run or exercising is hard. Swiping through posts on a phone is easy. We have to do more of the former, and less of the latter.
Cheers,
Karthik Suresh
Handcrafted insight 