How much do you remember from your last social media scroll?
Two very bright 17-year-olds and I just looked at their social media usage.
Yesterday, they each spent about 6 hours on TikTok.
I asked them both to let me know what their best memory was from their 6 hours.
Neither could remember anything.
These two are both on track for top universities, they’re deep, creative thinkers, they’re active in communities, talented athletes, and they’re both a joy to be around.
To many, they’re model kids.
In total, each of them averages about 3 hours a day on social media. That’s over 1,000 hours a year.
How much of a normal person’s working year do you think that is (considering normal holidays and working hours)?
It’s more than 7 months.
That’s over half a year of pure potential that could be going towards cultivating something positive in the world — learning and growing, inventing and contemplating, deepening relationships with friends and family — instead going to nothing.
Have you noticed that Instagram now starts for many of us with what seems like a glitch?
When we open the app, it shows us a post it thinks we’ll like, and then it immediately takes it away…
It’s not a glitch. It’s a planned mechanism for driving addiction.
I’ll explain why this is so dangerously effective in a moment, but first, I want to share why I’m writing this.
When I started making material for social media, I did so with a purpose. I began with a mission:
Make science accessible for the broadest possible audience, to provoke curiosity and courageous thinking, and to empower people to act on the basis of evidence and think critically, so that we can collectively build a better tomorrow.
Not long after, I added: Put nature first in everything I do and help others to do.
I always knew that my work had to stand out to reach big numbers. That’s why science was in a bath. That’s why #NoBeef began with me riding a cow. These quirks made sense because important and enriching messages were never enough by themselves. Even if posts and videos are written with humour and style, there always has to be a hook.
One of the main reasons I’m writing this is because it’s very clear to me that the necessary hooks have been getting more and more crude and base.
I recently made a video about goats and nature, opening with the question “What do goats know that we don’t know about volcanoes?”. A few years ago, this hook would have been enough. But not now.
Now, a hook needs to be a dazzlingly unusual spectacle, something triggering and horrible, something sexy, something that we’re already primed to vehemently agree with, something that makes us feel less (or more) insecure, or something that makes us feel angry or worried.
In some ways, this social media “game” has become incredibly simple. A recent exposé showed that many of the LinkedIn “influencers” don’t even make any new content — they just cycle stuff that’s worked for other influencers, and watch their numbers climb.
The space and time on these platforms for quality has declined immeasurably.
I posted a one-shot music video a few weeks ago on my Instagram. It’s one of the things I’m most proud of ever having been a part of. But it’s the least popular thing I’ve posted in months. It takes 3 seconds to get going, and that’s just way too long.
Quality and value used to be secondary to ‘attention-grabbing’, but incremental algorithmic changes on these platforms mean that quality and value are now so much less than even secondary. They’re almost inconsequential most of the time.
All that matters now is that we pay attention.
Ideally passively.
In the latter half of the 1900s, as independent radio stations were bought up and forced out of business by growing conglomerates, an odd optimisation strategy was used by the conglomerates. They ran focus-groups to discover what music people strongly liked and strongly disliked, so that they could play… neither.
The ideal music was music that people listened to unthinkingly, with no strong emotions. It was the most likely to keep people listening indefinitely through every advert break.
In the words of Mark Twain: “History never repeats itself, but it rhymes.” But this time, the data the social media companies have gathered to keep us engaged is far, far deeper and more sophisticated than what the radio conglomerates had.
I now fear opening my social media apps. Genuine fear.
I often have to go on social media for work. But now I take a deep breath and I mentally prepare myself because I know that, no matter how clear and simple my intentions, there’s a chance that my attention will be stolen. A 5-minute task to put up a post about nature can easily turn into 30 minutes of “what on Earth just happened?”.
From the beginning of 02022, as global central bank base rates began to rise, crushing the economics of technology companies, it was as if the execs all opened nuclear briefcases with big red dials inside, and turned up the addictiveness as high as it could go to capture even more attention, and therefore squeeze out even more money from advertising.
Do you enjoy these platforms as much as you used to? I do not.
To paraphrase Will Westerman, one of my favourite musicians, the nourishment of our imaginations is now being taken away from all of us.
TikTok is a particularly interesting case.
Not a lot of people know that TikTok isn’t available in mainland China. Instead, the Chinese have an app called Douyin.
Most of the big social media companies are US-owned, but TikTok and Douyin are owned by the Chinese company, ByteDance.
Whilst TikTok is full of time-wasting crap, Douyin is full of videos about science and art, and it elevates thinker role models. It has its problems, but the relative positives are clear.
As young people everywhere else in the world are being taught to want to be “influencers”, Chinese kids are being taught to want to be astronauts, scientists, designers and inventors.
The tale of the Chinese diplomat on French radio, responding “it’s too soon to tell” when asked whether the French Revolution was a good thing, is mostly apocryphal, but it helps us to ask a good question. Is it not sensible long-term thinking to recognise the dangers of social media platforms optimised only for attention?
I’ve had many businesspeople say to me “well Douyin doesn’t make money like TikTok does”, but I always reply by asking them what the societal purpose of these platforms is? Is their purpose just to make money? Is it wise and intelligent for us to allow businesses with such universal reach to profit by wasting vast quantities of everyone’s time, even though we also live in a society that depends upon ingenuity, creativity and invention?
To my mind, we might as well be saying that fossil fuel companies and other ecocidal industries are fine “because they make money”. It’s wilful blindness and short-term thinking taken to the extreme.
As the world increasingly shifts towards a future in which major perpetrators of ecocide are likely to be prosecuted, I wonder, will the people most addicted to social media platforms one day be considered victims of corporate maleficence? It’s not too hard to imagine.
If you are one of the many people who feels vulnerable to the addictive nature of these platforms, there are some things you can do to help yourselves.
For example, when I used to spend more time on social media, I practised ‘back-scrolling’. After I’d been scrolling for a while, I forced myself to stop, and then I went backwards. I took in everything a second time, and I asked myself if any of it was valuable. This had two effects: it put me more in control (making it easier to leave), and it also allowed me to properly learn from the posts that had been designed by people with positive intentions.
Another thing I did, which was far more valuable for me in the long run, was to switch the position of the app that the dopamine pathways in my brain had most effectively programmed my fingers to reach for, with Wikipedia. I love Wikipedia. Wikipedia is one of the brightest jewels of our global society. I’m a proud patron. We should all spend much more time on Wikipedia following our curiosity.
The best thing to do of course is to consciously give up on most of social media. I gave it up almost entirely in 02022, other than making posts and then quickly running away.
Something that triggered my departure was when I noticed the new “glitch” I mentioned above. Instagram now very briefly shows many of us a post it thinks we’ll like, then immediately takes it away before we can fully appreciate it or even clock who posted it, only to replace it with another post it thinks we’ll like too.
This is our best understanding of psychology being mobilised against us. We are more motivated by loss than we are by gain. Instagram gives us something good and then immediately takes it away from us to hack our brains. It causes us psychological pain on purpose so that we then want to fill the hole by scrolling further down, in the hope that we’ll find what we lost again. This is Kahneman’s Prospect Theory weaponised.
We are now all deep into an era of “attention economy”. The most effective censorship is no longer taking information away — it’s adding so much useless or misleading information that the important stuff is impossible to find. In the infamous words of the now prison-sentenced propagandist Steve Bannon: “This is not about persuasion: This is about disorientation.”
If you want to know more, read Shoshana Zuboff’s book, Surveillance Capitalism. If you’re short on time, read the first and last chapters — it’ll teach you enough to see with great clarity what’s happening on all the social media platforms.
Personally, I’m increasingly of the opinion that these platforms are as complicit in driving the climate and nature emergency as the fossil fuel companies and tabloid media. By holding and channelling our attention into nothing whilst the world falls apart around us, these social media giants might as well be taking axes to nature themselves.
I also think that the only creators that can survive in the toxic atmosphere of today’s social media platforms are:
- well-intentioned newcomers
- those with clear mission and great resilience
- artists whose work requires them to be there
- funded brands
- egotists and narcissists
Over the long term, the best at playing this game to win the audience day-in, day-out, are the egotists and narcissists. No one else could ever match the sheer dedication and emotional energy that they can put into winning the audience.
You can often spot them as the people who continuously adapt their views and the causes they stand for, because they’re not really on social media to stand for something in particular — they’re just working to win your attention, whatever it takes. They are the ideal worker bees of the attention-grabbing social media machines.
If you follow any of these folks, then get ready to be disappointed. Because one day, it’ll become public that they’ve made one or more seriously questionable choices. When this happens, do also know that most of the world is full of people with genuinely good values and positive intentions; it’s just that social media doesn’t elevate these people as well as it ought to, and so we’re given a distorted view of what people in the world are like.
As for myself, I do still believe that my missions can be furthered on these platforms, and so I will continue to post on them. But this is me now formally saying something that’s been true for a while anyway: that I will be much less of a pro-active presence on social media. I will contribute posts, but I’m unlikely to see many messages, comments and so on.
I salute all of those who continue to make good material for these platforms, be it driven by purpose, or to build a career around a beautiful art form, or both. I also salute all of those who continue to “like” and upvote all the important stuff and none of the crap; helping to fight back against the increasingly base and insidious, attention-maximisation algorithms.
But we all know that fighting the algorithms isn’t enough anymore.
So this is why I’m life-boating out to a mailer. Our email inboxes are much more our own. We can open what we want to open, and not what we don’t. Our own curiosity is in control. This is so important.
I hope you’ll join me. I won’t write too often — maybe once every two months. And when I do, I’ll always ensure that it’s enriching, interesting and valuable.
You can join my mailer here.
I’m also writing a book, which I hope you’ll support when it comes out. More on that later!
Otherwise, please go for more walks, watch more birds, smell more soil after its rained, get lost in the patterns on leaves, and generally try to spend more time in nature. Its complexity, beauty, smells and sounds will take your attention away from the worries and anxieties of the everyday and allow you to rest far better than social media ever could.
And if you can’t get out into nature today, then open up Wikipedia and type in “Biophilia”.
