You Will Wish You Watched This Before You Started Using Social Media | The Twisted Truth

If you're doing it with an addictive generation,

this

is a ticking time bomb. This is not an accident, in fact, it is by design. I mean, seriously, it was my mistake. I mean, I think we can all feel it when trying to make these products as additives. In the case of dopamine, we now know that many of the major

social

media

companies hire people called attention engineers who borrow basic principles from casino games in Las Vegas, among other places, to try to make these products are as addictive as possible. That is the desired use case of these products. you use it addictively because that maximizes the benefit that can be extracted from your attention and your data.

It's literally a point now where I think we've created tools that are tearing apart the

social

fabric of how society works, which is really where The way technologists Garan lunaire put it is that these companies offer you shiny gifts in exchange for minutes of your attention and bytes of your personal data that can then be packaged and sold. What happened is that the attention economy in

this

race for attention became more and more competitive and the more competitive it became to get people's attention on your news website, the more you need to add these design principles, They are more manipulative design tactics as ways to get your attention, you don't realize it, but they are being programmed Social

media

tools are designed to be addictive The actual design of the desired use case of these tools is to fragment your attention as much as possible. possible throughout your waking hours, that's how these tools are designed to be used, we have a growing amount of research telling us that if you spend so much of your day in a state of fragmented attention, such large parts of your day we are constantly dividing your attention to take a quick look and just look at them, just look at Instagram and this can be permanently reduced. your ability to concentrate.

I am especially concerned about this when we look at the younger generation that is coming, which is the most saturated. This technology is very addictive because if you pull the slot machine arm enough you

will

win and you never know which sucker

will

reward. To you, that's an addictive behavior and it's dopamine that drives that addiction, so what happens with social media is Robert Sapolsky: The seminal research on this at Stanford calls it the magic of maybe when you look at your phone and maybe there's a text there and maybe there's no and you don't know when it shows up so high you get that's dopamine that's the magic maybe maybe it's there maybe not when it shows up maybe it increases 400 cents in dopamine which is about the The same amount of dopamine you get from cocaine is a little less than that of an extremely addictive drug like cocaine and that's what's happening.

We really care what other people think of us. For example, when you upload a new photo, a new profile photo of yourself on Facebook, you know that it is a moment in which our mind is very vulnerable to knowing what other people think of my new profile photo and, therefore, when we get new likes on our profile picture, Facebook knowing this could message me and say, Oh, you got new likes on your profile picture and we. knows that we will be vulnerable at that moment because we all care a lot when we are tagged in a photo or when we have a new profile photo and they control the dial, the technology companies control the dial of when and for how long your profile picture in other people's news feeds so that they can orchestrate it so that other people end up liking your profile picture more frequently over a delayed period of time, for example, so that you have to come back more often and see it. what are the new likes and it's literally rewiring our brain, even social media, the challenges you know with these terms like Facebook depression and everything, because this is social media depression because everyone's looking at their feed and comparing their lives to others. people who are highlights of other people's lives and there's actually less satisfaction or sadness and depression and things like that, and it's interesting because if you think about things like things that you know routinely produce a lot of dopamine, alcohol, for example There's a drinking age, right? we drink it, alcohol releases a lot of dopamine, it makes you feel very, very good, we say okay, you can have that, but you have to wait, you have to be 21, we don't do that with social media.

The media was essentially putting highly addictive drugs in the hands of children before they have natural defenses against them and what you are seeing with internet and social media addiction is the same thing over and over again for people trying to change his state of consciousness. with a device that tries to get to the underlying neural chemical chemistry and it's very, very addictive, so I would say the problem with devices and I mean they're amazing things is that they interfere roughly with medium and long term goals. so I think the first thing you have to do to control them is find out what is interfering with their use.

It has to be something important, so you think, well, I want to do something important. What could be personal maybe you want to be in a relationship you are getting married you want to have children you want to have a career that is meaningful you know you want to have a life you want to have an Abrahamic adventure and be the father of nations let's say we can No you should be talking on your cell phone and doing that, so I think part of this is setting your sights high and making a plan and figuring out who you might be and seeing if obsessive smartphone use fits into that vision of nobility. and it will be partly because they are incredibly powerful communication devices, but very often it is for lack of something better to do and it also interferes, you know and imagine, like when you take that to the extreme where you know that bad actors can Now we manipulate large sectors of people to do what you want.

It's just a really, really bad situation and we compounded the problem. We curate our lives around this perceived sense of perfection because we are rewarded with these short-term cues that our hearts like. We approve and we combine that with courage and we combine it with the

truth

and instead what it really is is a fragile false popularity that is short term and that leaves you even more and you admit it empty and empty before you do it because then it forces you to this . vicious circle where you think: what do I have to do next because I need him back?

Think about that made up of two billion people and then think about how people react to the perceptions of others. It's just a really bad thing. We know from the research literature that the more you use social media, the more likely you are to feel lonely or isolated. We know that constant exposure to your friends carefully curating positive representations of their lives makes you feel inadequate and can increase rates of depression. and something I think we'll be hearing more about in the near future. I said there's a fundamental mismatch between the way our brains are wired and this behavior of exposing ourselves to intermittent rewarding stimuli throughout our waking hours, so it's one thing to spend a couple of hours at the slot machine in Las Vegas, but if you bring the slot machine with you and pull that handle all day from the time you wake up until you go to bed we are not connected, they are short circuits. to the brain we are beginning to discover that it has real cognitive consequences, one of them being a kind of generalized background hum of anxiety.

This is what the world we live in is not real. Social media is not real, and by design, social media is rewarding. us for showing our best life the champagne posed edited the Michelin star vacation orchestrated the best angle of our life the highlight reel but you never see the real life 99% of our lives the behind the scenes that unglamorous no filter the day To bland normality and you end up comparing your behind the scenes to other people's fake highlights and

using

others as a reference point for how you should look, how successful you should be or how you should live, these false comparisons will only serve to make you feel. inadequate and inferior to something that is not even real, research continually shows that comparing your life to someone else creates envy, low self-confidence, low self-esteem and depression, you compare yourself to other people every day, consciously or unconsciously , and it doesn't matter what he says.

You're not going to stop because comparing one thing to another is something natural that humans do, whether we want to admit it or not. A big reason something has value is because there is something worse. It's better to compare it and think about it. The old brick of a mobile phone with a big antenna is only considered awesome in a pre-smartphone world, the horse and buggy was only considered a phenomenal means of transportation until the automobile comes along, the answer is not to stop making comparisons because unfortunately we can't control that, but you have to change the object of your comparison from someone else to yourself, you have to measure yourself against yourself and by doing this you start a base point where you consider yourself perfectly fine exactly as you are, but it's also the most effective, motivating and healthy way to work on improving yourself, you will become happy when you stop putting pressure on yourself to be more like someone else and when you start comparing real with real, we are in a really bad state.

The current situation, in my opinion, is eroding the basic foundations of how people behave towards each other and I don't have a good solution. You know, my solution is that I don't use these tools anymore. I have them. for years it's created huge tension with my friends, huge tensions in my social circles if you look like you know my Facebook rate, if you probably haven't, I posted maybe twice in seven years, three times five times, it's just that it's less than 10 and It's weird, I guess I innately didn't want to be programmed so I just logged out but I didn't deal with it and now seeing what's going on, it's really, really putting me off in the early 1970s. the 80s at Xerox PARC, when Steve Jobs first went and saw the graphical user interface, the way people talked about influence, the world was a bicycle for our minds, here we are, you take a human being and has a certain set of capabilities. and capabilities and then you give them a bike and they can ride all these new distances, they have the power to go to these new places and do these new things to have these new capabilities and that has always been the philosophy of people who make technologies, how we create bikes for our minds to make and allow us to feel and access more now when the first iPhone was introduced, it was also the philosophy of these technologies, how do we empower people to do something more and what, and in those days .

It wasn't manipulative because there is no competition for attention. Photoshop wasn't trying to maximize the attention it required from you, it didn't measure success that way, and the Internet in general hadn't been designed to maximize attention from the start. it was just posting stuff, posting stuff, creating these message boards, it wasn't designed with all this persuasive psychology that our burns then if you feed the beast, that beast will destroy you if you reject it, we have a chance to control it, curb it and It's a time when people need to break away from some of these tools and things that you rely on, the short-term dopamine-driven feedback loops that we've created, are destroying how society works. cooperation disinformation the

truth

is missing and it is not an American problem this is not about Russian ads this is a global problem sir.

Zuckerberg, would you feel comfortable sharing with us the name of the hotel you stayed at last night?