I’m currently reading Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman as part of a series of books I’ve been using to explore my relationship with technology.

One particular section from the book nicely describes a key idea about the role we all play in what Jaron Lanier calls the “Behaviours of Users Modified, and Made into an Empire for Rent”, or Bummer, business model that pays for much of the Web today.

All of which helps clarify what’s so alarming about the contemporary online attention economy, of which we’ve heard so much in recent years. It’s essentially a giant machine for persuading you to make the wrong choices about what to do with your attention - and therefore with your finite life - by getting you to care about things you didn’t want to care about. And you have far too little control over your attention simply to decide, as if by fiat, that you’re not going to succumb to its temptations.

Many of us are familiar by now with the basic contours of this situation. We know that the ‘free’ social media platforms we use aren’t really free because - as the saying goes - you’re not the customer but the product being sold. In other words, the technology companies profits come by seizing our attention then selling it to advertisers. We’re at least dimly aware too that our smartphones are tracking our every move recording how we swipe and click, what we linger on or scroll past so that the data collected can be used to show us precisely that content most likely to keep us hooked - which usually means what makes us angriest or most horrified.

All the feuds and fake news and public shamings on social media therefore aren’t a flaw from the perspective of the platform owners: they’re an integral part of the business model. You might also be aware that all this is delivered by means of ‘persuasive design’ - an umbrella term for an army of psychological techniques borrowed directly from the designers of casino slot machines for the express purpose of encouraging compulsive behaviour. One example among hundreds is the ubiquitous ‘drag down to refresh’ gesture which keeps people scrolling by exploiting a phenomenon known as variable rewards. When you can’t predict whether or not refreshing the screen will bring new posts to read the uncertainty makes you more likely to keep trying again and again and again - just as you would on a slot machine.

When this whole system reaches a certain level of pitiless efficiency, the former Facebook investor turned detractor Roger McNamee has argued, the old cliche about users as the product being sold stops seeming so apt. After all, companies are generally motivated to treat even their products with a modicum of respect - which is more than can be said about how some of them treat their users. A better analogy, McNamee suggests, is that we are the fuel: logs thrown on Silicon Valley’s fire; impersonal repositories of attention to be exploited without mercy until we’re all used up. - Oliver Burkeman