DEEP DIVE: Gaia Bernstein on Gaining Control Over Addictive Technologies

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0:32Amy Wilson:Hello, everyone, and welcome to Fresh Take from What Fresh Hell? Laughing in the Face of Motherhood. This is Margaret. And today I am talking to Gaia Bernstein. She is a law professor who writes, teaches, and lectures in the intersection of law, technology, health, and privacy. Gaia is also the mother of three children who grew up in a world of smartphones, iPads, and social networks. Her new book, Unwired, Gaining Control Over Addictive Technologies, shatters the illusion that we can control how much time we spend on our screens. Welcome, Gaia. Thank you for having me, Margaret. This is a very, it's an issue that everyone is dealing with, I would say right now.

1:14Amy Wilson:I have an 11, 12, and 14-year-old, and so I feel like this issue is now suddenly the presenting issue. I look back on the days when I had a baby with, you know, oh, should I let them ever play on the iPad? And I'm like, oh, those were the good old days. Now it is, as you say, kind of crushing in around us this reality. The book starts, you have an aha moment. Can you talk to us a little bit about that, about coming out of yoga class and kind of realizing the scope of what was going on? Yeah, so I think it was for me around 2015. And around that time, people were not really talking about this issue.

1:52I was not even paying attention to myself. And I live in York City. And I was, as you said, I came out of a yoga class. And I went to get some coffee. And there were 15 people ahead of me in line. And usually I would have probably taken my phone out. But for some reason, maybe it was the influence of the yoga class. I decided not to. And I just looked around. And nobody was looking back. Everybody was staring down. And I think that was the first moment for me when I realized that something was really, really different and wrong here.

2:25Amy Wilson:And I think that moment of you look around a restaurant and everybody is looking down at their phone, or you look around, you know, any space, a playground, and the kids are playing and the moms are all staring at their phone. We have these instincts of like, there's something clearly wrong with this picture. But like a lot of issues we face as parents, it's not as simple as like, well, we just need to get our behavior together. We need to stop being so lame as people. And so as we start to look at the problem, is it just that, you know, we're all sort of totally sucked in by these devices? I guess let's start on a hopeful note.

3:06Amy Wilson:Is there some hope to break this? Because it does seem so pervasive. I definitely think there's hope. And I think my book is an optimistic book. Yes, it is. I think we've been focusing in a place which didn't work as well. We have been focused on the idea that something is wrong with us as people, as parents. Why am I not getting any work done? Because I'm just surfing the internet and answering texts. Why can't I get my child off the phone? People are asking what's wrong with their kids. Are they addicts? What's wrong with their family? and trying to control it in different ways. And I think the hope is making this shift from this internal battles or battles in our homes towards the public spheres to doing things collectively.

3:54Amy Wilson:Because you make the argument in the book that this is not just behavior, personal failure behavior, that this is tech companies are figuring out very specifically how to do to keep us on our phones. So let's talk about some examples that you give in the book. One being the intermittent reward model. Tell us about this. Because I think as we talk about this, friends who are listening, it's to say this is not happening by accident. This is not just, oh, you're so lame that you look at your phone too much. This is designed by design. So we're talking about intermittent reward model. Yeah, so absolutely.

4:37So basically tech companies want to keep us online for as long as possible. And they use several design mechanisms, which are really derived from basic psychological principles that target our human vulnerabilities. And the intermittent reward model is one of these, and the designs are prevalent all over the internet. And the idea is that when we get rewards on an irregular basis, our brain will release more of the neurotransmitter dopamine, which gives us pleasure. So if you go to a casino and you see people standing at a slot machine and keep pulling and pulling the handle, and sometimes they get money, well, they don't know when they're going to get the coins.

5:21So they keep going and going. Many, many of the features online are designed exactly the same way. So if you think about it, you know, when you have a Facebook account or an Instagram account, You don't know when you're going to get comments or likes. I mean, I post something and I think this is going to get lots of reactions and nothing happened. I may post the same thing the next day and suddenly people are reacting. We don't know. And so it makes us react much more. And everything is based on this. The notifications on our phone, we don't know when we're going to get that. We don't even know when we're going to get an email.

6:00Or if you think about Tinder, if you're dating. And so if you're swiping, you don't know when you're going to get a match. And this is devised everywhere in children's games through a feature called loot boxes, which is like surprise boxes. They don't know when they're going to get extra powers. And so it just keeps us hooked to getting more and more of these dopamine bursts. So if you're sitting and waiting with your child and you're not having to do, you sort of want to get something. And you just look at your phone hoping for the next dopamine.

6:30Amy Wilson:You also talk about the concept in the book of infinite scroll, which I just had a day yesterday where I was like, it's my day off. I'm going to relax. And I ended up, I think about taking a gym class that's 45 minutes. It seems like 10 hours. I think about taking a three hour plane ride. It seems like nine hours. And then I just was sitting, I was outside, but I was just scrolling on my phone, like it's my day off. And it's just the time passed so fast. And I think I was thinking about your idea of infinite scroll. So will you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah. So that's another example where tech companies and by the way, employing groups of psychologists to design these things.

7:13Amy Wilson:This is super interesting. Psychologists, they are going deep to say, how do I keep people as engaged as possible in this platform? Right. So basically, they took this very famous soup experiment. In the soup experiment, one group got a regular bowl of soup, and the other group got a bowl of soup with no bottom. So there was no stopping cues. The group, which had no bottom, ate 70 % more soup. It had no idea they were doing it. this is the infinite scroll basically if you go on twitter you go on instagram you go on facebook there is never an end there's never an end to the page so they've taken away stopping cues just like they took these people's bottom of the soup so and it's all over the internet taking stopping cues if you think about if you go on uh youtube if there's autoplay on tiktok once the video ends another one begins same things if you go on netflix if you want to see a movie the next episode or a show is even better and the next episode starts immediately our stopping cues are gone so we just spend so much time online i find with tiktok and i i'm an older person for tiktok but there is something about it's like the roulette version of it or the the something about the unknown that you could swipe next and it could be someone decorating a cake or someone talking about their devastating illness or someone talking about the news or a cute puppy, there is something about TikTok that I find extremely hard to stop.

8:54Amy Wilson:Like, when do I stop? The missing stopping cue there is really tough for me. Right. And for kids, even more probably. I'm sure that's right. And then, of course, we hear the term algorithm all the time, right? Like, Like, well, the algorithm this and the algorithm that, is it the algorithm that is keeping us engaged? Like, what is the role of the algorithm? So the algorithm is basically designed to make sure that we're engaged for longer. So it learns. So let's take Facebook, for example. They discovered that people will stay online for longer if their post makes them angry. Oh, yeah. I've heard that, right?

9:35Amy Wilson:That you're more engaged if you're angry than if you're just like, oh, that's a nice puppy. Right. So hate and anger keep you online for longer. So if a post gets angry reactions, it gets more point than if it gets likes or loves. And then it will show on more people's feeds. So it gets promoted. And that's exactly the result of a learning algorithm. And they probably didn't start with that, but that's what they've discovered. Yeah. And is it I mean, is that what is the psychology that like we because I definitely find that like when things are breaking that are juicy, gossipy, whether it's a reality show I follow or something political, like if I know everybody's going to be snarking about it, that's when I tend to be like, I got to be on Twitter checking it out.

10:25Amy Wilson:Like, what is that human instinct? I guess it's just that we feel more connected through anger and outrage. Well, it seems that people feel more connected to groups when there's an other they can be against. And that explains a lot of what we've been seeing in society, lots of disconnect and division. All of this was done in order. I mean, as I said, I don't think that's what they meant at the start, but that's what they discovered keeps us online for longer. And I think it's important to understand this is all part of a business model. I mean, the reason they need us online for longer is that we get Gmail for free, we get Facebook for free, and we pay with our time and with our data.

11:08So they need us to be there for longer so they can collect more information on us to target better advertising to us. Then they want us there for longer so we'll see the advertising and buy the products. So they can't really afford for us not to be there because the whole business model in which most of the internet economy is based will crumble. And that's what's so scary about this.

11:31Amy Wilson:I want to drill down on that when we come back. We are talking to Gaia Bernstein. She is the author of Unwired, Gaining Control Over Addictive Technologies. And we'll be right back. Amy, let me tell you about a magical place that is so exactly designed to be in closed space, year-round fun for the whole family, that I bet you already know what I'm going to say before I even say the name. Let's say it together on three. One, two, three. Great Wolf Lodge. You got it, Amy.

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15:35Amy Wilson:So I think the point that really hit home for me in this book is that the blame for kids and technology or the kind of stopgap measure for like, well, if you don't want your kids doing all of this, like, I guess you should be a better parent. I guess you should keep your kids off of screens as if like, we'd talk sometimes about the recycling example, like, oh, this all really comes down to you washing out your salad container. No, it's actually a huge international policy that is going on that is causing a ton of this. It's not, yes, you should maybe try to rinse out your salad container, but it's not like the weight of this all falls on parents.

16:17Amy Wilson:So let's talk a little bit about that and how this comes down to an argument of personal responsibility when we're not really clear what it is we're up against. Right. So I think for me, I started researching the book, looking at the past. And I realized there was a connection between the wars against tobacco, the wars against junk food to protect privacy. And it seemed like whenever a large industry, the truth comes out and people realize that the product is harming consumers, then their legal method, the PR method, it's also, it's a legal mechanism is, well, the consumers chose the product, they're responsible for what's happening.

17:02So with cigarettes, basically, smokers sued cigarette companies because they were sick with lung cancer and dying. And the cigarette companies said, well, you chose to smoke and it's your responsibility. And they won for decades in court. And same thing with food. A group of teenagers sued McDonald's in New York because they were sick with diabetes and they were obese. And McDonald's said the same thing. Nobody forced you to eat at McDonald's. Nobody forced you to supersize. And the New York court agreed. And they held it to know the kids were responsible, not the junk food industry. So that's what's happening with tech.

17:43But I think tech companies have taken it a step further. I mean, yes, we have gay manufacturers saying, well, it's all the parents fought and, you know, the kids are playing. But basically, they're also giving us tools to make us feel responsible. So all these digital well-being tools we have, like how much time you've been on your phone, you can see your screen time, or you can limit your time on an app. You can turn your phone gray. You can use parental controls to limit your kid's time. All these things are not really meant for us to spend less time online, and also not really for our kids to spend less time online, because they don't target the addictive features we just discussed.

18:26They don't target the infinite scroll, for example. What I do for is for us to feel responsible, to feel our control. And then if we fail, if even though you put parents in control on your kid's computer and phone, and they're still somehow using it or they're fighting with you, it's your fault. And I think that's a big part from where the blame is coming from. It's so, I mean, TikTok has a video saying you're in control. Right.

18:54Amy Wilson:You're not. I'm not in control on TikTok. I'm going to tell you right now, I lose control very easily on that TikTok. It's like personal responsibility is king, maybe particularly so in the US. I mean, it seems like, well, everything comes down to like, well, do it or don't do it. But if cigarettes are being marketed to kids and designed to be as addictive as possible, and food is being pumped with sugar and fat in a perfect combination to make it as craveable as possible, and screens are designed in every way with these casino type settings to be like, there's no clock, there's no watch, there's no way to tell how long you've been there.

19:33Amy Wilson:Then it's suddenly like, well, it's your responsibility. That's basically the thesis, correct? Right. Yeah. And you're right about it being very stronger than you asked because there's a very strong social ethos of self-choice and self-responsibility. So it plays into this. Yeah, but that push notifications and other things that pull us back to screens, they can overcome whatever personal responsibility we're attempting to engage in, right? I mean, it's like it's designed to overcome your feeling of personal responsibility. Right. But the thing is, in the end, we just sit there blaming ourselves all the time, thinking something is wrong with us or with the children.

20:15And that's not the point, really. Right.