IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2019 - 83

start. Not only does this perpetuate the heightened feeling of consciously willed actions that humans naturally
seek, as described above, it does so in a way that ties
individuals' intentions directly to their actions. This
close tie to the illusion of conscious will has led to Facebook receiving 1.94 billion monthly active users for
March 2017, and an astonishing 1.28 billion people logging on daily [10]. Ironically enough, Facebook doesn't
hide their goal to profit off of this illusion. In describing
the profitability of Facebook's goal to provide Internet
access to all, Mark Zuckerberg described how "[Facebook] is here to connect the world ... we want to take on
some really big challenges like helping everyone get
online." This idea of connecting people, or rather their
profiles, is further seen by how Zuckerberg considers
"connectivity [as] a human right" [11]. After further investigation, TechCrunch found that Facebook made about
twenty dollars off of each user, due to "Facebook's
engagement and ad targeting" [12]. Because Facebook
makes its revenue from connecting users, the company's profit depends on the number of "connections" that
are made. Thus by maximizing the ability of individuals
to feel consciously willed, users naturally gravitate
towards their platform making Facebook more money.
This is commodification of the conscious will of individuals on a mass scale.
Facebook is not the only platform to take advantage
of their user's natural gravitation towards wanting to feel
consciously willed. The next example involves a seemingly "more free" platform - Twitter. Like Facebook,
Twitter is designed to require its users to create a profile before using it the platform. However; a user does
not need to specify their real name in order to interact.
Each user must specify a pseudo-name known as a
"handle" upon account creation. These handles can
deviate from actual names in varying degrees. Noticing
that this may reduce the attachment of the profile to a
user's true identity, one may try to use the logic mentioned above to claim that Twitter's design choice would
weaken the tie between one's intentions and actions.
However, that is not true. Even though a user may use a
pseudo-name, their interactions are still linked to an
online identity. This online identity interacts with other
online identities through messages, tweets, and posts of
pictures. By socially interacting with other online identities, the controllers of those identities are forced to be
responsible for the creation and the evolution of that
identity, regardless of what their online name is. Thus,
even the users who sit behind a handle with no comparison to their own identity are still tasked with consciously reflecting on the outcomes that an interaction may
have on the identity that they are controlling. Thus, they
are maintaining a new social identity [13]. A user's control of this online identity is analogous to a ventriloquist
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and their dummy. Though the ventriloquist may have no
identity link to their puppeteered dummy, they are still
tasked with bringing agency to an object that without
their control does not have agency. In the process of
bringing the dummy to life, the ventriloquist, hyperconscious of their actions, feels an increased amount
of conscious will. Users on these platforms feel the
same. They become the ventriloquist, bringing agency
to agency-less code. Furthermore, due to the retentiveness of Twitter, and almost all similar platforms, users
are once again linking more intentions to actions.
Thus they are harboring feelings of their actions being
more consciously willed. Ultimately, even under completely disguised online identities, individuals are
tasked with establishing and maintaining an online
identity on a platform with dense, unavoidable histories of that identity. This culminates in them feeling
more consciously willed, and continues to incentivize
their use of the platform.

Features that Overcome Limitations
of Space and Time
Thirdly, in comparing online communities to real-world
communities, the difference is quite obvious. With person-to-person conversation, physical space limits the
number of individuals who are able to interact. Apart
from at special events like speeches or performances,
most human interaction occurs in smaller numbers,
where only a few people experience the expression of
our actions. This is different online, where connection is
only limited by bit rate. Just as speech and physical
actions define our personal identity, users of Instagram
are defining their online identity through the use of provided tools. The online community is instantiated
through, on average, 200 followers and majority public
profiles. This causes users to experience similar negative feelings of cognitive dissonance as previously
described. The dissonance experience extends in this
case from just an individual looking at the stored depiction of their online identity, to also being felt each time
a user posts to their large crowd. Remember, it is the
unnatural preprocessing of this information to avoid dissonance that causes individuals to feel their actions are
more consciously willed. Consequently, adding tools to
maximize the amount of preprocessing available to
avoid the natural cognitive dissonance that stems from
social interaction, is yet another reason why users flock
towards Instagram.
To further extend the previous argument, one must
analyze the interaction between the user base on the
application. Mike Byrne, journalist at Optical Cortex, in
2014 wrote a program that sampled 21 239 Instagram
profiles, and gathered statistics about their connections. From these Instagram profiles, 28% (6133) were

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IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2019

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