IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2023 - 7
able to reach audiences of unparalleled size has
greatly empowered the ordinary citizen. However,
advances in neuroscience, data science, individual
identification, and design for capturing attention have
reduced many to little more than predictable (and
so more easily manipulated) finite-state machines.
Consequently, people can become helpless units in
an aggregated revenue stream (cf., [4]), producing a
reversion to a societal organization based on feudal
arrangements [5], [6], [7]. And it remains a source
of concern to progressive leadership that the world's
most technologically advanced nation should also
be the most credulous with respect to, for example,
mask-wearing and vaccination during a global pandemic
[8]. Although this can be partially attributed to
opportunistic cynicism in advancing an extreme political
agenda, what sort of signals are being sent here?
The question underlying these radical opposites
and contrasting extremes is this: clearly " we " - " we "
to be interpreted here as meaning both as individuals
and as a society-have developed a deep and
special relationship with our devices, and in many
dimensions, this relationship has been undeniably
beneficial. But now, could this relationship, in the
parlance of psychotherapy and counseling, be categorized
as toxic? In discussing this question from this
perspective (but see also [4] and [9]), we first consider
whether the individual relationship between
the user and the device can be considered toxic, and
then whether the collective (societal) relationship is
toxic, at least for the individuals and societies concerned-generally
speaking, the devices don't care
so much, even if it can be made to seem as if they do.
Toxic individual relationships
A toxic relationship can be defined as a relationship
in which there is a repetitive pattern of behavior that
causes more harm than good for either or both of
the parties, whose well-being is then threatened in
some way: emotionally, socially, physically, financially,
or psychologically. There are two particular
characteristics of toxicity: first, that the relationship
is more harmful than beneficial; and second, that it
is difficult, if not impossible, for the harmed parties
to extricate themselves from the relationship.
Even taking the first characteristic as moot rather
than given, it is the second characteristic that is perhaps
the more disturbing. The user-device relationship
now extends beyond contractual " customer
lock-in " and now deliberately exploits addictive
March 2023
affordances in interface design [10], [11], while elegance
in design aesthetics ( " look and feel " ) can create
a deeper attachment even beyond brand loyalty
[12]. Moreover, a typical organizational response to
security flaws has been to introduce multifactor
authentication. This has made the device a single
point of failure on every critical path, in working
and social lives. Without the device to verify identity,
necessary access to email and other coworking, video-conferencing,
and " productivity " apps is impossible;
similarly, access to shopping, banking, and
entertainment services can also be blocked. The fear
of loss or theft drives payment for insurance (and, as
it is said, there is no poor bookmaker, there is also no
unprofitable insurance company, and for the same
reasons), but, in a nice twist, the insurance policy is
invalidated unless some sort of " Find My " feature is
activated. So, the user pays twice: the first time with
money as a sort of membership fee to gain access to
the possibility of having insurance, and the second
time with data, in order to actually activate the policy.
In these ways, a dependence is created for the user
on the device. It can then be extremely hard to extract
oneself from such a relationship, in particular, because
of a range of cognitive biases that are exploited in the
formation of the relationship and then reinforced in
the perpetuation of the relationship, keeping someone
trapped in an ever-deteriorating and worsening
situation. These cognitive biases-many of which are
identified by Prospect Theory [13], which predicts
that individuals will assess their prospects for gains
and losses asymmetrically-include status quo bias,
confirmation bias, loss aversion, the endowment
effect, self-blame, and the false consensus effect.
Status quo bias is defined as the tendency to
prefer that " arrangements " should stay relatively
the same, which in a toxic relationship becomes
an irrational preference for an existing situation to
persist rather than seeking a new situation. The separation
anxiety triggered by nomophobia (the fear
of being without a mobile phone is an identifiable
neurosis, even though it is not included in DSM-V),
together with surveys showing that younger people
would prefer " to break a bone than lose their
phone, " would suggest that being in possession of a
mobile device and being continually connected to
the internet is the status quo, and any threat to its
persistence is severely disruptive.
Confirmation bias [14] is identified as the tendency
to accept information that confirms established
7
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2023
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