IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2019 - 29

look away,' but the corporation has been far more circumspect about the design practices that eventually
make users, especially young users, incapable of looking away [28]."

From Manipulating Behavior to
Addiction by Design
Technology is not, as is the general view, reserved
for its products. Technology is all forms of systematized, pur pose dr iven organization, including
human organizations like the for-profit corporation, a
technology whose prime purpose is maximizing the
making of large sums of money. In pursuit of that
goal, creating addiction as an engine of profit is the
name of too many games, well captured in the world
of slot machines by the title and content of Natasha
Dow Schüll's Addiction by Design [29]. As with slots,
as with the epidemic of online sports betting, legal
and not, in the context of smartphones, social media
and apps, maximizing profit takes the form of hooking and latching targets. Forwarding that goal is B. J.
Fogg, founder of the Stanford Persuasive Technology
Lab. Its aim is to alter human thoughts and behaviors via digital machines and apps. According to
Fogg, "'We can now create machines that can change
what people think and what people do, and the
machines can do that autonomously'" [27]. Just as
the jewel wasp's exquisitely targeted stinger releases
dopamine into her prey's brain, triggering obliviousto-looming-danger grooming, "Social-media apps
plumb one of our deepest wells of motivation. The
human brain releases pleasurable, habit-forming
chemicals in response to social interactions, even to
mere simulacra of them, and the hottest triggers are
other people: you and your friends or followers are
constantly prompting each other to use the service
for longer" [30].

Tap and Go
The sheer lure of the promise of on demand, tap and
go/click and go/grab and go/scan and go/say and go/
look and go/listen and go/point and go, of not having
to wait for anything, anytime, anywhere, is a, if not
the prime driver of the out-of-control sorcerer's
apprentice dilemma. The more technology does for
us, the more it serves us, the more convenient it is,
the faster it responds to our every string pulled
desire, "seamlessly" - the favorite term deployed to
cheerlead technology's friction free effortlessness -
the better. If you can talk to your smartphone in lieu
of making the effort of typing, that's good. If the
machine knows you so well that it can warn you to
leave 15 minutes early because it knows there is
heavy traffic en route to your child's soccer game
SEPTEMBER 2019

∕

- knowing you have a child, knowing that child plays
soccer, knowing what time you take him or her to the
soccer game, knowing the route you take - that's
good. If you can simply point your phone at a restaurant to get reviews that's, of course, automatically
better than having to look up reviews, even if you can
just speak the request [31].
In their new book, Re-Engineering Humanity, Brett
Frischmann and Evan Selinger claim "[they're] not

The aim of the Stanford Persuasive
Technology Lab is to alter human
thoughts and behaviors via digital
machines and apps.

interested in the engineering of intelligent machines;
[they're] interested in the engineering of unintelligent
humans" [32]. They ask:
"What's the harm in technology companies
making shopping easier for us? Or making it
easier for us to get valuable information like
directions for how to get to a meeting across
town during rush hour traffic? These all seem
like good things that enhance our lives. That's
why it would feel catastrophic to lose the technological services that we've grown accustomed to. At the same time, however, we're
being sold a misleading vision of cyberservants
and digital assistants. These tools don't just do
our bidding. They're also smart enough to get
us to do theirs...We are being conditioned to
obey. More precisely, [as with the venom zombified roach obediently following the jewel wasp
into her den] we're being conditioned to want to
obey" [32].

Ants
From yet another angle, to see what such doing more
and more for us, always listening techno-slaves like
Amazon's Alexa and their exploding Internet of
Things (IoT) consortium, or the vast satellite enabled
GPS system - to see what those technologies are
doing to us, consider the only other species - actually no fewer than 35 species - that enslaves its own
kind: ants, and what such enslavement does to the
master ants.

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IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2019

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