Happy New Year
I wonder what we mean when we wish each other ‘Happy New Year!.’ Do we mean have a happy time celebrating the arrival of the new year? Or is it we wish each other a happy (new) year ahead?
If the latter, we might want to question our choice of the descriptor ‘happy.’ What would my being happy all year be like? Is this ‘being happy’ the same as happiness? Is happiness worthy of pursuit? Is having a happy life realistic? Do we want always to be happy? Should we try to be? Are there any other adjectives to better describe the promise for a year of a well-lived life?
We might think of words such as ‘satisfying’ or ‘fulfilling’ which suggest a state, some condition we attain and hold onto, hoping it will sustain us over the course of our lives. A wish for a life able to fortify us against the doubts, angst and insecurity of uncertainty and loss. Is that happiness? We might think of adjectives such as growing, expanding, discovering which suggest life as an uncompleted process we are working through. A life of promise and opportunity, getting ever better. Is this living happily?
On the first day of a new semester for a particular course, I would project on the screen an image of the poster advertisement the students walked by when entering the college. I ask them if they see anything peculiar about this ad by the front door. It’s a young woman, much like them, with a great smile, head back, about to laugh she’s so happy, holding a frosty bottle of Coca-Cola. Below the image of the ebullient woman is the campaign tagline, ‘Open Happiness.’ When asked, the students can’t think of anything peculiar about the ad. Of course, it is their first day and speaking out would be intimidating, but in fact they don’t notice anything odd about the ad.
I go on to point out some of the services available to the students including those of the counselling centre. I then would say to them how I don’t understand why the college would pay salaries to counsellors for helping people with emotional matters. All the administration needs to do is give the troubled students a bottle of coke. Then the class gets it. Now open happiness seems an absurd claim, certainly a foolish claim to make inside an academic institution.
We easily cede to the happiness promise, without much thought really. Naturally enough. By and large, our social fabric is in its essence woven on the ideals of consumerism, letting objects and their distribution define our work, our recreation, our economic progress, our social communication, our provision for family, and the markers of our success.
In a consumer, object-oriented society we perceive possessions as valued objects; and that projects onto how we see society: nature as object, career as object, recreation as object, services as object, things distinctive from ourselves that we manipulate; even each other as objects, noting how others look, what they do, what they have, how they make us feel, how they could change.
Marketing – one of the underlying drivers of an object distribution society – is keen to play on that promise of happiness, as evidenced in the Coca-Cola campaign. Higher values sell well. What we want. Who doesn’t want to be happy? Associate that desire to a product. Sold.
Marketers cater to a narrative: you need to feel happy, they point out to people of means. Our products or services will make you happy, they promote to people of means.
Underlying that narrative is a mechanism, one that marketers know very well. Identify the human longing. Introduce a stimulus. Encourage a response. Provide a reward. Tell us it matters. So, what happens is that the lower needs in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, need for food and shelter and social acceptance, lower on the scale, supplant the satisfaction of higher needs by telling us that syrup and carbonated water is happiness, that underwear celebrates your freedom. ‘Free to be me’ is the promise when you buy their underwear.
Note what is going on behind the scenes. Note what smart marketers, experts in marketing, say about the way to succeed in the profession: “develop an advanced set of marketing skills that drive more measurable results to any project and harness the power of psychology, purpose, storytelling, and impact to build trust in an increasingly skeptical world.”
It might also be noted that the idea of trust has changed for the digital landscape. I was speaking to a salesperson with a 40-year career. He said his success was built on a personal relationship with his clients. He knew them, looked after them, even cared for them. Recently, a client was not getting back to him, one he’s looked after personally for 20 years: he, there when they needed him. The client went online to buy what they wanted, didn’t bother to give their salesperson the respect of a chance to compete. Good business, no doubt.
Trust now is cost, value and delivery. Much is said about trust and client value and loyalty online, but in the end for the digital ethos, it’s not a person that one trusts. In fact, it’s the algorithm one is trusting. Trust is buried in code locked on a hard drive. It only gives the appearance that someone cares. Nobody really cares about the million subscribers, couldn’t possibly, just care about their return business. Loyalty. We might ask: loyalty to what?
Seems that now sales is understood as fabricating trust through strategic tricks of design and surveillance; customers are just an email list on a hard drive, there for the entrepreneur to exploit, fool with the promise of – what was it – oh yes, freedom and happiness.
You have only to take some books out of the library, books that teach businesses how to use social media effectively to understand the ethos we live under with social media to where advertising has migrated. It’s not for our good.
‘Tweet Your Way to the Top’ is blazoned on the cover of one of the books. ‘Fill the stadium with your fans’ is the promise of another.
I’ll let you read the books on how to build trust, how to develop your client list. I will offer that the instruction has nothing to do with establishing meaningful relationships. Trust is a fabrication, again of surveillance and Dr. Fogg’s application of persuasive techniques to the digital ethos. Do what you, the entrepreneur, needs to do to get the client to trust your algorithm, and then you can get what you want from them. That’s the job now.
Let’s stop for a moment to consider the nature of this advice: it’s so that you get what you want. Nothing to do with helping each other.
Unlike our culture, other cultures expect those with much to take care of those in trouble, as a duty. I recall a new immigrant saying to me how shocked he was to see people living on the street. In his society it was expected those with means be responsible for and assume the care of those in need so that they are not in need.
Not in our society: being happy you do on your own or you and your little cohort against the world. Happiness is selective. Winners and losers. If you can afford it, you win.
Make the user feel important by whatever means; the user is more likely to trust you…then you can get what you want from the user. Note the switch in conceit: the user is actually the one being used. As is said often now, we the users are the product of social media business strategy, not clients.
The new digital model works very well. Google – at heart an advertising distribution company – has 47 trillion dollars squirreled away offshore. They made it from telling us how much better off we are buying what they are selling us. We buy the line. We buy lots of stuff.
Promising happiness works. It sells well. Truth is, it’s a peculiar promise, their idea of happiness. Perhaps we don’t see it. Or we don’t want to see it… Who doesn’t want to be happy, we might retort. And we flock to the malls. The number one tourist attraction in Toronto is the Eaton Shopping Centre.
The social media algorithms work overtime, and are brilliant at their objective, to make sure you, the user, don’t have any time to pause, no time to reflect, no opportunity to question what you are doing. They make their product brilliantly irresistible to click on and click on and click on. That’s the business plan -do anything to make sure the user spends hours and hours attending the screen- and their brilliance at that has made the companies trillions, yes trillions of dollars.
Have I gone too far, making too much of nothing? If the salesperson of 40 years I mentioned read the training manual for how to be successful online, he’d probably be disgusted with the attitude and values extolled. Maybe he’s an outlier, past his time. Me too, past my time. It’s a new and better world.
At the same time, I’m reading academics and whistleblowers. They explain without qualification how the social media companies, the experts advising businesses on how to be successful on social media, and the influencers who are successful on social media, all of them, are selling us a line: what they promote in product or service is all about us, they tell us. Actually, as the academics and whistleblowers whisper in our ear, none of it is about us, we the consumer; it’s all about them; the ones making trillions of dollars profit.
It’s a scheme of the successful businesses to make us think they love us, that they have our interest at heart. They know the deceit of surveillance and applied persuasive techniques (many taken from the gambling industry success) will get us to trust them and be their loyal consumer. It’s not that they actually care about their million subscribers or care about each one’s quality of life. Bit of a trick you see. A bag of tricks.
Richard Wagemese in his book Embers says he thinks that happiness as we now understand it, is dependent on circumstances. That’s the happiness Coke provides. Engineers at soda drink companies carefully manipulate their chemical formulations to hit certain tastebuds to transmit to certain parts of the brain that leaves us with a particular sensation. And that hit in our brain has become an idea of happiness, a conditioned experience. It’s sensation of a kind.
Unfortunately, while we may be looking for a substantial happiness, this happiness of sensation requires constant and increasing stimulation. The companies want you to buy more and more Coke, or whatever the product. Nothing to do with nutrition or health. They design and engineer their products to be addictive. Experiencing happiness then has become the reward of a conditioned response to stimulus.
The design of our consumer society, unlike other societies, rewards the brain with experiencing sensations, all with the goal held high before us for acquiring material abundance, accumulating accolades, building wealth, being admired by many. We use these to measure our happiness. The general ethos we live by emphasizes our having things. The more we have the better we are. There seems no end to how much we have. Desire, it turns out, is insatiable. The promises to satisfy our desires are everywhere in our media – entertainment and advertising, political vision and social recognition – an ever-present defining of worth based on how much we have, a never-ending pursuit for what more we desire. Of course, not everyone believes that, but tellingly, those controlling the channels of communication and decision-making, those making profit, whether they believe it or not, promote it magisterially.
It’s the mechanism by which our perspective and behaviour is shaped and choices made. It’s a consumer-based society. We buy things and we expect things to do something for us. We are told and convinced. We expect things to satisfy us, to make us happy.
We know a significantly larger number of our youth are not feeling happy; youth are depressed and feeling anxious and lonely, the statistics arising since the advent of the smartphone. See the comprehensive research of Jean Twenge, et al. In fact, even the research of social media companies themselves, leaked by whistleblowers, documents the declining health of the unhappy youth. The overwhelming feelings of loss, company researchers made clear to the company executives, is attributed to the design of their algorithm. That research was meant to be kept secret.
The increasing number of lawsuits -1000s of school boards in the U. S. and a growing number in Canada – are claiming compensation for social harm caused young people based on the evidence that social media platforms intentionally and knowingly have significantly contributed to the increase in youth mental health issues.
It’s not as if the social downside of new media is a surprise for the designers and builders. Steve Jobs, when he introduced the iPad, the technology that would change the world, told a NYT reporter that his children wouldn’t be getting one. For their good. The current Apple CEO, Tim Cook, won’t let his nephew on social media. Silicon Valley’s top tier management send their children to a private school in San Francisco that is tech-free. They tell us their products and services are making our lives better, encourage us to buy them; but they know better.
The social media designers know this. They know even more. They know what colour to make your notifications alert because even that can be the difference between you staying on the phone or not.
But what does social media say publicly? How can the crisis of social media be rectified? With the user, they say. The users need to show more self-discipline. The users need better management. The users need to change their behaviour. It’s the user, not the social media companies who are responsible to effect change. No need to regulate the social media companies. The user needs to make change.
Revealingly in a research study, users who converted their screens to grayscale lost interest in going on their phones. That speaks to how it is not the intention of the user to linger on the phone, but the design of the platform that coopts the attention of the user keeping them there.
In another study, Twitter, now X, users were asked to pause before retweeting content. When the users waited and thought about the content, the users did not retweet 70% of what they would have retweeted had they not paused. They didn’t retweet because they judged the content unworthy to retweet.
So…who is in charge of our being on the phone? Social media companies tell us that we are. And they tell us being on social media is good for us. But as David Williams, former Google employee, now a researcher in the Ethics Department at Oxford University, relays: while Google is extolling all the benefits of their platform for the public, offering us world at our fingertips, in the backrooms the Google designers spend their time on one objective which is designing how to manipulate their users and keep them on the screen for as long as possible. The social media companies know who’s making the choice to be on the phone and who benefits from users staying on the phone as long as possible. And it’s not the user, not us. But don’t tell us that…We wouldn’t believe it. Maybe we don’t want to believe it.
The social media companies don’t want their clients thinking while on social media, don’t want their customers taking a moment to question the content, in the way I asked the students to consider the coke ad. Is there something peculiar going on, I asked the students. Social media companies don’t want users to have any opportunity to step back, assess the content, assess the value of the users’ extraordinary amount of time spent on social media, hours every single day.
The psychology has been known for a long time. We just haven’t caught on when it’s applied to social media. We haven’t been critical enough of social media. Liked it too much. Just gone along for the ride.
The observation for us should be that the game is set against us. It’s not set for our common good. The game has one goal at its core: to make a lot of money for the investors. They don’t care how it’s made because for them human society is just numbers inside their hard drive… and they do make a lot of money. If there is social chaos in Malysia playing out on Facebook, that isn’t anything more than digital data and money in their pocket to the executives of the Facebook company who have their proprietary code registered in Lichtenstein or someplace, and who are shopping on Rodeo Drive.
So… Apple has just settled out of court for a class action suit on its practice of listening to and reading its customers’ communication and selling the details of one’s private conversation to advertisers.
Even knowing the media companies do all this surveillance to manipulate us, yet no one in upper management authorizing the surveillance is losing her or his job. In fact the executives are recognized for doing a good job for their company. Much the same as what happened with Rev. Ryerson and all those other Victorians we now hold in disdain. They did well for Queen and country. In the same measure, Silicon Valley executives do their job very well, getting us lining up for the daily fare they dish out, conditioning us to their priorities, getting us feverishly working for them, 2,600 swipes and taps a day on average, working for their profit.
Again, if you recall from previous PhotoBoxes, the real question is why this has not been more of a concern for us; why something was not done a long time ago. For over 15 years all kinds of experts, such as Tim Wu at Columbia and dozens of others, academics and whistleblowers, have been telling us about the deceit behind the social media and browser businesses.
Again, the intriguing question is why we don’t see it, as with the example of the students looking at the Open Happiness Coke ad, not seeing anything peculiar about the claim.
We want to believe the marketers. Open Happiness. It’s what we want. The advertisers know what we want and cater to it. Psychologist James Hillman told of how advertising executives would attend academic conferences on Archetypal psychology and mythology. The ad executives wanted to understand the deeper underpinnings of the human soul (the word psychology means study of the soul); wanted to understand the longings and impulses deep in the human psyche, so they could exploit that knowledge in the selling of their product. Identify the human longing to be happy, and then put that alongside a bottle of coke. Have a happy family drive their SUV into the middle of a beautiful virgin forest and have all the animals welcome them, as if the SUV was deeply entwined in nature – as if that could be, the SUV at one with nature – but nonetheless, it effectively sells us SUVs. Our deep evolutionary connection to nature, desire to be at one with nature, coopted to sell us cars.
What do we need to chart a different course than following the seductive, sparkling, glittering images appearing on our shiny screen? That’s for us to discover, once we see through the conceit. A suggestion, for one personally, is to take some time, look around, and ask oneself if one’s life makes sense. The proposal is that if we but stopped for a moment to question, we might find a kind of absurdity in the advertising we consume and the promises made to us that fashion our world view. The energy drink B28 advertises, “Be Different. Drink B28 Black.”. The ad executives know that one of our deep human, evolutionary impulses, especially for young people, is to find our own feet and make our place in the world. It would only take a few seconds of sober second thought though to realize the B28 ad makes no sense at all. The company is not selling the drink for one person. We can assume the energy drink company wants as many people, hoards of people actually, to be drinking as much of their drink as possible. None of it makes sense. Nothing different or unique about buying that drink! Nothing true about it. The whole enterprise of B28 has nothing to do with us. Not for our health. Not for our self-image. Advertisers will say anything, appeal to any deep longing in us should it help them to sell their product. Sadly, it’s not about us at all. They just want our money.
One day we’ll wake up and say what was I doing, spending all that time and effort, speed scrolling like mad, commenting like mad, liking furiously, subscribing and following, buying what they got me excited about, doing it so well, so fast, all the while believing this is what is good for me, this is what I want. We’ll feel cheated when we realize that company or sports franchise or whatever has been coercing and fooling us about what we want. It’s been what they want. What was I doing, we will reflect. Kind of sad, really, thinking about it.
In the new year – should we choose to take some time for reflection – we might decide to pursue life values in a different place than the marketed ethos surrounding us. Find our own way. Make life our own.
Wise ones suggest the first question we might want to ask ourselves is what our deep self wants from life. The second question to ask is who should we trust to explore that exploration; who is going to help us find our way through the riddle of life to that place of a well-lived life?
What would that look like?
Consider this month’s photograph. Initially I suspect, you would notice the blue water and the road passing by. The colours in the pallet are complimentary and pleasing. A road or path going from foreground and disappearing into the background has a long history in visual art because the journey along that visual path goes right to our core, our psychic self. If you were on social media, you might say nice and click on.
If instead, what might happen should you stop moving on to the next image, stop speed scrolling through your life, spend some time with the photo, quietly, soberly?
You would see more; more in the image would appear to you. You might even begin to feel the smoothness of the water in the image, notice how the colour of the water shifts from dark to light blue. In time you might not only notice the road, but how it bends around the tree. And that might take you deeper into those recesses beyond rational thought where image and imagination play. Where soul plays out. You play out. You wonder if the road follows the river or forks to the right. And now you are in your imagination. You are drawing close to who you are, deep down, in the place you know to be true.
With time spent, the imagination bound inside the image begins to become you, become known to you, teach you, reveal to you a hidden truth…about yourself.
As you spend time with the image, things you hadn’t noticed such as the faint trees emerging from behind the dominant ones, come into your consciousness; they appear to take on a life of their own, touch you, appeal to you, in some place deep within, a warm place, a faintly familiar place inside you, who you are, just out of reach, in the stillness, appearing with time spent, a feeling, more breath than thought. That place.
Spending time means your attention isn’t just whizzing past the image, but rather, with time spent, the image becomes you, speaks to you of other things, stops you from the headlong rush, plants you in earth as a seed is planted in the earth or a body is buried in the earth. Earthiness. You. Belonging. You, feeling at one with yourself. You, feeling at home.
As Thomas Moore writes in his book Original Self, experiencing the deep self is actually discovering what we already know, have always known. John O’Donohue in Walking in Wonder quotes poet William Stafford: [these things] are what you know even before you hear them…those things known are you…and this is the reason you are in the world.”
The photo -or something else you love and spend time with, which you peer into, you contemplate- takes on a presence as you spend time with it. The white of the small tree trunk, the wispy trees, the water, the road, the grassy centre of the road – how all of it combines in a composition, how it takes on a presence, becomes present to you.
Be mindful, they say. Of course, with no opportunity wasted, mindfulness is being marketed now as a product (buy this and be more mindful). The sages tell that mindfulness, that is feeling present to your experience, is not something to acquire or do. One cannot possess the present; rather the present possesses one. Presence comes to us. As the monk and mystic Meister Eckhart writes: to know our truth we must abandon all of our assumptions, expectations and demands, for we need to be empty, waiting, open, in order to receive grace. In stillness, quiet, emptiness, life presents itself to us, in time, possesses us.
The social media business plan is designed to supplant that place of knowing within, of being present to our own self, of being possessed by the presence of things, of being alive to the rhythms of life. Social media wants our undivided attention on it in order to have us producing content for the machine, and for us to be available for them to sell us things. That’s why their main objective is to keep us online for as long as possible, the longer the better for them, for us to work for them keeping the content flowing, and for us to be a target for their real customers, the advertisers.
As Richard Seymour writes in his book The Twittering Machine, it’s like we’re in a box, one that gives us the conceit we are free. We are free to post, like or click, free to explore the whole world. But in fact, as Seymour says, we’re in a box designed to control and manipulate how long we are there and what we do there. Gamblers think they are choosing to place a bet, but the betting means nothing. Though gamblers pick a number or colour, decide to lay down or hold their cards, the game is up a long time before that. The house wins, can’t help but win. Social Media makes trillions of dollars. Placing the bet or liking the post is simply doing what the machine intends for you to do. The system knows the game is about the system; it’s nothing about you or has little thought for you, all the while telling you you’re the winner.
Richard Seymour goes on to make a case that what we believe is communication with friends and relatives on social media is actually communication with a machine. He points out that in reality we are interfacing with an algorithm, not a person. All that we write feeds an algorithm, one that dictates how we write and what we write. The system even uses what we write against us, to sell to us, to reshape our social fabric. Facebook dictates what you see in your feed, uses that to shape your views.
Sure we learn something about friends, family, people whom we follow, but what human value is it to you or them? Are you sensing them, feeling them, responding to the subtleties of another person, feeling love for them, their warmth and closeness. Or are you watching a screen. Can you even remember the like you made about your friend a week ago? A day ago? An hour ago? Minutes ago?
Posting or tweeting has benefit, but it is not about relationship, about connection, intimacy, belonging. At the best, many say, the experience of social media is of the same value as a community notice board outside the grocery story. It’s not about the family eating at the dinner table. It’s not close to the experience of deep human connection and belonging. The average a person touches or swipes her or his screen over 2,600 times a day. The experience is that of spending time with a machine. Attached to a machine. And not benignly: a machine that is constantly studying us, analyzing what we write, measuring where our eye goes, how long our eye spends looking at any one thing, listening to our conversations, and then our social media machine uses all that information gleaned from us to manipulate our behaviour.
Not me, you say. I’m not influenced. The machine knows when we are most vulnerable in the day, knows when we finish work, are travelling on the streetcar, feeling weak and tired, are most susceptible to suggestion, and the machine hits us up just then. It sells that information to advertisers, and the advertisers have a field day targeting you, tapping into your dreams, playing you like a lute. Not me, you say.
As Richard Seymour points out, we are not writing on social media; social media is writing us. Inside the box. Inside the conceit we need to do this, have to do this. We become so trained, so bored with life, so melancholic; it’s all we do: stare at a screen. A friend is a projectionist. Over the years he’s looked out through his window in the back of the theatre and seen a few phones light up at the end of the film. Now he says, he looks out and as soon as the film concludes, most everyone pulls out a phone, checks it. People stare at their phone while walking down the street; looking at the screen as they take their dog for a walk; pushing the stroller, staring at the phone, somewhere else than with their child.
Could we actually go for a walk or spend a morning and not check the phone? The machine has us constantly thinking of the machine. Sitting on transit; sitting in front of the TV; eating with friends: pull it out. Check. Check. Again and again. Impulsively. Hundreds of times every single day. Couldn’t go a day without checking. An hour. Couldn’t go an hour without checking. Wake up thinking of the machine. Going to bed thinking of the machine. Think about it: we are spending time with an algorithm. It keeps telling us we are free. A box is telling us that. No thought or question allowed us while in the box, tush-tush, because then we would notice it’s a box.
Does it make us happy? Lots of dopamine, yes, but our evolutionary body can’t handle that much dopamine. We crash. We feel lousy. We keep going because the machine is writing us. Mark Zuckerberg knows that from his company’s own research. So, his advice for feeling down: get more followers because more followers enhances the experience!! As Richard Seymour points out: Mark Zuckerberg won’t even use his own product. He’s smarter than that. He pays people to be his FB presence.
Some AI social programs monitor for suicidal thoughts. Research into some has shown that, even if all the markers say suicide is imminent, the program never recommends to the user to get off the program and phone a crisis centre where the suicidal user could receive help from a professional. The program, as the research reveals, keeps the suicidal person inside the program. Once again, it’s what all of social media is designed to do, keep you there. For as long as possible. Apparently, even if you are suicidal.
At the beginning of the new year we might instead of making a resolution, pose a question: is there something peculiar going on? You might ask yourself to think about where you choose to look for your wisdom. The wise ones – not the screens – say wisdom is in your own self, the empty self, the self that speaks to you what you already know. Trust it.
From a John O’Donohue poem in his book The Space Between Us:
As the wind loves to call things to dance,
May your gravity be lightened by grace.
Like the dignity of moonlight restoring the earth,
May your thoughts incline with reverence and respect.
As water takes whatever shape it is in,
So free may you be about who you become.