57 GENIUS INTERVIEW Adam Alter
THE ATTENTION ECONOMY IS AN ARMS RACE how media companies can survive this arms race if they aren’t using every trick their competitors are using. FEED: Do media companies have a responsibility to create products that promote wellbeing? Or is it up to the consumer to decide whether something is good for them? ADAM ALTER: Both matter. Users need to take individual responsibility, but punishing screen users is like punishing drug users. To fix the problem, you need to begin with the pushers rather than the users. In this case, the pushers have all the power. Social media companies and online tech titans have incredibly deep pockets, and they’re capable of running massive A/B tests to determine which versions of their products are maximally addictive. If they run a series of these tests, evolving their products to land on a weaponised, maximally compelling version, how are we as fallible humans supposed to compete? Willpower isn’t enough. And they aren’t going to ‘do the right thing’ on their own. They need to be compelled by legislation or by consumer boycotts. FEED: Should behavioural modification and addictive elements in screen technologies be regulated? If so, what are the elements to regulate? ADAM ALTER: Yes, I think so. There are countries that have begun to introduce legislation, including the US, France, Japan, China and South Korea. Some of these laws are toothless or misguided, but others seem to be helping to some extent. In France, large companies must explain to employees how they’ll be protected from the 24-hour demands of emails. We could regulate use, which is what South Korea has done with its so-called Cinderella Laws – prohibiting children under age 16 from frequenting video game parlours and internet cafes after midnight. This punishes the user rather than the producer, though, so a better approach is to target the cafes themselves – or to target workplaces and employers rather than employees – or even better, to regulate
which cynical hooks tech companies bake into their products. Many video games introduce in-game purchases that force players to pay to continue to play once they’ve reached a certain point in the game. These purchases are predatory, because they recognise that no game player wants to stop playing a game when they’ve invested hundreds of hours to reach the end of the game. That’s just one example of the sort of feature that some governments are prohibiting. FEED: If you had the power to rethink everything we did with screen-based entertainment, what would you do? ADAM ALTER: The biggest difference between screen tech now and screen tech in the 20th century is the eradication of stopping cues. In the 20th century, everything we did had natural psychological breaks built into it.
Newspapers ended, magazines ended, book chapters ended, TV shows were released one episode at a time and so on. You could override these cues much of the time, by, for example, continuing to read beyond a single book chapter, but humans are sensitive to stopping cues and they often move on to new activities when they experience friction or inertia. Tech companies have done everything they can to eradicate these stopping cues. Social media feeds are endless. Netflix, YouTube and other streaming services default to playing or displaying an endless string of content, and emails never leave you alone. Imagine stepping back 20 years and legislating against this practice – forcing companies to retain the stopping cues that encourage people to spend less time on screens and more time consuming discrete content rather than bingeing. We’d be spending far less time than five hours a day glued to our screens.
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