By promoting the idea that technology is hijacking our brains and getting all of us addicted to our devices, techno-fearmongers elevate the exception rather than the rule.
Josh Hawley, a Republican senator from Missouri, introduced the Social Media Addiction Reduction Technology Act, which—beyond its forced acronym—was remarkable for how aggressively it would regulate the design of certain tech products.
Among other provisions, the law would ban auto-play videos on sites such as YouTube. It would require sites such as Twitter to deploy a mechanism that “automatically limits the amount of time that a user may spend to 30 minutes a day.” It prohibits sites such as Pinterest from automatically revealing content when the user scrolls to the bottom of the page, instead “requiring the user to specifically request … that additional content be loaded and displayed.” The SMART Act would do all this, according to its preamble, to protect unsuspecting people from FOMO, doom scrolling, and other “practices that exploit human psychology or brain physiology to substantially impede freedom of choice.”
You can read the NirAndFar blog post on: “Tech Addiction” Is the New Reefer Madness https://www.nirandfar.com/hack-back-phone-distractions/
Nir & Far, a podcast about business, behaviour and the brain by Nir Eyal. If you enjoy this podcast, please subscribe on iTunes and leave an iTunes review. It will greatly help new listeners discover the show. Please visit my website Nir and Far for other info about my writing, books and teaching: http://www.nirandfar.com/
