A bottomless Pit of Distractions 🕳️

All I really wanted was to send a message to a friend. But obstacles to this seemingly simple undertaking where deviously hidden everywhere I looked. My mission was treacherous to begin with. When everyone and everything starts shouting at you once you enter the place, how are you really supposed to focus? How are you to do what you set out to do?

So here I was, on Instagram, but unlike what you might think, I did not come here to mindlessly indulge myself in Instagram Stories. I did not come here to scroll until my earthly doom. I did not come here to swipe through Reels, to get lost in highly-personalised micro interactions that do their best to shorten social media users' ever so short attention span. Do you remember why I came here? I came to write a message.

But apparently, it was I who did not remember. Within mere milliseconds I forgot what I set out to do, when my eyes faced two feeds–one horizontal, another vertical–both with an unmatched algorithmic accuracy, after years of studying my likes and yearnings, all with a single goal to distract me and make me forget why I originally came here. Suffice to say, that I ended up exactly where they wanted me.

I got caught up in a whirlwind of distractions, immediately checking on an Instagram Story of an old friend, which so temptingly appeared in the Stories feed. Seemingly, as I noticed right away from his profile picture, he had found himself a new girlfriend. This got me curious. And since my friend had not a single post on his profile, which shortly interrupted my act of curious snooping, I checked his girlfriend's profile. Lucky that I was, her profile was public. She had posted a Story too, which I checked willingly. Then, a recent post in her feed had me swipe pryingly through a gallery of vacation pictures until something happened.

What happened was that it suddenly hit me: these bastards got me. Five minutes had elapsed until I awakened from my algorithmic fever dream and remembered my original mission: to write to my friend! Five minutes doesn't sound like much, but once you add it up–say, if you've been using social media for 5, 10, 20 years–how many minutes have you lost?

The Instagram Directory

There's two reasons why I still have an account on Instagram today:

1. To converse with businesses who seem to offer no other communication channel to contact them.
2. To converse with my friends from around the world, whose preferred communication platforms differ from the ones we use in Europe, where Instagram turns out to be the common ground (for instance: South Koreans like to use KakaoTalk, Japanese and Taiwanese like to use Line, Chinese use WeChat–platforms predominantly unknown or unused in Europe).

For the last years, I have used Instagram mainly as a directory for my friends, but after this episode of losing control one too many times, I'm looking for ways not ever having to interact with it again, because it's evil, it's sneaky, it's designed to toy with the most natural human instincts.

Just using it as a communication channel proofs rather tricky. There used to be an experimental "Instagram Direct" app but it has been sunset, so I suppose it's time to ask for my international friends' email addresses and phone numbers.

In the meantime, I'll just add my Instagram Inbox page to my browser bookmarks, and access it via the web, so I don't have to face a feed full of distractions.

Getting out of the Pit

Tristan Harris described the problem with smartphone usage in a 60 Minutes segment with TV journalist Anderson Cooper, which I have found in Cal Newport's book "Digital Minimalism":

"This thing is a slot machine," Harris says early in the interview while holding up his smartphone.

"How is that a slot machine?" Cooper asks.

"Well, every time I check my phone, I'm playing the slot machine to see What did I get?" Harris answers. "There's a whole playbook of techniques that get used to get you using the product for as long as possible."

"Is Silicon Valley programming apps or are they programming people?" Cooper asks.

"They are programming people", Harris says. "There's always this narrative that technology's neutral. And it's up to us to choose how we use it. This is not true—"

"Technology is not neutral?" Cooper interrupts.

"It's not neutral. They want you to use it in particular ways and for long periods of time. Because that's how they make money."

Of course, none of this is new to you. We are all aware of the "attention society", created by Silicon Valley, in which we, the users are the product and still, that doesn't stop most of us from using social media. What might be new to you however, is the fact that social media hasn't always been this way.

As a matter of fact, there used to be social media that wasn't engineered to manipulate its users, that didn't profit from users spending as much of their time as possible on it. Remember MySpace?

Here goes Cal Newport:

The whole social media dynamic of posting content, and then watching feedback trickle back unpredictably, seems fundamental to these services, but as Tristan Harris points out, it's actually just one arbitary option among many for how they could operate. Remember that early social media sites featured very little feedback–their operations focused instead on posting and finding information. It tends to be these early, pre-feedback-era features that people cite when explaining why social media is important to their life. When justifying Facebook use, for example, many will point to something like the ability to find out when a friend's new baby is born, which is a one-way-transfer of information that does not require feedback (it's implied that people "like" this news).

Ever since I've become a happy computer user, when my dad introduced me to this exciting world of interactive media, I've never had any doubt in my mind: software is what I want to dedicate my life to. With the emergence of the web, that promised a platform for millions of users to express themselves, with the computer as a productivity tool, with open protocols like the web, email or proprietary formats like MP3, with the magic that user interfaces and design have had over me ever since this long ago, had I believed in the notion of good tech.

But as the so-called "Web 2.0" ran its course in the late 2000s and evolved from a harmless and joyful place to follow friends and post funny status messages about the odd behaviour of our cats, social media as a platform mutated to a monster and the playing field of insidious companies and their privacy-threatening, mind-manipulating practices in the form of surveillance capitalism. With social media being as addictive as crack, it represents everything I despise about software today.

While I myself have found a way to stop it dominating my life (by stopping to use it–well, except for seldom interactions like the one told above), the majority of the world is still at its mercy. More often than not, it's still considered harmless, funny and totally "normal", when in reality, it's dangerously addictive like a highly-potent drug. The reason why many don't see it the way that I do is because it's fun, it's happy and most importantly, it's stimulating our brains in ever so satisfying ways. Social media isn't so bad right?

Today, unfortunately, it's taking hold of us, no matter the age, culture or social background. Even at a very early age: I've seen a toddler recently, no older than three years old, doom-scrolling on TikTok, while his mum cheerfully sat next to him (which is even more troublesome, as the kid has been exposed to a recommendation algorithm that has been trained on an adult and there is no "TikTok for Kids". But I'm on the fence whether a children-friendly version of such a devious tool would be the solution here).

And yet, as I'm trying to discover a more optimistic outlook on life these days, I believe that there can be good social media and that there's some excellent ideas on how to make social media good. Already today, I have the feeling that many people in my bubble, especially on the small web, challenge themselves to spend less time on social media and on their smartphones altogether. This gives me hope that we're not entirely lost and each and everyone of us has the potential to live without social media and regain control over their time, with no more engineered distractions.

If you are using social media, I don't blame you, of course. All the blame goes to the social media companies!