In 2015 the See First “curation tool” was introduced to channel direct data on the shape of a user’s social mirror by soliciting his or her personal priorities for the News Feed. Facebook’s chief product officer describes the corporation’s interest in supplying what is “most meaningful” for you to know today from “everything that happened on Earth… published anywhere by any of your friends, any of your family, any news source.”42 Each post sequenced in the News Feed also now hosts a range of explicit feedback options: I want more of this. I want none of that. These direct surplus supply lines are important sources of innovation aimed at broadening the target of the fusion zone, increasing the tenacity of an ever-tightening glove. In 2016 Facebook’s product director confirmed that this direct sourcing of surplus “led to an increase in overall engagement and time spent on the site.”43
Facebook’s science and design expertise aim for a closed loop that feeds on, reinforces, and amplifies the individual user’s inclination toward fusion with the group and the tendency to over-share personal information. Although these vulnerabilities run deepest among the young, the tendency to over-share is not restricted to them. The difficulty of self-imposed discipline in the sharing of private thoughts, feelings, and other personal information has been amply demonstrated in social research and summarized in an important 2015 review by Carnegie Mellon professors Alessandro Acquisti, Laura Brandimarte, and George Loewenstein. They concluded that because of a range of psychological and contextual factors, “People are often unaware of the information they are sharing, unaware of how it can be used, and even in the rare situations when they have full knowledge of the consequences of sharing, uncertain about their own preferences.…” The researchers cautioned that people are “easily influenced in what and how much they disclose. Moreover, what they share can be used to influence their emotions, thoughts, and behaviors.…” The result is alteration in “the balance of power between those holding the data and those who are the subjects of that data.”44
Facebook has Pentland’s prized God view on its side, an unparalleled resource that is drawn upon to remake this naturally longed-for fusion into a space of no escape. Science and capital are united in this long-game project. Yesterday it was the “Like” button, today it is augmented reality, and tomorrow there will be new innovations added to this repertoire. The company’s growth in user engagement, surplus capture, and revenue are evidence that these innovations have hit their marks.
Young people crave the hive, and Facebook gives it to them, but this time it’s owned and operated by surveillance capital and scientifically engineered into a continuous spiral of escalating fusion, amply fulfilling Shaffer’s five criteria for achieving an addictive state of compulsion. Potency is engineered according to a recipe dictated by the hidden attributes of those who crave valorization from the group to fill the void where a self must eventually stand.
These cravings may not be the sole motivations of Facebook’s currently two billion users, but they aptly describe the attributes upon which Facebook’s incentives are designed to bite the hardest. Climbing the mountain of the self-other balance is an adventure that we each must undertake: a journey of risk, conflict, uncertainty, and electrifying discovery. But what happens when the forces of surveillance capital turn the mountain into a mountain range? Look at us! Yes, you are alive! Do not look away! Why would you? How could you? Today, we might “like” you!
IV. The Next Human Nature
A growing body of evidence testifies to the psychic toll of life in the hive, where surveillance capital’s behavioral engineering expertise collides with the centuries-in-the-making human impulse toward self-construction. Researchers are already providing answers to two key questions: What are the psychological processes that dominate the hive? What are the individual and societal consequences of these processes? According to the 302 most significant quantitative research studies on the relationships between social media use and mental health (most of them produced since 2013), the psychological process that most defines the Facebook experience is what psychologists call “social comparison.”45 It is usually considered a natural and virtually automatic process that operates outside of awareness, “effectively forced upon the individual by his social environment” as we apply evaluative criteria tacitly internalized from our society, community, group, family, and friends.46 As one research review summarizes, “Almost at the moment of exposure, an initial holistic assessment of the similarity between the target and the self is made.”47 As we go through life being exposed to other people, we naturally compare ourselves along the lines of similarity and contrast—I am like you. I am different from you—subliminal perceptions that translate into judgments—I am better than you. You are better than I.
Researchers have come to appreciate the way in which these automatic human processes converge with the changing conditions of each historical era. For most of human history, people lived in small enclaves and were typically surrounded by others very much like themselves. Social comparisons with little variation are unlikely to entail great psychological risk. Research suggests that the diffusion of television in the second half of the twentieth century dramatically increased the intensity and negativity of social comparison, as it brought vivid evidence of varied and more-affluent lives dramatically different from one’s own. One study found an increase in criminal larceny as television diffused across society, awakening an awareness of and desire for consumer goods. A related issue was that increased exposure to television programs depicting affluence led to “the overestimation of others’ wealth and more dissatisfaction with one’s own life.”48
Social media marks a new era in the intensity, density, and pervasiveness of social comparison processes, especially for the youngest among us, who are “almost constantly online” at a time of life when one’s own identity, voice, and moral agency are a work in progress. In fact, the psychological tsunami of social comparison triggered by the social media experience is considered unprecedented. If television created more life dissatisfaction, what happens in the infinite spaces of social media?
Both television and social media deprive us of real-life encounters, in which we sense the other’s inwardness and share something of our own, thus establishing some threads of communality. Unlike television, however, social media entails active self-presentation characterized by “profile inflation,” in which biographical information, photos, and updates are crafted to appear ever more marvelous in anticipation of the stakes for popularity, self-worth, and happiness.49 Profile inflation triggers more negative self-evaluation among individuals as people compare themselves to others, which then leads to more profile inflation, especially among larger networks that include more “distant friends.” As one study concluded, “Expanding one’s social network by adding a number of distant friends through Facebook may be detrimental by stimulating negative emotions for users.”50
One consequence of the new density of social comparison triggers and their negative feedback loops is a psychological condition known as FOMO (“fear of missing out”). It is a form of social anxiety defined as “the uneasy and sometimes all-consuming feeling that… your peers are doing, in the know about, or in possession of more or something better than you.”51 It’s a young person’s affliction that is associated with negative mood and low levels of life satisfaction. Research has identified FOMO with compulsive Facebook use: FOMO sufferers obsessively checked their Facebook feeds—during meals, while driving, immediately upon waking or before sleeping, and so on. This compulsive behavior is intended to produce relief in the form of social reassurance, but it predictably breeds more anxiety and more searching.52
Social comparison can make people do things that they might not otherwise do. Facebook’s experiments and Pokémon Go’s augmented reality each exploit mutual visibility and its inevitable release of social comparison processes for successful tuning and herding. Both of these illustrate the ways in which once-natural psychological processes are repurposed to
heighten the effectiveness of Pentland’s vaunted “social pressure,” thus enabling behavior modification at scale. Social pressure is activated by “I want to be like you” as the risks of difference and exclusion threaten negative social comparison.
What do we know about the mental health consequences of social comparison as it ensnares Facebook users, especially the young? Most of the research aimed at a deeper grasp of cause and effect in the user experience has been conducted with college-age participants, and even a brief review of a few key studies tells a grim tale, as adolescents and emerging adults run naked through these digitally mediated social territories in search of proof of life. A 2011 study found that social media users exposed to pictures of “beautiful users” developed a more negative self-image than those who were shown less attractive profile pictures. Men who were shown profiles of high-career-status men judged their own pursuits as inadequate, compared to others who saw profiles of less successful men.53 By 2013, researchers found that Facebook use could predict negative shifts in both how their young subjects felt moment to moment as well as their overall life satisfaction.54 That year, German researchers found that the “astounding… wealth of social information” presented on Facebook produces “a basis for social comparison and envy on an unprecedented scale.” Their work demonstrated that “passive following” on Facebook exacerbates feelings of envy and decreases life satisfaction. More than 20 percent of all recent experiences of envy reported by the students in the research study had been triggered by Facebook exposure.55
A three-phase investigation in 2014 found that spending a lot of time browsing profiles on Facebook produced a negative mood immediately afterward. Then, upon reflection, those users felt worse, reckoning that they had wasted their time. Instead of walking away, they typically chose to spend even more time browsing the network in the hope of feeling better, chasing the dream of a sudden and magical reversal of fortune that would justify past suffering. This cycle not only leads to more social comparison and more envy, but it can also predict depressive symptoms.56
The self-objectification associated with social comparison is also associated with other psychological dangers. First we present ourselves as data objects for inspection, and then we experience ourselves as the “it” that others see. One 2014 study demonstrated the deleterious effect of these loops on body consciousness. An analysis of young men and women who had used Facebook for at least six years concluded that, regardless of gender, more Facebook participation leads to more body surveillance. A sense of self-worth comes to depend on physical appearance and being perceived as a sex object. Body shame leads to constant rounds of manicuring self-portrayals for a largely unknown audience of “followers.”57
Life in the hive favors those who most naturally orient toward external cues rather than toward one’s own thoughts, feelings, values, and sense of personal identity.58 When considered from the vantage point of the self-other balance, positive social comparisons are just as pernicious as negative comparisons. Both are substitutes for the “hard bargain” of carving out a self that is capable of reciprocity rather than fusion. Whether the needle moves up or down, social comparison is the flywheel that powers the closed loop between the inclination toward the social mirror and its reinforcement. Both ego gratification and ego injury drive the chase for more external cues.
Over time, studies increase in complexity as they try to identify the underlying mechanisms through which social comparison in social media is associated with symptoms of depression and feelings of social isolation.59 One notable three-year study published in 2017 considered both the direct Facebook data of more than five thousand participants as well as self-reported data on their “real-world social networks.” This approach enabled ongoing direct comparisons between real-world relationships and Facebook associations across four domains of self-reported well-being: physical health, mental health, life satisfaction, and body mass index. “Liking others’ content and clicking links to posts by friends,” the researchers summarized, “were consistently related to compromised well-being, whereas the number of status updates was related to reports of diminished mental health.” So strong was this relationship that “a 1-standard-deviation increase in ‘likes clicked’… ‘links clicked’… or ‘status updates’ was associated with a decrease of 5%–8% of a standard deviation in self-reported mental health,” even controlling for a person’s initial state of well-being. The researchers’ definitive conclusion? “Facebook use does not promote well-being.… Individual social media users might do well to curtail their use of social media and focus instead on real-world relationships.”60
V. Homing to the Herd
This is not a rehearsal. This is the show. Facebook is a prototype of instrumentarian society, not a prophecy. It is the first frontier of a new societal territory, and the youngest among us are its vanguard. The frontier experience is an epidemic of the viewpoint of the Other-One, a hyper-objectification of one’s own personhood shaped by the relentless amplification of life lived from the “outside looking in.” The consequence is a pattern of overwhelming anxiety and disorientation in the simple act of digital disconnection, while connection itself is haunted by fresh anxieties that paradoxically leave too many feeling isolated, diminished, and depressed. One wants to say that the struggles of youth can be painful in any era and that it is simply the destiny of today’s young people to encounter the work of self-construction in this milieu of digital connection and illumination, with its truly marvelous opportunities for voice, community, information, and exploration. One wants to say they will get through it, just as other generations survived the adolescent trials of their time and place.
But this time it is not a question of simply packing their lunch and crossing our fingers as they head into the school-day maze of adolescent cliques, or sending them off to college knowing that they may stumble or fall but eventually find their passions and their people as they find themselves. This time, we have sent them into the raw heart of a rogue capitalism that amassed its fortune and power through behavioral dispossession parlayed into behavior modification in the service of others’ guaranteed outcomes.
They crave the hive, just as Hall’s teenagers did in 1904, but the hive they encounter is not the unadulterated product of their natures and their culture of mutuality. It is a zone of asymmetrical power, constructed by surveillance capital as it operates in secrecy beyond confrontation or accountability. It is an artificial creation designed in the service of surveillance capital’s greater good. When young people enter this hive, they keep company with a surveillance priesthood: the world’s most-sophisticated data scientists, programmers, machine learning experts, and technology designers, whose single-minded mission to tighten the glove is mandated by the economic imperatives of surveillance capital and its “laws of motion.”
Innocent hangouts and conversations are embedded in a behavioral engineering project of planetary scope and ambition that is institutionalized in Big Other’s architectures of ubiquitous monitoring, analysis, and control. In their encounter with the self-other balance, teenagers step onto a playing field already tilted by surveillance capital to tip them into the social mirror and keep them fixed on its reflections. Everything depends upon feeding the algorithms that can effectively and precisely bite on him and bite on her and not let go. All those outlays of genius and money are devoted to this one goal of keeping users, especially young users, plastered to the social mirror like bugs on the windshield.
The research studies and first-person accounts that we have reviewed reveal the coercive underbelly of the instrumentarian’s much revered “confluence,” in which harmonies are achieved at the expense of the psychological integrity of participants. This is the world of Pentland’s “social learning,” his theory of “tuning” little more than the systematic manipulation of the rewards and punishments of inclusion and exclusion. It succeeds through the natural human inclination to avoid psychological pain. Just as ordinary consumers can become compulsive g
amblers at the hands of the gaming industry’s behavioral technologies, psychologically ordinary young people are drawn into an unprecedented vortex of social information that automatically triggers social comparison on an equally unprecedented scale. This mental and emotional milieu appears to produce a virus of insecurity and anxiety that drives a young person deeper into this closed loop of escalating compulsion as he or she chases relief in longed-for signals of valorization.
This cycle unnaturally exacerbates and intensifies the natural orientation toward the group. And although we all share in this disposition to varying degrees, it is most pronounced in the stages of life that we call adolescence and emerging adulthood. Ethologists call this orientation “homing to the herd,” an adaptation of certain species, such as passenger pigeons and herring, that home to the crowd rather than to a particular territory. In the confrontation with human predators, however, this instinct has proven fatal.
For example, biologist Bernd Heinrich describes the fate of the passenger pigeons, whose “social sense was so strong that it drew the new predator, technologically equipped humans, from afar. It made them not only easy targets, but easily duped.” Commercial harvesters followed the pigeons’ flight and nesting patterns, and then used huge nets to catch thousands of pigeons at a time, shipping millions by rail each year to the markets from St. Louis to Boston. The harvesters used a specific technique, designed to exploit the extraordinary bonds of empathy among the birds and immortalized in the term “stool pigeon.” A few birds would be captured first and attached to a perch with their eyes sewn shut. As these birds fluttered in panic, the flock would descend to “attend to them.” This made it easy for the harvesters to “catch and slaughter” thousands at once. The last passenger pigeon died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914: “The pigeon had no home boundaries over which to spread itself and continued to orient only to itself, so it could be everywhere, even to the end.… To the pigeons, the only ‘home’ they knew was in the crowd, and now they had become victims of it… the lack of territorial boundaries of human predators had tipped the scales to make their adaptation their doom.”61
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