The Vice Obscured By Apple’s Virtue
Mark Zuckerberg has found himself on the wrong side of a morality play. In the face of the insanity of January 6, the business model that Facebook has helped perfect is now being rendered as the technology that will end free society. Constant “surveillance” for the purpose of better selling ads — Facebook’s core business model—is claimed to be a recipe for social disaster, because, in the context of news, that business model does best when it renders us most crazy. Newsfeeds are spiked with content designed to drive ever more vigorous engagement. That engagement has a cost, socially, even if it has a benefit for Facebook.
Apple has become the hero in this morality play. Leveraging its power over the iOS platform, it has deployed technologies to bust up the Facebook business model. In every context it can, Apple highlights the dignity cost in this constant surveillance by the “data industrial complex,” as Apple’s Tim Cook has described it. If Apple wins this fight, surveillance-driven advertising will be less profitable everywhere.
There is no doubt that surveillance-driven advertising is socially costly — in some contexts. But equally, without doubt, surveillance-driven advertising is socially beneficial in other contexts. That Netflix understands which movies my family is likely to like is a good thing — even if Netflix “learned” that by “surveilling” us as we watched our movies. The same with Amazon and books. And likewise with advertising as I search the web. It is a good thing that I no longer see ads for diapers. That was a happy stage in our family’s life; we’re all very happy to have moved beyond it, and grateful that the spies wired into our iPhones know that we’ve moved beyond it.
That private good, however, does not excuse the social bad that gets produced by these same technologies in the context of our role as citizens. It is a genuinely awful thing that the platforms that serve us information about hiking boots are optimized to feed our polarized ignorance when engaging us about politics. No doubt, Facebook needs to think more effectively about how best to enable efficient commerce without feeding the polarizing partisanship that marks our political age. What’s good on the commerce channel is not good on the citizenship channel.
Yet Apple has its own vices too. Its business model may not be advertising, but that doesn’t mean that its business model is not trading on the same weaknesses in human — especially child—psychology. Apple profits from engagement with its devices and its software. It has doubled down on expanding its gaming services while providing the technology to serve the endless demands of social media. Those technologies are designed to addict their users. As engineer-activist Tristan Harris describes, engineers spend endless effort to find the perfect mix of random rewards and bottomless-pit content to make resisting the technology more and more difficult. Apple’s products give access to these addicting technologies — and profit, the more we, or our kids, use them.
Practically every parent in America knows the consequence of this dynamic first hand. And every one of those parents realizes that the addiction engineers are better at this game than we are. Steve Jobs could ban his kids from iPads — in 2010. But in the age of virtual education, there is no choice to opt kids out from technology. And so every parent must wage an endless struggle to get their kids to resist technologies designed to be irresistible. The very idea is astonishing: When I was a kid, the people whose business it was to addict kids were called “felons.” Today, they are celebrated as the titans of the technology industry.
Apple could make it wildly easier for parents to exercise better control over their kids’ access to Apple’s technology. It chooses not to. When it launched its iPhone, it removed the capacity that existed on the Mac for parents to control the amount of time the technology was used. After pushback by parents, Apple has now buried a suite of parental controls in a preference set called “Screen Time.” But Screen Time is an extraordinarily cumbersome technology for exercising control over the use by kids of Apple’s technology. (Fred Stutzman, the inventor of the genius Freedom, unpacks it here.) It just happens to be the best that there is on Apple’s platform — because Apple makes it so difficult (in the name of “security”) for other companies to offer parents real control over the use of Apple’s technology. Surprise, surprise.
January 6 was an awful day, hopefully never to be repeated the life of this nation. And no doubt the technologists that engendered that craziness need to think carefully about how their tools are affecting democracy. But every single day our kids are being captured and engaged by technologies designed to overcome their better judgment about technology’s uses. And however bad January 6 was, the harm from this persistent corruption is also socially significant.
It is good that Apple is forcing a careful recognition of the costs of digital surveillance in our society. But the company needs to take more responsibility for the costs of digital addiction. Facebook may not be entitled to the profits it reaps from advertising technologies that render us as partisan crazies. But neither is Apple entitled to the profits it reaps by deploying addiction technologies, at least without effective parental controls. That it has chosen to deny parents that control is significant, if understandable. But until it learns to resist the temptations of its own business model, maybe the company ought to be less self-righteous about the failings of others.