{"id":3692,"date":"2023-05-15T10:18:34","date_gmt":"2023-05-15T10:18:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=3692"},"modified":"2023-05-26T10:23:50","modified_gmt":"2023-05-26T10:23:50","slug":"a-lawyer-scenting-blood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=3692","title":{"rendered":"A lawyer scenting blood"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Reading Unwired by Gaia Bernstein for New Statesman, 15 May 2023<\/a><\/p>\n

In 2005, the journal Obesity Research published a study that, had we but known it, told us everything we needed to know about our coming addiction to digital devices.<\/p>\n

The paper, \u201cBottomless Bowls: Why Visual Cues of Portion Size May Influence Intake\u201d was about soup. Researchers led by Brian Wansink of Cornell University invited volunteers to lunch. One group ate as much soup as they wanted from regular bowls. The other ate from bowls that were bolted to the table and refilled automatically from below. Deprived of the \u201cstopping signal\u201d of an empty bowl, this latter group ate 73 per cent more than the others — and had no idea that they had over-eaten.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a tale that must haunt the dreams of Asa Raskin, the man who invented, then publically regretted, \u201cinfinite scroll\u201d. That\u2019s the way mobile phone apps (from Facebook to Instagram, Twitter to Snapchat) provide endless lists of fresh content to the user, regardless of how much content has already been consumed.<\/p>\n

Gaia Bernstein, a law professor at Seton Hall, includes infinite scroll in her book\u2019s catalogue of addicting smart-device features. But this is as much about what these devices don\u2019t do. For instance in his 2022 book Lost Focus Johann Hari wonders why Facebook never tells you which of your friends are nearby and up for a coffee. Well, the answer\u2019s obvious enough: because lonely people, self-medicating with increasing quantities of social media, are Facebook\u2019s way of making money.<\/p>\n

What do we mean when we say that our mobile phones and tablets and other smart devices are addicting?<\/p>\n

The idea of behavioural addiction was enshrined in DSM-5, the manual of mental disorders issued by the American Psychiatric Association, in 2015. DSM-5 is a bloated beast, and yet its flaky-sounding \u201cBehavioral Addictions\u201d — that, on the face of it, could make a mental disorder of everything we like to do — have proved remarkably robust, as medicine reveals how addictions, compulsions and enthusiasms share the same neurological pathways. You can addict humans (and not just humans) to pretty much anything. All you need to do is weaponise the environment.<\/p>\n

And the environment, according to Bernstein\u2019s spare, functional and frightening account, is most certainly weaponised. Teenagers, says Bernsteins, spend barely a third of the time partying that they used to in the 1980s, and the number of teens who get together with their friends has halved between 2000 and 2015. If ever there was a time to market a service to lonely people by making them more lonely, it\u2019s now.<\/p>\n

For those of us who want to sue GAMA (Google, Amazon, Meta, Apple) for our children\u2019s lost childhood, galloping anxiety, poor impulse control, obesity, insomnia and raised suicide risk, the challenge is to demonstrate that it\u2019s screentime that\u2019s done all this damage to how they feel, and how they behave. And that, in an era of helicopter-parenting, is hard to do. danah boyd\u2019s 2014 book It\u2019s Complicated shows how difficult it\u2019s going to be to separate the harms inflicted by little Johnny\u2019s iPhone from all the benefits little Johnny enjoys. To hear boyd tell it, teenagers \u201cobsessed\u201d with social media are simply trying to recreate, for themselves and each other, a social space denied them by anxious parents, hostile authorities, and a mass media bent on exaggerating every conceivable out-of-doors danger.<\/p>\n

The Covid pandemic has only exacerbated the stay-at-home, see-no-one trend among young people. Children\u2019s average time online doubled from three to six hours during lockdown. It use to be that four per cent of children spent more than eight hours a day in front of a smart screen. Now over a quarter of them do.<\/p>\n

Nor have we merely inherited this dismal state of affairs; we\u2019ve positively encouraged it, stuffing our schools with technological geegaws in the fond and (as it turns out) wildly naive belief that I.T. will improve and equalise classroom performance. (It doesn\u2019t, which this is why Silicon Valley higher-ups typically send their children to Waldorf schools, which use chalk, right up until the eighth grade.)<\/p>\n

Bernstein, who regularly peppers an otherwise quite dry account with some eye-popping personal testimony, recalls meeting one mum whose son was set to studying history through a Roblox game mode called Assassin’s Creed Odyssey (set in ancient Greece). \u201cSince then, whenever she asks him to get off Roblox, he insists it is homework.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bernstein believes there\u2019s more to all this than a series of unfortunate events. She thinks the makers of smart devices knew exactly what they were doing, as surely as the tobacco companies knew that the cigarettes they manufactured caused cancer.<\/p>\n

Bernstein reckons we\u2019re at a legal tipping point: this is her playbook for making GAMA pay for addicting us to glass.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s what we already know about how companies respond to being caught out in massive wrong-doing.<\/p>\n

First, they ignore the problem. (In 2018 an internal Facebook presentation warned: \u201cOur algorithm exploits the human brain\u2019s attraction to divisiveness… If left unchecked [it would feed users] more and more divisive content to gain user attention & increase time on the platform.\u201d Mark Zuckerberg responded by asking his people \u201cnot to bring something like that to him again\u201d.)<\/p>\n

Then they deny there\u2019s a problem. Then they go to war with the science, refuting critical studies and producing their own. Then, they fend off public criticism — and place responsibility on the consumer — by offering targeted solutions. (At least the filter tips added to cigarettes were easy to use. Most \u201cparental controls\u201d on smart devices are so cumbersome and inaccessible as to be unuseable.) Finally, they offer to create a system of self-regulation — by which time, Bernstein reckons, you\u2019ve won, or you will have won, so long as you have proven that the people you\u2019re going after intended, all along, to addict their customers.<\/p>\n

You might, naively, imagine that this matter rests upon the science. It doesn\u2019t, and Bernstein\u2019s account of the screentime science wars is quite weak — a shallow confection built largely of single studies.<\/p>\n

The scientific evidence is stronger than Bernstein makes it sound, but there\u2019s still a problem: it\u2019ll take a generation to consolidate. There are other, better ways to get at the truth in a timely manner; for instance, statistics, which will tell you that we have the largest ever recorded epidemic of teenage mental health problems, whose rising curves correlate with terrifying neatness with the launch of various social media platforms.<\/p>\n

Bernstein is optimistic: \u201cJustifying legal interventions,\u201d she says, \u201cis easier when the goal is to correct a loss of autonomy\u201d, and this after all, is the main charge she\u2019s laying at GAMA\u2019s door: that these companies have created devices that rob us of our will, leaving us ever more civically and psychologically inept, the more we\u2019re glued to their products.<\/p>\n

Even better (at least from the point of view of a lawyer scenting blood), we\u2019re talking about children. \u201cMinors are the Achilles heel,\u201d Bernstein announces repeatedly, and with something like glee. Remember how the image of children breathing in their parents\u2019 second-hand smoke broke big tobacco? Well, just extend the analogy: here we have a playground full of kids taking free drags of Capstans and Players No. 6.<\/p>\n

Unwired is not, and does not aspire to be, a comprehensive account of the screen-addiction phenomenon. It exists to be used: an agenda for social change through legal action. It is a knife, not a brush. But it\u2019ll be of much more than academic value to those of us whose parenting years were overshadowed by feelings of guilt, frustration and anxiety, as we fought our hopeless battles, and lost our children to TikTok and Fortnite.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reading Unwired by Gaia Bernstein for New Statesman, 15 May 2023 In 2005, the journal Obesity Research published a study that, had we but known it, told us everything we needed to know about our coming addiction to digital devices. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617,78],"tags":[320,872,609,1070,1069,1068,267],"class_list":["post-3692","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-reviews-and-opinion","category-reviews-and-opinion","tag-addiction","tag-digital-culture","tag-law","tag-litigation","tag-mobile-devices","tag-new-statesman","tag-social-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3692","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3692"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3692\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3693,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3692\/revisions\/3693"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3692"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3692"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3692"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}