Holding Tech Responsible For Your Addictions is Morally Wrong
In my opinion at least.
Technology is being designed to be more addictive. The social media, video game, video, and news industries are all developing their software to keep you in front of their program for as long as possible. If they can keep you, the user, engaged they can collect data, fine-tune their algorithms to engage you and others like you better, and profit off of you either through subscriptions or by showing you advertisements. This business model has many adverse effects on you and the society that you live in. For example, if you are spending more time on your computer or phone you are more likely to; engage in irregular sleep patterns, not engage with friends and family in real life, feel disconnected and lonely, not feel motivated to improve your situation, feel anxious or depressed, engage in polarizing debates and arguments. These effects happen because; screens produce blue light which affects your ability to fall asleep, social media produces rewards in our brains that are easier to get than almost any other rewarding behavior so we don’t do much else, social media shows you polarizing posts because rage keeps you engaged. I have heard a few people argue that companies practicing these techniques are immoral, I’m here to tell you why they are not.
This may seem like an odd thing to say, but let me state my values and assumptions that I will use to ground this argument. If we don’t share the same values or assumptions I accept that I’ll never convince you.
Value 1, you are responsible for your actions. From the position that you are responsible for your actions, it’s hard to say that it’s the tech industry’s fault for inflicting the negative effects of addiction on you since you are the one choosing to engage with their products. This would be like saying it’s the fault of the cigarette for damaging your lungs when you willingly smoke.
Value 2, you are better able to serve yourself and society if you are capable of self-control. If you as an individual can keep your vices under control you won’t burden society by adding to the numbers of those who already need to seek help because of the injuries technology has inflicted on them. If you keep your vices under control you also won’t need to experience the pain of those injuries first hand.
Now you may argue back in a few different ways, I may not be familiar with them all but I’ll touch on the more common themes I hear. One argument is that you shouldn’t have to control yourself to such a degree, this can be fixed by regulating the companies. I’ll address this later when I describe my assumptions. Another one is that we should consider people who are not considered old enough to modulate their behavior such as kids and young adults. My counter to this is that kids should be taught how to modulate their behavior and should be taught psychology from a young age. Kids and young adults can understand and need to practice the skill of controlling themselves or else they won’t understand know how to in practical situations.
Assumption 1, addiction once known is something that any individual is consciously able to fight against. What this means to me is, once you know something can be addictive it is up to you now to choose to stop using the product. You can fight against it by consciously not doing it. Whether or not you decide said addiction is harmful and needs to be stoped is up to you to decide.
Assumption 2, the ability for experiences to become extremely addicting will continue to grow as society and technology develop, this effect can be seen everywhere in every industry, sweeter foods, more potent drugs, crazier amusement park rides, more engaging social media. This is a reason for you the reader to take the time to build the control needed to break addictions. Addictive things are not going away, in fact, they seem to be increasing in amount and potency thus you can’t expect the government to be able to regulate them all. The government has shown itself to be incapable of regulating physical things like alcohol and marijuana how can we hold them responsible for regulating such an extremely fast-paced environment as the internet. Thus the responsibility whether you want it or not might always fall on you.
Assumption 3 regulation will not make the issue go away because people are addicted to the issue. I expect the same thing will happen that happened with the war against drugs, or the Prohibition. So removing the law-abiding suppliers like Facebook will only create more demand for other suppliers that do not follow the law. This assumption is why I don’t think regularization will help.
Assumption 4, if people do not take responsibility for what they are addicted to then they would be more easily addicted to non-law-abiding and potentially more addicting suppliers of experiences. The lack of placing responsibility on the individual will allow them to say that maybe internet addictions and other addictions are outside of their control, they just need to wait for more regulation to be created, to feel better. This removes their feeling of obligation to fight for themselves because someone else solved the problem for them.
I believe that being responsible for my actions and that modulating my behavior is morally good. Thus in the case of addiction, which I assume is a behavior that I can consciously control I am responsible for having anything adverse happen to me. If I lay blame on Facebook for making me feel depressed because I used their website I’m violating my value that I am responsible for my actions and their consequences. So regulating Facebook, which is only trying to make money, because of problems I caused to myself would be morally wrong, and further, than that may be detrimental to society because of my second, third, and fourth assumptions.
