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I’ve always been fascinated with airplanes. As a kid, I had posters of planes on the walls of my room. In college, I worked as a crew member for an experimental-aircraft festival. As a young father, I took my kids to the airport to play “airplane bingo,” where we’d try to figure out what type of plane was taking off before it passed overhead. When my wife needed a quiet house on Saturdays to give violin lessons, I took the kids to hang out in the National Air and Space Museum.
About ten years ago, with a nudge from my daughter, I decided to learn how to fly a plane myself. Like all new pilots, I started by earning a private pilot’s license that allowed me to fly a plane in visual conditions. Just like driving a car, when flying in visual conditions, you make all flying decisions by looking out the window, seeing where you’re going, and adjusting based on what you see. If it looks as if you’re headed toward another plane, you turn in a different direction. To make sure you’re flying level, you look at where the horizon lines up against the nose of the plane and adjust your wings until they are parallel. When landing, you look for the runway and adjust your speed and altitude to land. We could get away with only having visual pilots except for one thing: clouds. When you’re in the clouds, you can’t see anything. Even though the fundamental approach for flying the plane is the same, your reference point for making all of your decisions (what you can see out the window) is now gone.
Instrument flying teaches pilots to use the equipment in the plane to avoid crashing into other airplanes, keep flying level, and land safely even when they can’t see anything outside the window. When I began working on getting my instrument license, I found one of the hardest parts was learning to trust the instruments over my gut feelings. When you can’t see the visual cues you’re accustomed to, your gut sends you all kinds of incorrect messages. Every year, visual pilots inadvertently end up flying into the clouds. Even though the physics of flying the plane haven’t changed, they haven’t learned how to use the instruments as their primary reference point. Most visual pilots who accidentally get into the clouds end up completely upside down in less than three minutes because they don’t know how to recognize and correct their own behavior.1
Our access to the digital world has dramatically changed the way we navigate through life. And because these changes came without precedent or instruction, we have almost entirely relied on our natural inclinations—what worked in the physical world—to determine how to behave in this new space. Just as in flying a plane, even though the fundamentals of being an effective member of a human community haven’t changed, when we are in an unfamiliar environment and we don’t understand how to use the tools that will keep us flying level, our gut inclinations don’t always serve us well. According to Renee Hobbs, professor of media literacy at the University of Rhode Island, two-thirds of American families don’t have any strategy for using digital media in their homes. As a society, we are visual pilots who have found ourselves in a digital cloud without the training we need to be there. Indicators of our digital dysfunction are everywhere. We’re in the clouds and upside down.
Before we can talk about the strategies to safely navigate our digital world, we need to first understand some of the dangers that exist around us. We’ll start by looking at four representative examples of our digital dysfunction that threaten the success of our children and the future of our civil society. As I stated in the introduction, this is not a gloom and doom book. But being optimistic about our digital future doesn’t mean ignoring the dangers. My goal isn’t to make an exhaustive list of all the problems in our digital world but instead to provide a few reference points to underscore the urgency of getting things right.
A Dystopia for Clicking Ads
The first digital dysfunction stems from the underlying business model of the internet. Our online platforms are largely financed by advertisements. This leads us to ruthlessly bombard our children with upwards of three thousand ads per day.2 Research from the American Psychological Association shows that children younger than eight are cognitively and psychologically defenseless against advertising. They don’t understand the concept of “selling” and therefore accept advertising claims at face value. And remember, these are not old school newspaper ads or the commercials for Crystal Pepsi that appeared between episodes of The Simpsons while we were growing up. The online ads we are feeding to our children are blended with nonadvertising content in a way that makes them much harder to distinguish. Most children can’t even tell which part of a website is an advertisement and which isn’t.3 The user experience of the web itself has evolved to spread the information we’re looking for across multiple pages in order to create more traps for targeted ads.
Digital ads are highly optimized to take advantage of our unique weaknesses. Using our own viewing and purchasing history, collected by companies like Acxiom and LiveRamp, complex algorithms learn our specific behavioral patterns. They then use that data to make highly accurate predictions about our future behaviors and modify advertising to be optimally irresistible at just the right moment. This is known as persuasion architecture. How well does it work? A couple of years ago the New York Times broke the story of a father who demanded an apology from Target for sending his teenage daughter ads for baby clothes and diapers. While he didn’t know it yet, Target’s algorithms had already figured out that his daughter was pregnant based on her digital footprint. Target can not only tell which of its customers are pregnant but estimate the due date within a surprisingly accurate window based only on their online behavior.4
The constant diet of virtual advertising is causing some very real problems. For starters, parent-child conflicts increase as parents deny purchase requests that were precipitated by advertising. Then there’s the worrisome connection between viewing targeted advertising and decisions young people make. Carefully targeted e-cigarette ads have correlated with millions of middle and high school students who are now vaping.5 Targeted advertising has had an impact on childhood obesity, as millions of kids choose to eat unhealthy foods when their favorite cartoon characters show up on the advertising.6 Somehow Disney characters never seem to appear on packaging for broccoli. And because the rules that limit certain types of advertising on kids’ TV programming don’t yet apply on the internet, even carefully selected online videos or appropriate websites can be hijacked by disturbing advertising messages over which we have no control.
But the truly disconcerting part of our targeted-ad-driven internet is that we are permitting marketers to use our children’s most intimate personal information to make them more easily deceived. Without realizing it, you are allowing your children’s states of anxiety or depression, physical health, even the timing of your daughter’s menstrual cycle, to be used for manipulating her behavior into making money for someone else.7 And as a society, we are doing almost nothing to stop it. As sociologist Zeynep Tufekci explains in her eye-opening TED Talk, “We’re building a dystopia just to make people click on ads.”8 If someone who wasn’t already accustomed to our digital dysfunction were to observe this behavior, they would easily conclude that we are systematically exploiting our children as part of an income-generation scheme for someone we don’t even know.
Digital Exploitation and Abuse
Another digital dysfunction is the deliberate interpersonal harm that increasingly taints our virtual world. Taking the form of bullying, hate speech, and exploitation, this shocking cruelty festers in innumerable cases around the digital world. Amanda Todd was a typical Canadian teenager. She loved singing, art, animals, and snowflakes. Her favorite color was purple.9 Amanda moved to a new school in seventh grade and used video chats to meet new people. She would sing and dance on camera, and generally enjoyed the attention and compliments she received. People told her she was “beautiful, stunning, perfect.” During one chat, though, someone convinced her to flash her breasts.10 Soon after, Amanda, then only thirteen, got a message on Facebook from a stranger who threatened that if she didn’t show more of herself, he would publish the topless pictures of her. The images were posted to a porn site and a link was sent to her Facebook friends. Amanda began experiencing anxiety, depression, and panic disorder.
In an attempt to escape, her family decided to move to a new home, to start fresh. A year later, her blackmailer reappeared. He created a Facebook profile that used Amanda’s topless photo as the profile image and began contacting classmates at her new school. Amanda said, “[I] cried every night, lost all my friends and respect people had for me … again.” She moved once more, to another city, another school, but the messages and abuses continued. The following September, Amanda posted a YouTube video called “My Story: Struggling, bullying, suicide, self harm.”11 Using a series of flashcards, she tells this painful story from her point of view. “I’ve decided to tell you about my never ending story,” the first card in Amanda’s hands reads. Shortly after posting her video on YouTube, Amanda hanged herself in her home.
Cyberbullying is any abuse or harassment that takes place in the digital world through text messaging, social media, even multiplayer gaming, where an unlimited and uncontrolled audience can view and share content. Cyberbullying can take many forms, including sharing negative, harmful, or threatening content about someone else. It often includes sharing personal or private information about an individual in an attempt to cause embarrassment or humiliation. There are several aspects of cyberbullying that make it significantly more problematic than bullying in the physical world. The first is scale. As strange as it may sound, in the physical world, it takes effort to bully someone (you have to physically track them down to interact with them), which can actually help limit the scale of damage. However, in the virtual world, a harmful comment or demoralizing picture can instantly be shared widely with peers and strangers with as little effort as a click or tap.
Not only is bullying easier online, but the perpetrator is also more removed from the consequences. The virtual world allows us to do and say things we would never attempt in person, simply because the distance shields us from experiencing the real-time, in-person results of our actions. We don’t see the hurt in the other person’s face or the disapproval of onlookers, or receive correction from authority—all factors that deter cruel behaviors in our physical spaces. And because we haven’t done nearly enough to teach our children that the consequences of digital behaviors are just as—and sometimes much more—serious than the ones that come from physical behaviors, we are not making much progress in improving the problem.
While bullying in the physical world is generally limited to specific locations (for example, at the bus stop, in the locker room, and so on), cyberbullying is relentless. This means that the safe spaces a child can retreat to and not experience physical bullying, like their home, a church youth group, or a friend’s house, are unavailable to escape cyberbullying. When the bullying takes place through a mobile device, there is literally no moment during the day or night when the person can get away from their attackers. Amanda’s case is not unique in the sense that even moving to new schools or states does not ensure the bullying will stop. Proximity doesn’t matter in digital spaces. The anonymity of the internet can make it very difficult to tell who the perpetrator is, which in turn makes it ever harder to stop. We have become entirely complacent with a digital culture that permits virtual bullying and abuse with little or no consequences. A recent Pew Research Center study showed that nearly 60 percent of US teens have been bullied or harassed online.12 Even more shocking is the fact that almost 90 percent of teens have witnessed online bullying and most have done nothing about it.13
Our cyberbullying culture can’t be blamed entirely on young people either. More than half of Americans have experienced hate speech and harassment online.14 We see cyberbullying in the comments section of just about every news website. The Guardian’s analysis of nearly 1.5 million abusive comments from its site showed that articles written by women and nonwhite males consistently attracted a higher proportion of abusive comments.15 Even global leaders—those we expect our children to see as role models and emulate—are complicit. Tweets from political leaders include name-calling, spreading rumors, and belittling nonpolitical aspects of their opponents. Sherri Gordon, a bullying prevention expert, says, “Children are observing the nation’s top political leaders engaging in the very bullying tactics that kids at school use to climb the social ladder.”16
Skewing Our Perception of Reality
A third dysfunction of our digital world is an increased tolerance for deception. Using digital tools, we’ve created a set of unrealistic baselines that skew our sense of reality and damage our self-perceptions. The digital world gives a platform from which we see into the intimate parts of other people’s lives. As this happens, we can’t help but compare their experiences to our own.
Comparison is a natural human tendency that can motivate us to improve our lives and work harder. But the digital world takes advantage of our brain’s logic with an underhanded trick. Because we can choose how we want to portray ourselves in the virtual world, we often put a more positive or impressive version of ourselves on display. We don’t post every problem or stress point we’re dealing with; rather we focus on our achievements, opportunities, and exciting moments. As we scroll through our social feeds, though, we often forget this fact as we compare everyone else’s picture-perfect fantasy lives with the reality of flaws and sadness in our own. University of Houston psychologist Mai-Ly Nguyen Steers calls this viewing “everyone else’s highlights reel.”17 The New York Times reports that Americans spend about six times the amount of time washing dishes as playing golf, yet there are twice as many tweets reporting golfing than doing dishes. The Las Vegas budget hotel Circus and the luxurious hotel Bellagio each accommodate about the same number of people, but the Bellagio gets about three times as many check-ins on Facebook. Owners of luxury cars like BMWs and Mercedes are more than twice as likely to mention their cars on Facebook as owners of ordinary makes and models.18 You get the point.
This comparison with a skewed baseline has led to increasing feelings of hopelessness and depression, particularly for young girls.19 Brian Primack, the dean of the College of Education and Health Professions at the University of Arkansas, found that people who checked social media the most frequently had almost three times the risk of depression, compared with people who checked less often.20 The UK’s Royal Society for Public Health found that social media use in teens is linked with increased body-image issues in young people, who are the heaviest users of social media.21 Apps like Facetune only fuel this problem by encouraging teens to filter any picture to make their lips look bigger and stomach look smaller before posting to social media.
The digital world is also skewing the reality of our sexual culture. Nearly three hours of new porn videos are uploaded to Pornhub every minute of every day. Pornhub’s website alone reports 115 million visits per day.22 That’s the equivalent of the entire populations of Canada, Australia, Poland, and the Netherlands all visiting the site, which is just a fraction of the total overall daily porn traffic. In the same way our edited social media posts promote an idealized view of our lives, the porn industry uses digital media tools to promote an unrealistic version of sexuality that is increasingly focused on portraying violent acts and sexual abuse. This unrealistic baseline actually leads to real-world problems as it drives an increasingly violent sexual culture and skews our ability to have healthy relationships. Through porn, boys learn that aggressive sexual behavior is acceptable, and girls learn that such behavior is expected.23
False baselines have become a common part of our digital world. We’ve created a virtual space where you have to be an exceptional person to even tell the truth about who you really are. The problem with becoming an age of pretenders is that there always comes a day of reckoning. No one’s body will ever look like it does after Facetune, no life is all roses and European vacations, and violent sexual acts hurt in real life and damage our ability to have fulfilling, healthy relationships. We have become a society of pretenders fueled by a digital artificial baseline.
Eroding Civility
A final category of digital dysfunction are activities that directly threaten our civil society. These include the increasing use of digital tools to spread misinformation and interfere with democratic processes. Our children are growing up in a world where cyberattacks will cause far more damage to their safety than a physical war or terrorist attack.
Our acceptance of the rampant creation and spread of false information in the digital world has highlighted our inability to distinguish fact from fiction online. The ability to make informed choices, a pillar of any functioning democracy, requires us to have access to reliable information. Until now, maintaining this fundamental pillar largely meant ensuring the press had the freedom to write about news without fear of retaliation. However, as social media becomes our primary source of information, our ability to make effective decisions is at risk in a way that never could have been imagined by our nation’s founders. News is algorithmically prioritized by popularity, not credibility, making it harder by the day to tell truth from fiction online.
Among the most shared US news from 2017 was a story saying that NPR reported over 25 million Hillary Clinton votes as fraudulent, a story about a death row inmate eating a Bible for his last meal, and a story about a California school where children were forced to learn sharia law in class.24 Despite being widely shared, all these stories were completely false. Panic escalated during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic when a decade-old map of global airline routes was relabeled as a map of the spread of Covid-19 infections. It was shared tens of millions of times and even picked up and broadcast by TV news outlets.25 Twitter alone shares about 4 million tweets of blatantly fake news each month.26
While there is widespread agreement that misinformation is a problem in our virtual world, we seem to shrug it off, telling ourselves that it’s more annoying than dangerous.27 Or perhaps that the source is a well-intentioned but eccentric user of our media platforms. In so doing, we ignore the reality that viral misinformation is a military-grade weapon for weakening national security. If you need convincing, look no further than the amount of energy countries put into foreign misinformation efforts each year. Russia has mounted sophisticated and effective hacking campaigns against the United States aimed at causing national instability. The work is engineered by the Internet Research Agency (IRA), a Russian organization aimed at interfering with the US political system.28 According to the Atlantic, the IRA’s work is based on the philosophy that you could “tip the world toward revolution through psychological warfare and deception, exploiting the divisions and weaknesses of bourgeois society.”29 Using hacked emails and Facebook data, posts on a variety of divisive issues like gay rights, gun control, and immigration are used to cause chaos in our civil society and pit Americans against each other.30 A report from Oxford University estimates that between 2015 and 2018, over 30 million users shared the IRA’s Facebook and Instagram posts with their friends and family, liking, reacting to, and commenting on them along the way.31 Veteran Washington Post journalist David Von Drehle reports, “Seizing opportunities on the lawless frontiers of social media, [Vladimir Putin] has stoked division, spread disinformation, fanned conspiracy theories and generally mind-gamed the American system.”32 Our susceptibility to exaggeratedly divisive social media makes us vulnerable to foreign destabilization campaigns without them ever having to set foot on US soil.
Our digital dysfunction has also weakened another critical pillar of a functioning democracy: free and fair elections. In 2018, we learned that our personal data was being used to manipulate election results on a global scale. The now infamous Cambridge Analytica was a company that used a survey app to gain access to data on 230 million Facebook users. Due to the lack of protections from Facebook on data sharing at the time, Cambridge Analytica was able to access personal information about not only all the people using its app but also all of their friends and friends’ friends. Cambridge Analytica publicly bragged that it had amassed five thousand data points on almost every person in the United States. Using this massive data set, Cambridge Analytica then identified potential “persuadables”—people who were on the fence about a given political issue. The persuadables were the relatively small number of people whose opinion, if changed, would sway the result of an election. Cambridge Analytica’s business model was to sell its “swaying” services to the highest bidder. If you could afford to pay $1 million a day, it would deliver the fence-sitters to you on a silver platter by bombarding them with targeted, shockingly manipulative, digital messages. Using the five thousand data points, it could craft posts in a highly personal way to guarantee an emotional reaction, thereby pushing just enough persuadables to change their views and shift an election. And it worked. Evidence suggests that Cambridge Analytica changed the results of elections in Australia, India, Kenya, Malta, Mexico, the United Kingdom, and the United States by manipulating voters based on their own stolen data.
More recently, the world witnessed the impacts of viral misinformation in January 2021 when the United States capitol was overtaken by a violent mob. The last time the US Capitol was overthrown was during the War of 1812 and never by Americans. In addition to the desecration of a historic building and multiple deaths, a free and fair election was called into question, deteriorating trust in the election process itself, all of which was the result of intentional misinformation shared online. Donald Trump used Twitter to disseminate baseless claims that the election was “stolen,” fueling the violent storming of the Capitol. Digital misinformation fuels polarization as it allows anyone with any belief to feel artificially right and removes the burden of trying to reconcile our differences. According to social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, “Online political discussions (often among anonymous strangers) are experienced as angrier and less civil than those in real life; networks of partisans co-create worldviews that can become more and more extreme; disinformation campaigns flourish; violent ideologies lure recruits.” Haidt goes on to say, “Citizens are now more connected to one another, on platforms that have been designed to make outrage contagious.”33
A direct line connects our problem with viral misinformation to the weakening of our society. Reporter Von Drehle reminds us that when it comes to attacks on democracy, “the battlefield of choice is the internet.” The most destructive attacks against our civil society today come from bytes, not bombs.
Technology Is (Just) an Accelerator
So we have some problems, serious ones. These examples of digital dysfunction give a glimpse into behaviors that put our health, happiness, and civility at risk. Like the visual pilot losing control over the plane when flying into the clouds, our digital dysfunction has exposed how little preparation we have received for controlling the use of technology in our lives, not to mention teaching our children how to do it.
To get back to flying level (to put it positively) or keep from crashing the human race into the ground, we have to understand how we got into the digital clouds in the first place. Finding the answer to that question could seem overwhelming. We could spend a decade conducting an anthropological study of the role of disintegrating societal values juxtaposed with an unfiltered capitalistic system driving our modern technology use. But before we commission that study, I believe there is actually a much simpler answer. Our digital dysfunction stems from the fact that we’ve forgotten that technology does not have a conscience. As silly as that may sound, it can be surprisingly easy to do. After all, we reveal our most intimate questions and concerns to Google, which responds to us with superhuman capacity and accuracy.
New York University professor Scott Galloway makes the compelling case that the only other entity that comes as close as Google to be trusted with our most intimate questions is God.34 Meanwhile Facebook knows more about our family’s and friends’ interests than we do. When Facebook reminds us of a birthday we would have otherwise forgotten, it can feel as if Facebook actually cares about them. When we look at it that way, we can easily forget that the platforms we trust with our most intimate personal details don’t actually care about us at all—or even recognize the value of the interactions they enable.
Technology is just an accelerator and, as such, will accelerate whatever tasks we apply it to. The same real-time video technology that can connect a grandma from one side of the country with her grandkids on the other can also enable a multibillion-dollar revenge-porn industry. The same open networks that enable unrestricted access to all the books and art of the world also enable phishing scams that steal $600 billion annually.35 Technology can accelerate the spread of information but is absolutely ambivalent to whether the information it spreads is true. Technology can facilitate interactions between millions of people but is indifferent to whether their intentions are good.
Instead of thinking of technology as a trusted friend with a conscience, we might be better served by thinking of technology as a curved mirror. It magnifies who we are as people—both the good and the bad. It reflects the values of its users, but to an extreme. As artist and author James Bridle puts it, technology has the capacity to instantiate all of our most extraordinary, often hidden, desires and biases by encoding them into our digital world.36 Humans have the responsibility to bring a conscience to virtual spaces, and we must actively teach the future inhabitants of our digital world how to do that. If we don’t take action, our digital interactions will continue to devolve until civility has crumbled, kindness has eroded, and digital dysfunctions become the defining characteristics of our virtual personas.
But that future is also entirely avoidable. In addition to magnifying our desires and biases, technology also makes them visible in a way that allows us to change them. It’s harder to pretend that our beliefs and desires don’t exist when our news feeds are optimized around them in a very observable way. We have the option to focus technology’s accelerating forces on improving our world and deepening our humanity. We can create a generation that grows up learning how to aim that curved mirror toward accelerating meaningful interactions and tackling tough problems in their communities. The conscience of our technology, it turns out, must be us.