资本主义成瘾问题 Capitalism's Addiction Problem

Capitalism's Addiction Problem

When it comes to our relationships with technology, the signs of addiction are manifest. We are spending more and more hours online, sacrificing time with loved ones. Deprived of a decent Wi-Fi connection, we grow irritable. We risk life and limb to send texts from the road. In a 2019 Common Sense Media survey of 500 parents, 45 percent confessed to feeling at least somewhat addicted to their phone. Among parents whose children had their own phone, 47 percent said they believed that their kids were addicted too.

在与技术的关系中，我们上瘾的迹象显而易见。我们上网的时间越来越长，宁愿放弃与亲人相处的时间。没有良好的无线网络连接，我们就会变得烦躁不安。我们宁愿冒着生命危险也要在路上发信息。非营利机构“常识媒体”于2019年对500位家长做了一项调查，发现有45％的家长承认至少在一定程度上对手机上瘾。孩子拥有手机的父母中，有47％表示他们认为自己的孩子也上瘾了。

Many technology companies engineer their products to be habit-forming. A generation of Silicon Valley executives trained at the Stanford Behavior Design Lab in the Orwellian art of manipulating the masses. The lab's founder, the experimental psychologist B. J. Fogg, has isolated the elements necessary to keep users of an app, a game, or a social network coming back for more. One former student, Nir Eyal, describes the benefits of enticements such as " variable rewards"—think of the rush of anticipation you experience as you wait for your Twitter feed to refresh, hoping to discover new likes and replies. Introducing such rewards to an app or a game, Eyal writes approvingly, "suppresses the areas of the brain associated with judgment and reason while activating the parts associated with wanting and desire." Indeed, that brief lag between refresh and reveal is not Twitter crunching data--it's an intentional delay written into the code, designed to elicit the response Eyal describes.

许多技术公司的产品设计旨在让人上瘾。整整一代硅谷高管在斯坦福行为设计实验室接受了奥威尔式大众操纵方法的培训。该实验室的创始人、实验心理学家B.J.福格，分离出了使用户对某个应用程序、游戏或社交网络欲罢不能的必要因素。福格曾经的一位学生尼尔，埃亚尔描述了“不确定奖励”等诱惑的成效—想想当你等着推特消息刷新，以期发现新点赞和新回复时那奔涌而出的期待心情。将此类奖励引入应用程序或游戏中，埃亚尔赞赏地写道，”会抑制大脑中与判断和理性相关的区域，同时激活与渴望和欲望相关的区域”。事实上，刷新与显示之间的短暂间隔并不是推特在进行数据运算，而是写进代码中的有意延迟，意在触发埃亚尔所描述的那种反应。

A growing chorus of critics is warning of the dangers inherent in such manipulation. Tristan Harris, a former technology designer at Google—and another former student of Fogg's—is a co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology. Harris has likened his iPhone to having “a slot machine my pocket," and indeed many of its features are similar to those of the most addictive games on any casino floor.

越来越多的批评人士警告称，这种操纵行为存在固有风险。特里斯坦·哈里斯也曾是福格的学生，他担任过谷歌技术设计师，现在则是人文科技中心的联合创始人。哈里斯将自己的苹果手机比作“口袋里的老虎机”，而这部手机的许多功能的确与最令人上瘾的赌场游戏相仿。

Harris has worked to reveal the tactics companies use to keep us hooked. On YouTube, for example, the auto-play function deprives viewers of a natural moment at which to disengage. But it's not just that the site Keeps queuing up new clips for you to watch. YouTube's algorithms are designed to hold your interest by serving up content you can't resist, and the algorithms have gotten very good. As of 2017, users were watching a collective 1 billion hours of YouTube videos a day, more than 70 percent of which had been served to us in the form of algorithmic recommendations. Pause over that number for a moment: Nearly three-quarters of the YouTube videos we're watching have been fed to us.

哈里斯一直致力于揭示公司使用了哪些引人上瘾的策略。例如，YouTube的自动播放功能剥夺了观看者自然而然地从视频中脱离出来的时刻。但这并不是该网站不断在待播清单中新添视频片段供你观看这么简单。YouTube的算法旨在通过提供令人无法抗拒的内容持续吸引用户的兴趣，并且该算法已经发展得非常完善。2017年，YouTube视频的日均观看总时长达到了10亿小时，其中70％以上是以算法推荐的形式主动呈现给用户的。暂停片刻想想这个数字吧：我们正在观看的视频中，近四分之三是“投喂”。

Digital life, we must remember, is still in its infancy, and the powers of the corporations that govern that life are still growing. Companies are studying what we search for, what nudges we respond to, and what times of day we engage in certain online behaviors. Soon, cameras and sensors will likely be tracking what frightens and amuses us, allowing data collectors to know more about us than we perhaps even know about ourselves.

别忘了，数字生活仍处于起步阶段，而控制它的公司们仍在扩大势力。这些公司正在研究我们搜索着什么、对何种助推式营销有所反应以及每天什么时间进行特定上网行为。用不了多久，摄像头和传感器可能将追踪记录什么会让我们恐惧，什么又会让我们发笑，让数据收集者对我们的了解甚至超过我们自己。

The suggestion that we need to be protected from such tactics might seem paternalistic, and if consumers were the rational actors who populate economics textbooks, it might be: A person could decide for herself whether to exchange some amount of privacy for the joy of viewing friends' photos or the convenience of tracking her heart rate. But the addiction economy relies on an asymmetrical exchange of information. Users are expected to willingly surrender their private information for access to services. The data collectors, meanwhile, fiercely guard their own privacy, typically refusing to disclose what information they have, whom they sell it to, and how they use it to manipulate our behavior.

我们应被保护免受这类策略的操纵，这一提议似乎是家长式的，而如果消费者是住在经济学教科书里的理性行为人，情况可能会是：一个人可以自主决定是否让渡部分隐私，从而获得查看朋友相片的快乐或追踪自身心率的便利。但瘾性经济依赖于信息的不对等交换。用户被期望为获得服务而乐意出让个人信息。与此同时，数据收集者则会严格保护自身的隐私，他们通常拒绝透露拥有什么信息、出售给谁以及如何利用这些信息操纵我们的行为。