Social media’s engineered feedback loops convert normal social comparison into compulsive anxiety

Evidence

The research studies and first-person accounts that we have reviewed reveal the coercive underbelly of the instrumentarian’s much revered “confluence,” in which harmonies are achieved at the expense of the psychological integrity of participants. This is the world of Pentland’s “social learning,” his theory of “tuning” little more than the systematic manipulation of the rewards and punishments of inclusion and exclusion. It succeeds through the natural human inclination to avoid psychological pain. Just as ordinary consumers can become compulsive gamblers at the hands of the gaming industry’s behavioral technologies, psychologically ordinary young people are drawn into an unprecedented vortex of social information that automatically triggers social comparison on an equally unprecedented scale. This mental and emotional milieu appears to produce a virus of insecurity and anxiety that drives a young person deeper into this closed loop of escalating compulsion as he or she chases relief in longed-for signals of valorization. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1485

Categorization

• SEED: Angles on the ethical case for regulating the ‘tuning’ of inclusion/exclusion rewards — a companion to tech-regulation essays.
• XREF: Echoes of gambling/addiction literature and the behavioral surplus thesis from earlier chapters; connects to Sloterdijk-style critiques of instrumental sociality. — connects to: Online, negative emotions are easier to generate than positive ones, biasing engagement — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 397; Heavy Twitter monitoring made relationships feel like strategic performance while fueling anxiety. — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 601; Likes function as variable-reward dopamine reinforcement driving user compulsion — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1459 (+13 more)

Broader Connections

• Instrumentarian social engineering principles produce chronic self-comparison among young women online #corroborates (0.90) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1426
• Perceived threats escalate through interactive feedback loops between groups #expands (0.78) — Walter G. Stephan, Oscar Ybarra, Kimberly Rios Morrison, Intergroup Threat Theory, 25