IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2019 - 28

the apprentice hopelessly searches for the turn-off
command. As he's about to drown, the sorcerer,
awakened by all the commotion, arrives and sweeps
away the flood [20].3
There's no sorcerer who can arm-wave away the deluge we've set in motion.

Epidemic
In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell wrote that
"the best way to understand the dramatic transformation of unknown books into bestsellers, or the
rise of teenage smoking [cum-vaping-cum-smoking
[22]], or the phenomenon of word-of-mouth, [or the

Parents have no idea that lurking
behind their kids' screens and phones
are a multitude of psychologists,
neuroscientists, and social science
experts, who use their knowledge
of psychological vulnerabilities
to devise products that capture
kids' attention for the sake of
industry profit.
overnight blitz of legal online sports betting 'with
potentially huge implications for how sports are
watched, and even played in America' [23]] or any
other mysterious changes that mark everyday life is
to think of them as epidemics. Ideas and products
and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do" [24].
Based on a recent DNA study, our species, homo
sapiens, has been around for as long as 350 000 years
[25]. The iPhone came on the scene in 2007, 12 years
ago. The proportion of our existence as a distinct species that includes iPhones is 0.00003. In other words,
for 99.997 percent of homo sapiens existence on Earth,
there was no such thing as an iPhone. And yet here
we are with near everyone thumbing away, head down,
texting, tapping, scrolling, flicking, and oblivious to

3
The sorcerer's apprentice desperately searching through the book of
magic to shut down the army of robot brooms and sweep away the flood
has a tragic resemblance to one of the two recent Boeing 737 Max 8 crashes that killed all on board [21].

their surroundings and everyone in it, their kids, their
parents, their friends at dinner.
Though we generally don't see ourselves as the environment of high-tech products like the smartphone, we
are. As with the order and power in GPS technology
releasing entropic effluents into its human environment
as the waste heat equivalent of shriveling hippocampi
and its downstream potential for early dementia,
including Alzheimer's [26], on the scale of individual
human engagement, the entropy being discharged into
people, including, or especially young people, can be
seen in smartphone and social media addiction, finetune designed by the ethically challenged to capture
and latch.

Kelly
"'We called the police because she wrecked her room
and hit her mom...all because we took her phone,' Kelly's father explained. He said that when the police
arrived that evening, Kelly was distraught and told an
officer that she wanted to kill herself. So an ambulance
was called, and the 15-year-old was strapped to a gurney, taken to a psychiatric hospital, and monitored for
safety before being released."
Days after being hospitalized, Kelly was brought to
child and adolescent psychologist, Richard Freed's
office. Freed "asked Kelly... to help [him] understand
her perspective on that evening. She didn't respond
and instead glared at her parents. But then, surprising everyone in the room, she cried, 'They took my
f***ing phone!'"
Freed points out that Kelly's parents are by no
means, outliers. "Even though [they] were loving and
involved, her mom felt that they'd done something terribly wrong that led to their daughter's problems...
What none of these parents understand is that their
children's and teens' destructive obsession with technology is the predictable consequence of a virtually
unrecognized merger between the tech industry and
psychology. This alliance pairs the consumer tech
industry's immense wealth with the most sophisticated psychological research, making it possible to develop social media, video games, and phones with
drug-like power to seduce young users... These parents have no idea that lurking behind their kids'
screens and phones are a multitude of psychologists,
neuroscientists, and social science experts who use
their knowledge of psychological vulnerabilities to
devise products that capture kids' attention for the
sake of industry profit" [27].
In her new book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff, puts it this way: "Facebook's
marketing director openly boasts that its precision
tools craft a medium in which users 'never have to

IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

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SEPTEMBER 2019

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2019

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