How to Tame Your Lizard -- Part 4

ask me anything, no waiting required

If you missed the last post, you can view Part 3 here

Take a look at your Newsfeed and try to place the Advertisements you see scattered in the hierarchy. While a stretch, it is not a bad simplification that when you climb the hierarchy, you are taxing your frontal lobe which makes you special.

This is the final installment so thanks to ALL OF YOU who have stuck with it so far. Choosing the photo for today was FUN. My education and interests have always shaded me toward the more technical. I sometimes wish I had greater exposure to such things as philosophy and psychology in my early years although I have tried to supplement through the years with reading. While it is probably basic and obvious to many, I think taming your inner lizard is all part of becoming a more complete person. It is not easy. Modern science has figured out how to trigger us and just constantly bombard our inner lizards. I believe this is an impediment to health and well-being for individuals and society as a whole. That is why I decided Maslow’s hierarchy of needs might be a worthwhile image for today. Our inner lizard KEEPS US near the bottom where fears and pettiness aggregate. If you want the serenity that comes as you climb the pyramid, taming that lizard is a worthwhile goal.

The original business plan at Google was to concentrate mostly on what we all use Google for to this day. It seems to be able to answer almost any question. All of that costs money and the google website would need to figure out how to pay for all those searches they were answering for “free”. The two founders of Google were Sergey Brin and Larry Page. The less-understood second product that Google developed was named after one of the founders. He called it Page Rank. Once you figure out the question someone is asking, the next step is to find the most relevant answer to the question. Google decided that the best answer was the one that was most universally counted on. They chose to rank the answers to questions according to how all the other web pages of the world came to reference a given answer. Each answer would get a rank and the top rank goes to the top of the list.

All of this is good. The more people that are asking the same question, the more valuable the answer becomes. The more people are asking, the greater number of eyeballs on the answer. Google, with Page Rank, decided that advertising no longer needed to be a man in a suit, out for a steak dinner, trying to get a cigarette company to buy a full-page ad in Time Magazine. The value of that advertisement could now be measured. Less wasted advertising budgets and more targeted ads that almost provided a guaranteed rate of return on the ad. Digital advertising had arrived and would change advertising. The idea that every single ad could now be measured and understand whether the ad “worked” was revolutionary. When the Madison Avenue veteran heard the idea and eventually passed on the early investment opportunity to acquire a large portion of Google, he demurred. The way he saw it, automated, fairly priced advertisements that could provide guarantees on effectiveness was “f#&$*%g with the magic of advertising”.

Why was this so significant that I spent two long paragraphs on it? Digital advertising did not depend on Nielsen ratings to figure out which commercials were seen much less led to people looking for the advertised product. Digital advertising was instantaneous. Humans had figured out how to access our lizard brains and our frontal lobe over time and figure out what matters to us, not just what we fear. Many people may argue whether the transformation Google has brought has been a public good or not. I consider it an indispensable part of everyday life. Fundamentally, they have opened the doors to information for all. They have democratized access for the whole world. The world is a better and more efficient place because of their fundamental approach and what they DELIVER to us.

The next chapter of this exploitation of the lizard brain in all of us is easier, at least for me to judge whether it is a public good or not.

In February 2004 an awkward set of male students created a localized website at Harvard that was meant SPECIFICALLY to OBJECTIFY women. Its purpose was to create a rather creepy assortment of photos of FELLOW STUDENTS so that other, rather awkward creepy kids could “rate” the women of Harvard. They called their private website for the men of Harvard “The Face Book”. That website, whose function was to objectify and appeal directly to our basest values has become Facebook, one of the largest corporations on earth. Advertising and appealing to your lizard brain is what the primary plan of this product has been from the first place. The goal is to keep you engaged. It is now 2022 and many people have simply looked past all of this and made Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and abhorrent messaging an integral part of their daily lives. All of them have women in their lives. All of them likely understand the implications on multitudes of people when 2 billion-plus people can be instantly shamed, mocked, derided, and isolated. Our very biology has been turned against us to get clicks. The implication of bypassing what makes us human (that frontal lobe) and only managing communication with us through our inner lizard is a sobering and horrible thing. I would posit that it is quite different to invite an inquiry (thanks to your frontal lobe) from someone about something they want to know (Google) and provide them with the most relevant answer. Facebook and its family of products redirect what your frontal lobe might be pondering and simply keep you engaged with your more primitive brain. At EVERY TURN, witnessed by your newsfeed, they steer you toward the dark part of your ancient brain and elicit your anger, fear, and anxiety. If a falsehood is what is known to keep you clicking, it will be placed AHEAD of even the known truth. I genuinely believe this is one of the VERY WORST things humanity has ever concocted. It seems diabolical to have a firm understanding of what someone is asking and then consciously not give the “best answer” but rather the most emotionally engaging answer, whether true or false. This is my conclusion of why Facebook presents a unique threat to rational dialog and should be treated differently than ANYTHING before or since. I think it is likely that Facebook has a pretty good analog of Page Rank as described earlier. The fact that they can change the behavior of their algorithm when it is necessary to get Congress off their back makes it clear that what they are doing is INTENTIONAL. Intentionality MAKES it evil. What is also clear is that Facebook also has additional considerations beyond relevance and truth. The goal seems to be your base human emotions as a tool to keep you engaged. One is based upon reason and the other is emotion. Manipulating our reason and substituting base emotion seems a very dangerous approach. It generates revenue but the cost to all of us I believe is high. Facebook has been the most efficient example of what I term “privatize the gain and socialize the loss”. The gain flows to shareholders while emotional manipulation is born by society at large. I will refrain from providing examples as my readers are part of a divided country. I do not, however, believe that humans are divided about steering teenage girls to body-shaming images to keep them clicking. If you are not part of the solution, you are the problem. The refrain is often “what about free speech”. Pressing our primitive emotional triggers is not speech at all, it is more rage and shouting. Facebook provides value and connection and it is not zero-sum. To me, however, it seems its focus is geared toward your emotional and primitive self.

I am sure that this crazy addiction of being reinforced with 365 days a year of “Christmas letters” is a hard habit to kick. I abandoned my Facebook account 10+ years ago. I have survived and remained engaged in the world. When avid users ask me why I am not on Facebook I talk about Christmas letters. I remember writing those letters 20+ years ago and receiving many. They were fun and innocuous. They evolved into curated nonsense with shimmering impossible photos and descriptions of Stepford wife's families. What I saw on Facebook when I stepped away was the same impossible, exhausting and unhealthy denial of being and reality in people. It becomes exhausting to maintain the facade and the work of it requires a harshness in how we interact to protect our curated “truth”. I also imagine that at some deeper level, the users believe their mindless “likes” are not part of the problem. Absent limits, this rather hellish network blossomed into what we know as Facebook, Instagram, and other parts of a “social network”. Sometimes I think about how some creep at Harvard who once made a website ranking the hotness of women on his campus invented Facebook in 2004 and now we’re all here watching the irreversible impacts this site has on society and culture.

I think there are ways to divert people from thinking and leverage people into a mob. We have this wonderful gift of a frontal lobe. It is time for us to understand the more we use it the path to a more serene future. Use your inner lizard for what it does best. Your frontal lobe is the tool you need to climb Maslow’s pyramid. While I believe products like books and patent inventories and mapping are all sensible and public goods, Google has not been immune from the behavior either. I think that YouTube has some similarities to Facebook but not to the same extreme. I believe limits are warranted.

I would also encourage that when we decide collectively on whether and how to regulate “Big Tech” we start with the premise of what is a public good. I do not think that just because Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft are large that means their impact is negative. I believe these other companies have been a force for good in the world in so many ways. The rise of concentrated market positions always creates uncertainty. However, I believe these others ARE GROUNDED IN AN IDEA that makes the world a better place, and hence while they may require oversight and regulation, their very nature and purpose do not create a hellscape. I genuinely feel different about Facebook and that is my OPINION. I fail to see the public good that emerges from exploiting our primitive brains which can only reduce a sentient being to an animal in a blink of an eye. In that respect, I believe that Facebook is a clear and present danger to a democratic, free-thinking society. You can trick an animal of all types and even a pet you love. That is the nature of our reactionary primitive brains. A “good” person realized long ago this is cruel and that the behavior is considered inhumane. Just because we can trick our fellow men and women in the same way, I think safeguards to stop it are the most prudent course of action.

In the meantime, I encourage all of you who enjoy social media to try to pause when you are reading ANYTHING. Once you have read it, RESIST the impulse to click and look at something else. Take a sip of whatever you are drinking and engage that frontal lobe. Before you click again consider that your next click is speech. In almost everything all of us ever say (including our clicks), here is a fair set of admonitions:

• Does it need to be said?

• Does it need to be said by me?

• Does it need to be said now?

I think that unless you can honestly say YES to all three, please resist the urge to click, retweet, post, or otherwise. If you need time to figure it out, have another sip and let the gift of a frontal lobe help you figure it out. I still remember when I stepped away from Facebook, the passing of time and my circles of interest offered temptations to come back and see how it has changed. I think that in all respects, it has become a larger and larger threat to civilized society.

THE END