Guardian | He was particularly aware of the allure of Facebook “likes”, which he
describes as “bright dings of pseudo-pleasure” that can be as hollow as
they are seductive. And Rosenstein should know: he was the Facebook
engineer who created the “like” button in the first place.
A decade after he stayed up all night coding a prototype of what was
then called an “awesome” button, Rosenstein belongs to a small but
growing band of Silicon Valley
heretics who complain about the rise of the so-called “attention
economy”: an internet shaped around the demands of an advertising
economy.
These refuseniks are rarely founders or chief executives, who have
little incentive to deviate from the mantra that their companies are
making the world a better place. Instead, they tend to have worked a
rung or two down the corporate ladder: designers, engineers and product
managers who, like Rosenstein, several years ago put in place the
building blocks of a digital world from which they are now trying to
disentangle themselves. “It is very common,” Rosenstein says, “for
humans to develop things with the best of intentions and for them to
have unintended, negative consequences.”
Rosenstein, who also helped create Gchat during a stint at Google, and now leads a San Francisco-based company that improves office productivity, appears most concerned about the psychological effects on people who, research shows, touch, swipe or tap their phone 2,617 times a day.
There is growing concern that as well as addicting users, technology
is contributing toward so-called “continuous partial attention”,
severely limiting people’s ability to focus, and possibly lowering IQ. One recent study
showed that the mere presence of smartphones damages cognitive capacity
– even when the device is turned off. “Everyone is distracted,”
Rosenstein says. “All of the time.”
But those concerns are trivial compared with the devastating impact
upon the political system that some of Rosenstein’s peers believe can be
attributed to the rise of social media and the attention-based market
that drives it.
Drawing a straight line between addiction to social media and
political earthquakes like Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump, they
contend that digital forces have completely upended the political system
and, left unchecked, could even render democracy as we know it
obsolete.
