The tycoons of social media have to stop pretending that they're friendly nerd gods building a better world and admit they're just tobacco farmers in t-shirts selling an addictive product to children.
Because, let's face it checking your likes is the new smoking.
Philip Morris just wanted your lungs.
The App Store wants your soul.
There are two billion people, more than two billion people on Facebook.
That's more than the number, it's about the number of notional followers of Christianity.
People check their phones a hundred and fifty times a day.
The millennial sort of audience.
And, so, if you think about it, from the moment you wake up it's like you're jacked in to this environment and thoughts starts streaming into your head designed by a few technology companies.
What we find is the typical person checks their phone every 15 minutes or less and half of the time they check their phone, there's no alert no notification it's coming from inside their head telling them: Gee I haven't checked in Facebook in a while. I haven't checked on this Twitter feed for a while.
I wonder if somebody commented on my Instagram post.
That then generates cortisol and it starts to make you anxious and eventually your goal is to get rid of that anxiety.
So you check in and apparently we feel stressed when we can't get our phone or when our battery is about to die.
You probably know this feeling. And a research done in Australia shows that among 3,000 people under the age of 30 founded nine out of every ten admit to feel this anxiety while having his battery dying.
Steve Jobs revolutionized the entire world with the iPhone and he never let his children use it.
Because he did not want them dependent on technology.
Right now an infant is getting their first laptop that's soft and squishy and makes noise.
Right now a child is being born online and being favorited and retweeted.
The hyper generational segregation of our time is bizarre, unhealthy and historically unprecedented.
You've never seen the like of people sitting at a table in a restaurant not talking to each other because they're texting and using their Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and they are at the table and don't even know each other.
In the house and can't even talk to each other and the pressure that's on us to be like everybody else is so great that everybody tries to live like they’re in a reality show.
There's a culture we don't have enough in common anymore and that's because the internet which was supposed to unite the world has become too adapt at serving us personalized content.
Do you know what I saw on Yahoo's front page this morning?
No, you don't because mine isn't the same as yours. People get newest feeds now that just spit back customized stories based on what we've clicked on in the past.
We are great consumers, but poor producers.
We will buy what can't afford with money that we don't have and to impress people we don't even know trying to be like everybody else.
Get off of Facebook and put your face in a book.
Right now a teenager is photoshopping their selfie because as a society we're telling them they're not good enough.
Right now influencers encourage narcissism without knowing the breadth and depth of their impact on their audiences.
Right now 40,000 spectators are in an Olympic football arena watching a competitive eSports competition because this is this generation’s football match.
There's always this narrative that technology's neutrality is up to us to choose how we use it.
This is just not true.
Technology's not neutral.
They want you to use it in particular ways and for long periods of time because that's how they make their money.
You don't realize it but you are being programmed.
It was unintentional.
But now you got to decide how much you're willing to give up.
How much of your intellectual independence.
If you feed the beast that beast will destroy you.
If you push back on it we have a chance to control it, rein it in.
And it is a point in time where people need to hard break from some of these tools and the things that you rely on .
The short-term dopamine driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works.
No civil discourse, no cooperation misinformation miss truth.
And it's not an American problem this is not about Russian ads this is a global
Problem.
I challenge everyone to try going one week without social media.
Don't let your phone and social media control you.
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