Sheep Farming and Tech companies
The word “Mob” takes on an entirely different meaning when you’re on a sheep farm. O yeah, you are now a sheep farmer. Well, not really, but for this article, pretend you are one. It doesn’t have to be a farm that does anything nasty; it can be a happy sheep farm. Now you have to make a living somehow, and all you have are a bunch of happy sheep. It would help if sheep were seen as a suitable house pet such as a dog or cat. Then you could sell your happy sheep to loving families all over the world. But sheep are not suitable pets for the typical family. They fart and bound about, and their discard is a mound of tiny balls. But what if I was to tell you, with enough capital, you could influence the general publics’ opinion to steer towards seeing sheep as a proper loving pet?
Tristan Harris explains how tech companies have this capability in his TED talk, “How a handful of tech companies control billions of minds every day.” Catchy title. Harris explains that there is one main goal that a lot of these tech giants are all jockeying for, it’s our attention. He gives a great example of how the dominion effect happens in tech with Youtube’s invention of the “auto-play” function, “Well, if you’re Netflix, you look at that and say, well, that’s shrinking my market share, so I’m going to autoplay the next episode.” Next thing you know, every platform has implemented a similar function to stay competitive. Creating an environment of how low can you go on an ethical scale.
Harris’ TED talk took place in 2017. It’s 2021, the top of my Reddit feed shows an article published by Salon.com written by Igor Derysh on how Facebook might have played a significant role in the assault on our nation’s capital as much as the now shunned app “Parler.” One of the most crucial parts of the TED talk is when Harris speaks about how important the emotion “outrage” is to companies; “Outrage is a really good way also of getting your attention, because we don’t choose outrage. It happens to us. And if you’re the Facebook newsfeed, whether you’d want to or not, you actually benefit when there’s outrage.” Most people want to share their outrage, and you want your friends & family who share the same views as you to see the hypocrisy! So you hit the share button, and the outrage spreads. We must understand that the tech companies’ algorithms are not geared towards our well-being; there coded to produce revenue for the business. The more clicks, the more organic views, the higher the advertising price, resulting in higher profits.
“It’s changing the way that we have our conversations, it’s changing our democracy, and it’s changing our ability to have the conversations and relationships we want with each other.” There are many connecting points between what Harris foresees in the future and what is currently unfolding within our country. I invite you to watch the entirety of his TED talk and hear what he suggests we should focus our (precise) attention on.
O, by the way, a “mob” on a sheep farm means “a group of sheep that has been run under exactly the same conditions for the entire growing season.”
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