Big Tech and Free Will: How Corporate Control Undermines Our Choices
Addiction Economy Thought for Today - good article here about how big tech is undermining our free will from James Marriott in The Times. (Sorry paywall)
Inspired by a new book from renowned neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky called Determined, who he says
"does not believe people are incapable of changing, only that our decisions are always attributable to complex causal chains of environmental, hereditary or neurochemical factors rather than to human will. He is probably correct to suppose that many of his readers will be reluctant to follow him all the way to his “absolutist” position. But reading his book it occurred to me that a small dose of Sapolskian scepticism may be essential to surviving in the modern world. For, even if most individual human beings still believe in free will, we increasingly live in an environment controlled by large corporations that do not."
This is the crux of our work on The Addiction Economy - we are saying that undermining our ability to control our usage is at the heart of all addiction economy business models and the root cause of their harms - cigarettes, vapes, unhealthy and ultra processed foods, alcohol, social media and computer games - he looks at other tech companies too:
"Human agency barely figures in the commercial strategies of tech companies who control vast amounts of information about human behaviour. They are accustomed to seeing their customers not as unique and surprising individuals but as fairly predictable data points."
Can't wait to read this book as Joe Woof and I have bee struggling with articulating this properly, we feel it is deterministic, they have taken our agency in so many ways, but also the knowledge gives us back our agency.
Susie Alegre Nita Farahany Grant Ennis I am sure you know his work well, but new to us.
https://lnkd.in/eYb4hRaZ
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/hilary-sutcliffe-01235220_big-tech-firms-know-us-better-than-we-do-activity-7279774005568438273-Qqk8?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAABvwHi8BrzHpVpsjlCK5eMOzes1OZlCPKgE