The greatest marketing tactic a company can use is to transform customers into consumers. Consumers crave a new product. They seek it out whether they have need of it or not. Wendell Berry wrote that “capitalism doesn’t acknowledge limits” when warning against the dangers of becoming consumed with the “cancer of increase.”
We have been formed by this doctrine of the internet as much as we have been by free market philosophies. The trick that made the internet so sticky (meaning that it entices users to “stick” around longer than usual and return in the future) was its ability to bend the universe to its user’s whims. From the first version of Macintosh to the original launch of Facebook, the user has been the center of attention for all of a designer’s creativity. How can we create a user experience that is personal, user-friendly, accessible? Some of these questions provoke thoughtful, flourishing answers. They also have the power to make a user believe, subtly and over prolonged exposure to interfaces, that they are the center of the universe.
From the moment a platform is launched, whether it be on Medium or Instagram, Netflix or Amazon, the focus is you. What are your preferences? What are your interests? Who are you? Who would you like to be? These and more compose a cacophony of messages that reinforce each of our god complexes and transfer authority and agency from without to within. This form of empowerment and access can bring flourishing to many. We can never forget the abilities the web has granted our world in a time when collaboration and problem-solving are high needs.
At the same time, we must reckon with the fact that so much of the online half of our lives can steadily be shown to produce people who are entitled, narcissistic, and selfish. Our algorithms feed us exactly what we desire. Our notifications are tailored to create an ambient set of rhythms from which our life flows. In the chaos of this sycophantic noise hides a technology that has become so ingrained, so necessary, and so pervasive that to begin to even think of questioning its existence and design is anathema. Profit incentives, design biases, and social fabric tether our ship to a rock among rising tides. To remove our binds and climb free of the wreckage will require coming to terms with our natural limits. It will take eschewing the facade of primacy the internet has embedded in our self-perception. It will ask of us what every philosopher has had to ask through the ages, Who am I in this wide, wild world?
