Since the 1950s with the rise of alcohol, cigarettes, and junk food, society has been exposed to a series of new consumer-facing products engineered to exploit our physiology and addict people in the name of record profits. History has proven that businesses like these will stop at nothing to not only keep the status quo intact but also aggressively expand. As an example of this, look no further than Big Tobacco introducing at one point in time glass particles into their cigarettes to have the nicotine really kick in.

Fast forward to today, technology companies have spent two decades engineering the next frontier: our psychology. Now, our relationships, identity, volition, and attention are for the first time in history, being commercialized. Only a handful of tech companies monopolized the free and open web against its original promise of decentralization to become the trillion-dollar enterprises that they are today. These multinationals have become not just advertisement companies but what Shoshana Zuboff terms "surveillance capitalists." This new breed of capitalism made capturing human attention and reselling it at all costs the new economic imperative of the 21st Century. TikTok alone is commanding 1 billion hours of attention daily, which accumulates to 114.000 years every 24 hours.

More and more people live life increasingly inside a digital phantom world detached from the real one. In this new realm, 'these platforms hold a mirror to society,' Tristan Harris remarks, 'however, they are a funhouse mirror.' As such, all over the world, materially wealthy societies now find themselves suddenly amid widespread erosion of trusts, polarization, misinformation, and meaninglessness, as individual citizens suffer from continuous partial attention and increased rates of suicidality, drug abuse, anxiety, depression, and loneliness.

Especially among its heavy users, teenagers, social media fatigue and other negative psychological externalities are skyrocketing. 40% of students report feeling “too depressed to function.” Another 48% agree or strongly agree that “they are addicted to social media.” In the same report, +61% report feeling “overwhelming anxiety’. 47% of teens wish there was an easier way to switch off social media. 36% deleted their social media app at least once annually to curb it. 32% of teenage girls in the UK report Instagram makes them feel worse about themselves. There is a +78% increase in ‘serious psychological distress’ episodes by 20-year-olds. There is a +189% increase in 10-14-year-old girls being hospitalized for self-harm, as well a +58% increase in teen suicides ages 14-18. The majority of these figures are compared to the pre-social media era and are growing double-digits annually.

How we spend our life is how we spend our days. Nearing the end of them, today's screenagers will inevitably look back and come to the painful realization that, of all that life has to offer, envying those they won't ever meet and keeping tabs on who at any given moment everyone is collectively mad about has inadvertently become the defining activity of most people’s life in the 21st Century. Clocking in an average of four hours a day, doomscrolling life away on social media will amount to a devastating total of approximately 12 years and 8 months—the single largest discretionary expenditure of their life.

As William James remarked in 1890, ‘Our life experiences equal what we have paid attention to, whether by choice or default.' Why did we allow a technology to capture and resell an entire generation’s attention from cradle to grave, as if it weren’t the lifeblood of their very existence? One day, they will ask, “What were all these junk connections for?” when it hits them that, all along, they belonged to the generation with the highest self-reported levels of loneliness in recorded history. How many will conclude that the story of their lives have been insidiously co-opted and ultimately irreparably harmed by a corporation and their addictive algorithms that were never on their side—but someone else's?

If we continue down this path, we will have failed an entire generation by allowing them to be raised by this digital abyss. We will be guilty of standing by and doing nothing while we watch as pre-adolescents—who lack the fully developed prefrontal cortices essential for self-awareness and impulse control—inevitably become addicted to the technological narcotics of the 21st century. What was termed ‘The Social Dilemma’ in 2020 has escalated into a full-blown social catastrophe poised to wreck the lives of an entire generation.
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There is a narrow path forward, but misunderstandings about the nature of the problem remain a significant obstacle. In 1967, Marshall McLuhan warned of a dangerous tendency he termed ‘The Rearview Mirror’ effect, where people interpret the new through the lens of the old. The tendency to view technological, cultural, and innovative shifts through familiar frameworks prevents us from fully grasping the new. Extending the metaphor of driving, this flawed thinking would lead one, for example, to refer to a car as merely a ‘horseless carriage.’ In other words, to grasp our conundrum adequately and act decisively, we must not be deceived by the unrecognizability of the unprecedented.

Within the realm of information technology, perceiving each new advancement as merely a linear continuation of its predecessor leads us astray.  It suggests that radio is just an extension of writing and the telegraph; television, an extension of radio; and social media, merely a continuation of television. This “Rearview Mirror” conclusion blinds us to the radical transformations occurring; it is fundamentally flawed and impedes our ability to do what we must. The reality of the erosion before us is that we are confronting an entirely different beast.

As Yuval Noah Harari points out, democracy is, at its core, a conversation. Today, we are in the midst of a post-truth epistemological crisis that renders large-scale conversation impossible, undermining people’s belief in meritocracy, and the positive-sum nature of human cooperation. Let there be no doubt: much hangs in the balance. If this vicious spiral of distrust continues unchecked and permeates the level of nation-states, we might lose the unprecedented era of world peace we’ve come to take so much for granted.

Humanity is a tiny candle surrounded by a vast darkness. I am often reminded of Earth’s veins of beautiful light shining so brilliantly they are visible even from outer space. From this vantage point, it becomes evident that if we prolong inaction, our unique flicker of light may soon be swiftly snuffed out. This future cannot be allowed to unfold; thus, Telos was born to accelerate the advent of a humane technology future.
Sources on the Dilemma Page

The emerging field of responsible technology is to social media what clean tech is to the fossil fuel industry. Just as the environmental damage caused by burning hydrocarbons went unaddressed for years, the attention economy underpinning social media has led to significant negative externalities in the form of psychological harms that we are only now beginning to understand. These include polarization, fake news, information overload, addictive use, isolation, and influencer culture. Given the unprecedented reach of social media today, those working in these companies are no longer merely designing products; they are designing people and society as a whole.
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The faster we collectively move away from the attention economy, the better. However, consumers are unlikely to switch because tracking and ads are eliminated. A viable alternative needs to wholeheartedly embrace the new paradigm and be better in every way. To better understand how that might be achieved, it is useful to see the sphinx-like technology that we call 'social media' through the lenses of information, personal communication, and entertainment technology. As such, entertainment can be fun at times, yet life is short, and amusing ourselves to death is a tragedy. With respect to the former two, as a technology to inform or bond, social media has proven itself to be worse than useless—it is counterproductive. Through this lens, the status quo leaves abundant opportunity for anyone to deliver breakthrough innovation to the lives of countless individuals.
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At Telos, we are not playing by the rules set by the attention economy, nor are we competing in the race to the bottom of the brainstem by exploiting human weaknesses to addict users. We believe that what will inevitably displace social media in the future is a technology that converts users into customers. Instead of propagating confusion and disinformation, it will be a reliable source of trusted insight. Instead of shallow connections, it will foster life-long companionships. Instead of fighting for our attention, it will, for the first time, be a framework that supports our intentions.