LIVING WITH REGRETS
Parker is a giant when it comes to social media and, according to his entry on Biography.com, “a darling of the tech world. Beginning as a rogue computer hacker in his teens, Parker showed his early genius as co-founder of the file-sharing computer service Napster. Later, he became the founding president of Facebook. He’s reported to be worth more than $2 billion.”
Parker recently came out regarding the dangers and the damage to culture and to individuals because of such platforms as Facebook and Twitter. He spilled the beans to Axios, an Internet news source, in late 2017, explaining how Facebook was deliberately designed to addict people to its use.
“The thought process that went into building these processes, Facebook being the first of them… was all about: ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible,’” he said. “And that means we have to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever…. It’s a social-validation feedback loop… exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology. The inventors, creators—it’s me, it’s Mark [Zuckerberg], it’s Keven Systrom on Instagram, it’s all of these people—understood this consciously,” he added. “And we did it anyway.”
Parker also confessed earlier in the interview: “I don’t know if I really understood the consequences of what I was saying [in promoting social media], because [of] the unintended consequences of a network when it grows to a billion or 2 billion people and… it literally changes your relationship with society, with each other…. It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains” (Mike Allen, “Sean Parker unloads on Facebook: ‘God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains,’” Axios.com, November 9, 2017).