The world is not getting crazier or more outrageous. The world has always been deeply strange, and it has always been full of injustice, horror, and loss. Communications technology has made it easier to remain aware of this, but more importantly, ad-tech has incentivized it.
Causing panic for personal gain is not a new technique. However, it used to work in two ways:
- A state of panic lowers people’s guard, making them willing to accept less rigorous arguments, and thus making them easier to manipulate in particular ways. Arguments only need to sound convincing.
- You can manipulate people by manufacturing a threat and then presenting your product as a solution.
Ad-tech changed this.
Panic (or, more precisely, autonomic arousal) creates a state of shallow vigilance: we are constantly scanning our environment for evidence of threats, but energy is diverted from the neocortex to the skeletal muscles to prepare for fight or flight. Shallow vigilance means increased engagement metrics: we refresh the page in order to check if the danger has passed, or if we need to do something other than freeze in place; we refresh the page again because our starved brain has already forgotten what we read ten seconds ago.
Ad-tech-driven renvenue models incentivize maximization of impressions (which are easily measured), not effectiveness (which has never been reliably measured), and so they optimize for engagement. This is not completely irrational: the mere exposure…