I spent the past few years learning how to pull the levers and rotate the knobs that use your data to extract clicks from you online. I started to understand how these systems work, and I started to realize I was also addicted to these systems myself. To improve, I conducted research and made changes to my behavior over the course of two and a half years. Now that I am in control, I am trying to bring out the information that will help others understand and improve their digital lives.
I wrote a book on digital addiction. Get a copy from Barnes and Noble or Kobo
This post reveals one of my most important realizations, informed by my field research, that has most helped me better understand and correct my digital life.
We have over time become addicted to a continuum of digital sexual stimulation, with continual production and reduction of digital sexual anxiety and stimulation, through use of both social media and porn.
The first step is looking at content on social media, which is often sexualized because of our want to be sexually desirable. This creates sexual stimulation, and thus sexual anxiety, from not having an immediate channel for that stimulation. This leads us to porn to streamline the release of that sexual anxiety — through the same digital medium that created the anxiety. The access to endless novelty in porn leads to maximal use, and a heightened frequency of masturbation and orgasm.
The high depletion of sexual energy causes young adults to go on social media the next day looking for sexual stimulation for more sexual energy: the energy we need to motivate ourselves and increase our receptivity to stimulation and engagement in life. But this artificial stimulation then leads to sexual anxiety that leads back to porn, draining us of energy, and fueling this cycle to social media to get sexual stimulation throughout the day, through intermittent profile and news feed browsing while working.
It is only by abstaining from the consumption of digital sexual stimulation that we abstain from this vortex, thus warranting us to make changes to both sides: social media and porn. For social media we should avoid consuming digital sexual stimulation on the news feed or profile browsing, and on porn, well, we should completely abstain from porn, so that we are not excessively drained. We should use social media in a minimalistic way: simply to upload content and maintain a profile simply to not signal detachment from the community, allow oneself to be connected to others through Messenger, and to maximize visibility for dating and social opportunities. We should not use it to consume sexual stimulation on the news feed or profile browsing, and we should eliminate the consumption of notifications.
There is another feedback loop driving this continuum, from machine learning that’s used to show you more and more appealing content. The more time spent on social networks like Instagram, the more data, based on what you’ve been looking at, that the algorithms have to predict what to show you. This increases the pleasure of consuming content on those services, leading to more use, which leads to more data, which leads to more desirable content. While this optimization makes use of these social networks more pleasureful, it makes it hard to resist the temptation to use them excessively throughout the day because of how easily they can — always — be accessed.
Because people often use these services for sexual stimulation throughout the day, the algorithms show more and more sexually stimulating content. This is particularly true on Instagram, where the global feed has access to a wide array of people to curate depending on the sexual tastes you demonstrate. With that vortex, it becomes important to develop self-control. The self-learning algorithms of Facebook and Instagram make it continually easier to escalate to irrational, self-destructive use.
To make matters worse, when trying to work on a device, having watched porn on that device creates a sexual, fetishized relationship with your device that rumbles in the back of your head, making it difficult to fully concentrate in front of a lit screen- and making it tempting to distract yourself. When trying to work on the same screen that we use to watch porn, the screen activates a pavlovian association with sex, perhaps sexually stimulating you, making it difficult to work and easier to use digital media to distract ourselves in sexualized ways, like viewing girls on Instagram.
Devices that have become fetishized through use of porn make it hard for people to work. The mind is luring you to watch porn, because the screen light’s association with the pleasure of porn. This is part of the reason why it is tempting to view content on Instagram or Facebook when working on your computer: your mind is becoming subconsciously sexually stimulated by the interaction with the device, and your mind then tries to subconsciously direct you to a path of least resistance towards porn, to satisfy the subconscious sexual stimulation. But by bringing you to consuming content on social media, which is often sexualized, you can get sexual stimulation in public.
The machine learning algorithms, in tandem with our fetishization of our devices, may explain the difficulty we have. What happens is as follows.
The more and more you derive sexual stimulation through pornography through an electric screen, the greater the potency of the distractions to consume sexualized content on the same screen after ejaculation because of the Pavlovian sexual association and the desire to restore sexual energy. The greater potency of distraction results in greater difficulty resisting those temptations for distraction, resulting in greater use of distractions like Instagram, which then fuels the machine learning algorithms that cause Instagram in particular to become better and better at showing you what content you want to see based on inferences from your past behavior, which often results in a more and more custom tailored sexualized experience that produces more stimulation and makes it easier and easier to use Instagram more and more, which powers the machine learning algorithms even more, and as a result of the sexual stimulation, increases the temptation to watch pornography, increasing the Pavlovian association that increases the potency of the temptations to use social media, inflaming this addictive cycle.
The machine learning algorithms of social media, paired with a fetishized relationship with a device, results in a feedback loop where the technology becomes more and more powerful while our ability to exert control and defend distraction becomes more and more weak.
We become caught, between porn and social media, in the continuum of digital sexual stimulation.