Shihab Moral

Last Wednesday, Clinton Castro, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Information School and Department of Philosophy, discussed the technological present and used Kantian philosophy to argue that there is a need to protect others, primarily children, from the threat the current internet landscape presents.

The talk, titled “The Attention Economy and the Child’s Right to an Open Future,” focused first on research surrounding the effects of technology on cognitive development, emotional and mental health and interpersonal relationships. Castro described social media as a product market trap, meaning most users wish that the product did not exist at all yet still must use it in a modernized world, and as a collective action problem in which everyone both must contribute to solve the problem and has an incentive not to.

Castro cited the effects of these market traps on children as the prime motivator for his studies.

“I think it’s always unfortunate when you have collective failures,” Castro said. “But it particularly puts a bad taste in my mouth when the collective action problem is not only exploited, but it’s children in the collective action problem, and then that vulnerability is being exploited.”

Castro also emphasized that the addictive nature of social media is entirely intentional. He described the “Hooked” model, named after the book by Nir Eyal. Social media apps trigger a user with a notification, causing them to act in exchange for a variable award. They then prompt users into making an “investment,” such as a post or completing their profiles, preparing them for the next trigger and forming a habit.

“The real goal is not to have people bored at a stop sign and receive a notification and then go to LinkedIn, for example,” Castro said. “It’s instead to have people go through that so often that they go straight from being bored to being on the site.”

Assistant Professor of Philosophy Aliosha Barranco Lopez, who brought Castro to campus, found that these social media triggers have not only trapped her students in scrolling cycles but herself as well.

“An interesting question is when someone is ready [for social media], because it just seems to me that we are not ready,” Barranco Lopez said. “We adults are not ready.… I do research on this, and I found myself in the same habits as my students.”

Both Barranco Lopez and Castro worry particularly about the new generation of children being raised alongside social media. To Castro, this concern comes both from his lived reality as a father of a four-year-old and from a Kantian perspective.

“One thing that philosophy can help bring clarity to is what ultimately matters in this arena that we’re trying to go after,” Castro said in an interview with the Orient. “It’s not like the philosopher can offer everything, but I think the philosopher can help us understand what matters and why.”

In Kant’s view, humans must balance the “force of love,” or the concern we have toward one another, with the “force of respect” for others’ autonomy and their own decision-making skills. However, because children are developmentally not prepared to make large life decisions, Kant’s philosophical perspective must be shifted to keep their limited autonomy in mind.

“[Children] get to matter, and I think that one way in which they get to matter, like all of us, is they become proper objects of love,” Castro said. “We should care for them. However, in the case of children,… I think the domains over which they can really exercise their autonomy are just slimmer.”

Castro explained that, on the policy side of regulating technology, there are already three solutions that he believes in: no smartphones before high school, restrictions to prevent children under 16 from accessing social media and enacting truly phone-free schools. He emphasized that some of these solutions can lie on a sliding scale, but by and large, some of the more ambitious solutions may be the most productive.

“I’m trying to open up the sliding spectrum of different ways in which we might manifest an idea like this,” Castro said. “One thing I’m trying to understand is why [we] should be advertising [to] kids in general.… Is this a good idea? This is something that we actually used to not do, and we actually used to be more technologically regulated.”

Karter Whitman, a community member who attended the talk, admired the philosophical perspective Castro took.

“[Castro] is a philosopher, and this whole problem of social media is the multivariate space of economic factors and psychology factors and technology factors,” Whitman said. “But he’s just saying, ‘Let’s talk about this morally.’ There’s really nothing we can do to get the companies to change how things are or control the world economy. We just have to talk to each other.… Nobody invented a healthier cigarette. People just stopped smoking.”