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Somewhat unsavory source of entertainment. And we now know that many of the major social media
companies hire individuals called attention engineers who borrows principles from Las Vegas casino
gambling, among other places, to try to make these products as addictive as possible. That is the desired
use case of these products-- is that you use it in an addictive fashion because that maximizes the profit
that can be extracted from your attention and data. So it's not a fundamental technology. It's just a
source of entertainment, one among many. And it's somewhat unsavory if you look a little bit closer. So
here's the second comment objection I hear when I suggest that people quit social media. The objection
goes as follows: "Cal, I can't quit social media because it is vital to my success in the 21st-century
economy. If I do not have a well-cultivated social media brand, people won't know who I am. People
won't be able to find me. Opportunities won't come my way, and I will effectively disappear from the
economy." So again, my reaction is, once again, this objection also is nonsense.
So I recently published this book that draws on multiple different strands of evidence to make the point
that in a competitive 21st- century economy, what the market values is the ability to produce things that
are rare and are valuable. I can produce something that's rare and that's valuable, the market will value
that. What the market dismisses, for the most part, are activities that are easy to replicate and produce
a small amount of value. Well, social media use is the epitome of an easy to replicate activity that does
not directly produce a lot of value. It's something that any 16-year-old with a smartphone can do. By
definition, the market is not going to give a lot of value to those behaviors. It's instead going to reward
the deep concentrated work required to build real skills and to apply those skills to produce things-- like
a craftsman, that are rare and that are valuable. To put it another way, if you can write an elegant
algorithm, if you can write a legal brief that can change the case, if you can write a thousand words of
prose that's going to fixate a reader right to the end, if you can look at a sea of ambiguous data and
apply statistics and pull out insights that could transform a whole business strategy, if you can do these
type of activities which require deep work that produce outcomes that are rare and valuable, people will
find you. You will be able to write your own ticket. You will be able to fill the foundation of a very
meaningful and successful professional life, regardless of how many Instagram followers you have.
So this is the third common objection I hear when I suggest to people that they quit social media. In
some sense, I think it might be one of the most important. The subjection goes as follows: "Cal, maybe I
agree with you. Maybe you're right. It's not a fundamental technology. Maybe using social media is not
at the core of my professional success. But you know what, it's harmless. I have some fun on it. [Weird?]
Twitter is funny. I don't even really use it that much. I'm a first adopter. It's just kind of interesting to
start try it out. And maybe I might miss out on something if I don't use it. What's the harm?"
So again, I look back and I say, this objection also is nonsense. In this case, what it misses is what I think
is a very important reality that we need to talk about more frankly, which is that social media brings with
it multiple well documented significant harms. And we actually have to confront these harms head-on
when trying to make decisions about whether or not we embrace this technology and let it into our
lives. So one of these harms that we know this technology brings has to do with your professional
success. So I just argued before that the ability to focus intensely to produce things that are invaluable,
to hone skills that the marketplace values-- so this is what's going to matter in our economy. But right
before that, I argued that social media tools are designed to be addictive. The actual
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