By Ariel Ezrachi /
Maurice E. Stucke
DIGITAL technology has transformed the way we communicate, engage and consume, especially during the novel coronavirus pandemic. Our smartphones keep us connected 24×7, our services are personalized, and our voice-activated appliances are ready for our command.
We now chat, purchase and consume whether videos, news or gossip online. Our livelihoods and attention have shifted so much to online, that in many instances if it’s not online, it doesn’t merit our attention.
The digital markets seem competitive, with so many options vying for our attention. It may appear that with so many companies competing for our time by offering us better services, better quality and lower prices, we benefit. But is this perceived competition actually benefiting us? Not necessarily. Here lies the crux of the matter over time, many online markets have come to be dominated by a few powerful digital gatekeepers. So whenever we visit their platforms, they ensure that whatever apps, products, services, videos, or songs we pick, they will somehow profit.
Imagine if someone could create at the very outset a seemingly competitive environment, but control it and use it to exploit the participants, while primarily benefiting the creator. In our recent book, Competition Overdose, we call these creators the “Gamemakers” after the characters who go by that name in The Hunger Games book and film trilogy.
These powerful platforms, like the Gamemakers, can design and manipulate our experience and choices. They can dictate what news articles we read, what products we are offered, and how we perceive the wider society. They also dictate the terms of competition for the many app developers and merchants, determining how they sell their products, how much “tax” they have to pay the platform, and on what terms they can connect and interact with us.
The Gamemakers then colonize new platform markets, such as the digital personal assistants in our home, the wearables on our wrist, and the video games our children play, to harvest even more data about us. After all, these data, and the advanced algorithms used to analyze them, give the Gamemakers power and enable them to target us with behavioral ads.
But why stop there? The Gamemakers use our data to exploit us, for example, through profiling and discriminatory pricing. As we are (de facto) locked into one platform or provider, we are subjected to its control and behavioral techniques. We face asymmetric information as to the costs, benefits, and availability of outside options. Some of the Gamemakers also use the data and behavioral manipulation to increase our loyalty stickiness and addict us. The longer the time we spend on their apps the more “eyeball time” we put in the more personal data they can extract from us and the more money they can make by selling access to those data to advertisers.
“Your kid is not weak-willed because he can’t get off his phone,” one neuroscientist noted. “Your kid’s brain is being engineered to get him to stay on his phone.” The same could be said of all of us. Developers fiercely compete to make their apps and games as addictive as possible, thereby eroding our capacity for free choice.
– The Daily Mail-
China Daily news
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