The machine always wins: what drives our addiction to social media

We are swimming in writing. Our lives have become, in the words of the author and academic Shoshana Zuboff, an "electronic text". Social media platforms have created a machine for us to write to. The bait is that we are interacting with other people: our friends, colleagues, celebrities, politicians, royals, terrorists, porn actors – anyone we like. We are not interacting with them, however, but with the machine. We write to it, and it passes on the message for us after keeping a record of the data. The machine benefits from the "network effect": the more people write to it, the more benefits it can offer, until it becomes a disadvantage not to be part of it. The world's first ever public, live, collective, open-ended writing project. An addiction machine, which deploys crude techniques of manipulation redolent of the Skinner Box created by behaviourist BF Skinner to control the behaviour of pigeons and rats with rewards and punishments. We are users, much as cocaine addicts are users.