When Free Is not Free: Pavlov's Humans and Behavior Modification Empires

A Behavior Modification Empire is an organization that establishes the means of human interaction via highly addictive technologies that elicit Pavlovian reactions to social rewards and punishments and then sells the right to manipulate participants to third-parties. Jaron Lanier, a Virtual Reality pioneer and important Internet luminary, begins a 2018 TED talk by referring to an early computer scientist named Norbert Wiener. Weiner wrote a book called "The Human Use of Human Beings," in which he envisioned a dystopian future governed by a computer system that would gather "data from people and [provide] feedback to those people in real time in order to put them . . . in a Skinner box, in a behaviorist system." One could imagine a global computer system where everybody has devices on them all the time, and the devices are giving them feedback based on what they did, and the whole population is subject to a degree of behavior modification. And such a society would be insane, could not survive, could not face its problems. Of course, Weiner's notion proved to be eerily prophetic, and now that it's happened, Lanier believes we have to figure out how to survive it.