Many axioms exist around the idea of evil, such as "The road to hell is paved with good intentions." It is fairly well understood that hell is the not-so-restful resting place for those who perpetuate evil. But as this saying warns, there are many people who will commit evil acts under the guise good intentions. They will have never saw it coming because they did not think their thoughts and actions all the way through to their logical conclusions, or became distracted, following the easy path that promised shiny things along the way.

And so it appears to be in this brave new world, a long and winding minefield neatly hiding unintended consequences under the lures of noble platitudes, utopian illusions and the possibilities of financial gains beyond wildest dreams. We are reminded that big tech wasn't always big and it's forefathers were the guys that got beaned on the first throw in dodgeball in junior high. That those same geniuses who were in the AV club and fiddle with Atari parts and whose mothers worried their sons would never get married, would someday rule the world. Basically, the plot of every single comic book. And just like in the comics books, the anti-hero geniuses nearly all start out with good intentions. But something goes awry, something changes their motivations and soon, they are stepping on landmines and leaving a society of zombies in their wake. Some never realize what they have done. They believe they are doing good - they are making life easier for the average person (for a cool $1000 per device or the payoff of incredible advertising rewards).

So maybe they are not all evil. These huge corporations are full of workers who are just doing their jobs. Many are a creative lot with great technical expertise to boot. They want to do their jobs well, and like the rest of us, have established performance objectives, bosses who might be jerks, or have trouble getting to the office on time. But as Paul Lewis discovers, in his article this past August in The Guardian, "Our Minds Can be Hijacked," the very employees who came up with some of the most influential products fed to the eager masses, are realizing there may be poison laced in that delicious Kool-aid. Justin Rosenstein is one of those influencers who has come to recognize this bait and switch and has turned his back on it, at least to some extent. He is the Facebook engineer who created the seemingly innocuous but deviously powerful "like" button back in 2007.

What is so evil about a simple bit of positive engagement? This tiny interaction, which had enormous appeal, had a snowball affect that quickly turned people (users) on a platform designed to create community and foster friendships, into bits of valuable data that could be harvested, along with all the other information tied to each and every "like" and sold to advertisers.

Ok, but evil?

What is it these big tech companies are doing that has become so suspect? Nothing less than creating societies of technology addicts whose every glance, tap, swipe and scroll are not only logged, tracked and analyzed, but sold for no other reason than to create more glances, taps, swipes and scrolls targeted ever more precisely so that those very gestures can not only be predicted but controlled. They are controlling what people think. And you thought those apps were "free."

What Rosenstein, Leah Pearlman and other Facebook employees who seemed to have been well rewarded for their digital success have discovered, is the flip side of all this great engagement. They and other technologists began to ask why this was such an overwhelming success. Nir Eyal, author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, teaches techniques that get people addicted to products. He calls it persuasive design. Particularly with the advent of smartphones, psychological tricks have been employed to make people develop habits around their devices and the applications within. These applications, through a series of now very intentional and thoroughly thought out interactions through notifications, rewards and a little more than a dash of anxiety, create a digital addiction for its users. The big tech giants are deliberately designing to keep people hooked.

Eyal defends his work, citing his 2017 keynote address at the Habit Summit, that developers should be "wary of crossing the line into coercion." He further explains that companies are simply very good at what they do, and giving people what they want, to the best of their abilities. No one forced you to eat those amazing chocolate chip cookies, so don't blame the baker that you are fat. So, like purchasing sugar-free or fat-free cookies instead, Eyal recommends utilizing various controls to limit usage and potential triggers. There are dozens on the market, mostly under the guise of parental controls (though many parents need to use them on themselves). Shameless plug for Verizon's SmartFamily goes here.

None-the-less, our brains are being hijacked. Tristan Harris, a former Google employee and student (as was Eyal) of BJ Fogg, considered by many in the tech industry to be the foremost behavioral psychologist of persuasion design, became a whistleblower of sorts, for revealing how just a few people in a few companies can decide "what a billion people are thinking today." He did this by penning a memo, A Call to Minimize Distraction & Respect Users' Attention. Google rewarded Harris with a new title, design ethicist and product philosopher. While he did get to sit in a corner and get paid to think, in possibly the ultimate move of manipulation, they put him right where they "needed" him and went on their merry way. Harris, to his credit has gone on to explore these techniques extensively, championing this cause for ethical design standards and protecting minds from nefarious manipulation through his non-profit, Time Well Spent, and was considered in 2017 by Rolling Stone magazine, one the the top "25 People Shaping the World." Daaanng. Not too shabby for a philosopher.

There is an actual economy here in play - the attention economy. Your attention means big bucks to those who can catch it and keep it as long as possible. Ramsey Brown, a programmer who spoke, along with Harris, with Anderson Cooper in a 60 Minutes interview about brain hacking, knows exactly how these algorithms work and how they can be tweaked for optimum addiction. Everyone is "part of a controlled set of experiments that are happening in real time across you and millions of other people." The same way some people are glued to slot machines and kept there by the occasional win, so the possibilities of more likes, messages, auto-playing videos, and other eye candy do the same - sucking up huge chunks of otherwise time well spent elsewhere.

This attention economy is no accident, and has its origins in advertising going way back. We all are aware that certain colors attract attention in the supermarket, magazines, and pretty much anywhere else we look. Television quickly became the "boob tube" that kept kids from doing homework, and wives from household chores. We've all heard about subliminal messages in commercials, catchy jingles meant to get stuck in our head, and on and on. But now, we teeter on the brink of surveillance and thought control, by buzzing and chirping into our pockets so that we reach for them like another one of Pavlov's dogs.

There are others besides Harris and Brown who are sounding the warning bells about the enormous amount of detrimental distraction internet usage is causing. In fact, where I found this article was equally as interesting - in my local county newspaper's free shoppers guide. Really. But the timing was perfect. In a reprint of an AP story, Advocates Condemn Psychological Tactics Used to Keep Kids Online, Lindsay Tanner tells of a coalition of psychologists, researchers and children's advocates who are petitioning "the American Psychological Association to condemn the tech industry's practice of using persuasive psychological techniques to keep kids glued to their screens." Tanner points out that this includes video games as well, as evidenced by the World Health Organization declaring that excessive video game playing is an addiction. But while the big companies like Google, Apple, and Facebook will pay some homage to this reality and throw a few apps that reward not using devices to these protesters, their job posting for entire divisions of psychologists for user research likely speaks otherwise.

What can be really be done?

The answer might be harder than it sounds, but can reap great rewards. Put it away. My husband, who swears by his orange Casio G'zOne Boulder flip phone, is constantly telling the rest of us to look up, or put away the toy. "Look at me when we talk!" he protests as I insist on scrolling while we discuss one of his many house projects. He's not wrong, and my irritation is completely misplaced.

While spending my rainy Sunday afternoon writing on the living room couch, I deliberately kept both my phones (yes, I have two) on the nightstand in my bedroom. One phone rang and it announced that it was my daughter. I had promised to spot her ten bucks for eats at McDonalds and forgot to transfer money to her card. First, the fact that I could magically give my kid money in less than a minute is pretty cool, and the fact that it told me who was calling, but guess what happened next? Oh, look, notifications on my Twitter, tap. Twenty minutes later... I swear I thought it was only 5 minutes. Back to the bedroom it went. In order to focus and do deep, thoughtful work, I had to take my cue from Cal Newport whose book Deep Work, I am making my way through. We need to purposely make time for those things in our lives that really are more important. Time away from the devices completely so that we can think for ourselves, look and see the real, living and breathing 3D life around us, not some engineer's idea of what he thinks I should see, that adds to his bottom line, not mine.