My go-to analogy for products that are optimized for engagement.
The 1:1 analogies don't hold for me, so here's how I think about it.
I’ve heard countless analogies for how parents can think about preparing their kids for life online — riding bikes, skiing, navigating cities, swimming. I have found these quite helpful in thinking through how to build muscles for navigating what is an inherently complex, risky, and increasingly dangerous environment. But the analogies don’t hold for me.
Let’s go with the swimming analogy. Kids can be taught to swim. It is a learnable skill, and once you learn it, staying safe is about making safe/smart decisions. You can send them to the best swim schools, with the best coaches. You can supervise, and they can demonstrate competence. But learning to swim only partially helps, because what they will actually be jumping into is not really a swimming pool…
Imagine a pool that detects when you are tired and then spins up whirlpools and currents designed specifically for your body, with the sole purpose of keeping you in the pool forever. The pool is designed to suck you to the bottom and keep you there.
That is what these products do. They are designed in a manner that tailors your experience specifically to your interests and behavior in order to maximize “engagement” (aka attention). The degree to which they succeed on each person may vary, but there should no longer be any doubt about this — it’s literally in their own documentation. Unfortunately for us, technology in classrooms also operates this way. Just look at the promises of tech in education. They revolve around “personalized” learning. “Personalized” education is education that is tailored to you (sound familiar?) and is basically shorthand for we need all your data, and in order to get that data we need you to use this thing as much as possible. As Emily Cherkin says: “EdTech is just BigTech in a sweater vest.”
Parents can and should be engaged, aware, and guide their kids as they learn to use various products. At the same time, there is only so much that parents can do to keep their children safe on platforms that are quite literally designed to suck them in. While so many parents celebrate the growing backlash against social media, the same exact pattern is unfolding in the very AI products that public officials are celebrating (and even encouraging) as the next frontier of education.
I hope this helps.
