TL;DR
Meta told a federal court it could face $1.4 trillion in penalties for building addictive algorithms. I am one of the people it broke, and I am telling you how I am getting my mind back.
I also sat down with Dawna Jones, twenty years into network science, on Vital Cartography, why hierarchy in nature is not the same as hierarchy in most organisations, and why the whole conversation kept circling back to one word: responsibility.
Two different conversations, same underlying question: what do we actually do with the systems that shape us.
Meta’s Court Confession: $1.4 Trillion and Counting
Future Proofed Leader
I am addicted to my phone.
I am telling you that first, because nothing below means anything if I write it from a distance. I am not writing from a distance. I am writing from inside it, trying to work out how I get my mind back over the next ten years instead of losing more of it to a screen that was built, on purpose, to take it.
Here is what Meta told a federal court. On 6 July, it disclosed that four US states — California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey — are pursuing penalties that could scale up to $1.4 trillion. That is roughly what the entire company is worth.
The trial starts 18 August in Oakland. Forty-two state attorneys general are already involved. Over 2,400 federal lawsuits sit behind this one. A Santa Fe jury already made Meta pay $375 million in March, for the same underlying claim.
Here is the part that unsettled me more than the number did. This was not discovered. It was known, by the people who built it.
Steve Jobs, by multiple public accounts, kept his own children away from the very devices his company sold to the rest of us. Meta’s engineers have spent a decade being asked, in earlier litigation, about infinite scroll, autoplay, and reward mechanics lifted from slot machine design. This was not an accident. It was the product.
I want to be precise here, because precision matters more than outrage does. I am not saying social media is evil. I am not saying the phone in your pocket is evil. Tools do not have morals — the people who design them do.
What I am saying is that we, the users, have to take responsibility. Not only for our own minds, but for the generation coming up behind us, who never knew a world without this pull.
Now the part that actually made me sit up. Dr Gloria Mark at UC Irvine has measured attention spans on screens for almost two decades. In 2004, the average was two and a half minutes.
Today, replicated across five independent studies, it is 47 seconds. Once you are interrupted, it takes 23 minutes and 15 seconds to fully return to what you were doing.
Here is the part nobody sells you, because hope does not travel as fast as fear does. This is reversible.
A 2016 study in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology found that exercise helped restore dopamine receptor availability that had been worn down by compulsive overstimulation. Sit with the craving instead of feeding it, and it genuinely loses amplitude over time. That is not a productivity hack. It is training.
Steven wrote EVIL DOES NOT NEGOTIATE. this week: https://jewishjournal.com/commentary/columnist/389839/evil-does-not-negotiate/
I am not putting Meta’s product design in the same category as what he was writing about — that would cheapen both arguments. But there is one shared discipline underneath both pieces. Some things you do not bargain with. You do not talk your addiction down. You sit with it until you have mastered it, not the other way round.
That is what I am doing, starting today. Not finished. Started.
One line to sit with: some things you do not bargain with.
Vital Cartography: Dawna Jones on Networks, Health, and the Ultimate Form of Agency
Network First Podcast
Vital Cartography: Dawna Jones on Networks, Health, and the Ultimate Form of Agency
Dawna Jones has been working in network science for twenty years. She wrote Decision Making for Dummies, spent the mid-2000s inside Hewlett-Packard’s original social network mapping research, and has interviewed and been interviewed more times than either of us could count. In this episode, she joins me to talk about Vital Cartography, her new project, …
Dawna Jones has been working in network science for twenty years. She wrote Decision Making for Dummies, spent the mid-2000s inside Hewlett-Packard’s original social network mapping research, and has interviewed and been interviewed more times than either of us could count.
In this episode, she joins me to talk about Vital Cartography, her new project, and why the same principles that make a network resilient also make a body, an organisation, and a planet resilient.
We started with why she joined the Network First Manifesto. Her answer went back to her years as a facilitator working across sectors, watching the same pattern repeat: good intentions moving forward in the room, and an undertow working against them underneath.
From there we got into the difference between hierarchy as it exists in nature, and hierarchy as most organisations actually use it. Hierarchies are real, Dawna argues, and demonising them has been convenient rather than accurate. What matters is whether you are running a centralised, autocratic version of it, or a dynamic, trust-based network where the real question is simply who you go to for what.
Vital Cartography is where the conversation opened up the most. Dawna built it on the recognition that the body’s eleven systems — endocrine, digestive, lymphatic, circulatory, and the rest — are treated by healthcare as separate, when in reality they are constantly talking to one another.
The project scales that idea from the personal to the organisational, and all the way up to the planetary, where the Amazon rainforest plays the role of lungs. It is now taking physical shape as an immersive installation: sound, colour, and interactive elements, built around five of the eleven systems most affected by stress.
We also talked, briefly, about Steve Jobs, and the uncomfortable fact that even extraordinary success does not exempt you from the basic truth that health is the precondition for everything else you are trying to build.
That led into decision making, and the moment Dawna landed on the word that shaped her book: awareness. Self-awareness, and contextual awareness. As long as you are on autopilot, she argues, you are making decisions off assumptions that are usually not true.
We closed on the word that kept surfacing through the whole conversation: responsibility. Once you accept responsibility for the direction you are heading and the circumstances you are actually in, you can move forward.
One line to sit with: we become the shape of who we are with.
Two conversations, one week apart, and the same word sitting underneath both of them. Not accident, not evil, not blame. Responsibility — for your own mind, and for the networks you choose to be shaped by.
Nat
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So what actions and habits are you doing and changing to reduce your addiction? I use greyscale (Instagram is boring in black and white) amongst others. I'm interested as this is something I want to be on top of so that I model my phone use better for my 13 year old daughter.