He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Healthy Users: The Governance of Well-Being on Social Media, and reported the following:
Page 99 of Healthy Users explores the hidden political costs of nudge, discussing how its paternalistic interventions manipulate the free choice of (assumed-to-be) irrational individuals living in neoliberal societies. Page 99 characterizes nudge as a system of control, despite its proponents arguing that it ensures the autonomy of people subject to its techniques. By subtly shaping environments, through design cues that range from house flies on urinals or default options on administration forms, ‘choice-architects’ direct human thought and behaviour in certain directions, at the expense of others. The book as a whole explores the effects of this in the context of social media interfaces, arguing that the type of agency afforded to users is incredibly narrow, primarily reflective of normative Silicon Valley values to do with self-interest, self-promotion and social competition. The book argues that to engage with social media is to respond to and action these values. To be a user in the terms offered by platforms is to live the neoliberal dream of nudge. A reader opening the book on page 99 would likely get a sense of these arguments, yet may miss how the book also relates these norms to the economic practices of platforms who are keen to keep users scrolling for a primary capitalist function. That is, despite platforms claiming that the design of their interfaces encourage healthy use, meaningful connection, and social flourishing, they also cultivate habitual interactions and dependencies. It is through these repeated, daily user habits that platforms are able harvest profitable data, which is then used to improve their services and sell to interested third parties for a profit - mainly for targeted digital advertising. Habits, therefore, as the book explores in some depth through a range of empirical and theoretical analysis, are the vehicle of users' own normalization and the principal source of capitalist value extraction online today. Overall, then, I think page 99 of Healthy Users reveals some of the core philosophical ground of this critique, but omits its corresponding technological, and deeply contemporary, applications found throughout the book as a whole.Learn more about Healthy Users at the University of California Press website.
--Marshal Zeringue