Alan Jacobs

Many outlets have reported in recent days that Facebook is testing the removal of Likes from posts. Let’s say they do eventually implement this feature. If so, then the first question is whether it will be opt-in or opt-out. That is, will Likes show unless you choose not to show them, or will they be hidden unless you choose to show them?

My guess is that, in either case, and despite the many calls by tech journalists for changing the way Facebook works, most Facebook users will want to keep counting Likes. We need to remember that there are over two billion Facebook users, and hundreds of millions of them have undergone years of operant conditioning: they have been trained to seek Likes, to rejoice in Likes, to be made miserable by the absence of Likes. Many of them have returned thousands and thousands of times to Facebook to check their count of Likes, refreshing their browser tab even when they don’t need to. The habit of measuring their personal value by Likes is so deeply ingrained that it is difficult to see how a significant number of them will break it. Or even really want to.

I don’t think we reckon with this phenomenon often enough, or seriously enough. The major social-media companies have been conducting for the past decade an implementation of B. K. Skinner’s principles more massive than anything we can truly imagine. They have found ways to get billions of people to volunteer for the experiments and devote sometimes hours a day to pursuing them. Operant conditioning at this level works. And its effects are difficult to undo.

One way to see this: often when people get sick of Facebook or Twitter or Instagram and find some other online venue, they simply bring with them to their new location the habits they learned in the previous ones: the snark of Twitter, the rants of Facebook, the posturing of Instagram. It’s like the old line about travel: wherever you go, there you are. It’s hard enough for people to leave Facebook or Instagram or Twitter behind; what’s almost impossible to leave behind is the person that those sites’ algorithmic behaviorism turned you into.

This excellent post by my colleague Philip Jenkins reminds us of an earlier era — just 25 years ago! — when America was worried about right-wing terrorists. As I have often pointed out — see here and here — it’s not just the distant past we’ve forgotten, it’s the very recent past. And that forgetfulness makes it very difficult for us to come up with appropriate and proportionate responses to our current problems.

A follow-up to my recent post on a certain variety of chronological snobbery: I see that Louise Doughty has nominated her top 10 ghost stories. Their dates:

• 1987
• 1898
• 2015
• 2017
• 2017
• 2010
• 2002
• 2009
• 1983
• 2001

So: seven of the ten best ghost stories ever written have appeared in the past 18 years. Amazing! How do we account for the fact that just in this century writers have gotten so good at ghost stories — so much better that people who came before, like Arthur Machen and M. R. James and Charles Dickens? It’s a mystery.

Of all the many task-management apps available for the Apple platforms, the one that fits my needs best, by far, is Things by Cultured Code. And if I’m using the iOS version it’s a sheer delight. I can organize everything from small daily tasks, to lists of movies I want to watch, to complex multi-stage projects. It’s beautifully designed and has lots of power when I need it.

But often I work on a Mac, and when I do, Things makes me miserable. I blink and strain my eyes until they hurt, I crane my neck towards and away from the screen. After anything more than five minutes I’m frustrated and in pain. The reason: the makers of Things have since day 1 of the Mac version of their app — twelve years ago — refused to allow users to adjust the size of any text in the app. They like text small and so they keep it small. But my aging eyes can no longer adjust, even with my fairly sophisticated lenses. So sometimes when I’m using the Mac I will pull out an iOS device rather than struggle with the text on the Mac version of Things.

It’s not rare for software companies to do less than they might, and probably less than they should, to make their apps accessible to people whose senses don’t function peecisely as a healthy 25-year-old’s do. But it is really rare, these days, to find a company as actively hostile to non-ideal users as Cultured Code. It’s hard to imagine a usability feature more basic than the ability to adjust text size. But they won’t do it. It’s like someone producing a music app that doesn’t allow you to adjust the volume. (“We’ve chosen a volume level that we think will be best for most of our users.”)

I have a lot of money and time invested in the Things apps, but it looks like I’m going to have to turn to an alternative that may be less well-suited to my workflow. But that’s okay; I can adapt my workflow. I just can’t adapt my eyes.

(And dear reader, please do not respond to this post by giving me advice. Whatever you think I ought to do in this matter, I have tried it, and I do mean whatever. And while I have you on the line, please don’t ever give anyone advice, about anything, unless they explicitly ask for it.)

The novelist Hannah Beckerman was asked, “I’m an English lit postgraduate who’s slipped into a reading rut since my final exams – what are some good books to get me back into loving literature?” Here are the first publication dates of the books she recommended:

• 2006
• 2016
• 2013
• 2010
• 2014
• 2015
• 2015
• 1995
• 1997
• 2000
• 2002
• 2017
• 1959–1994 (Paley’s stories)
• 1937
• 2017
• 2019
• 1988
• 1926
• 1989
• 1999
• 2015

Also, all of them are written in English and by people from England, Scotland, Ireland, and the USA. The two major temporal outliers (1937 and 1926) are both children’s books, and there are no adults-only (or -primarily) novels from before 2002.

Is it really likely that all the books that might be recommended to someone who wants to “get … back into loving literature” are from our culture, our language, our time? And that none of them are poems or plays?

In yesterday’s post I quoted from Deirdre McCloskey’s work on bourgeois life, and I want now to return briefly to that. Late in the first volume of her trilogy she refers to a 1945 book called The Economic Order and Religion:

It develops that Knight and Merriam are arguing that social life in a large group with thoroughgoing ownership in common is impossible. That is what they believe Christian love entails. Their source is always the gospels, never the elaborate compromises with economic reality of other Christian writers, such as Paul or Aquinas or Luther, or the thirty-eighth article of the Anglicans: “The riches and goods of Christians are not common, as touching the right, title, and possession of the same, as certain Anabaptists do falsely boast.”

What, the Gospels aren’t supposed to count? Methinks they count indeed. But I can understand why someone looking at Luke 12:33 and Luke 14:33 might want to quickly turn aside. In any case, it’s not just the Gospels that tell this story: we also have (and Hart cites) the book of Acts and the letter of James. If McCloskey is going to argue that we should imitate “the elaborate compromises with economic reality of other Christian writers,” then she really needs to say why we should follow those “other writers” when they disagree, or at least certainly seem to disagree, with the Gospels, Acts, and James.

And as we think about all these matters we should surely remember Kierkegaard’s comment that most Christians think that the commandments are intentionally over-severe, like setting our clocks ahead half-an-hour to make sure we get up in the morning. (He can’t mean what he says.)

As always: the evidence all seems to point in one direction when you ignore or suppress all the evidence that points in the other direction.