The Loop: How Technology is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight Back

The economist Albert O. Hirschman describes three options available to modern citizens faced with a system that does not serve them in his 1970 book Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. Don’t like something? Hirschman argued you have three choices: walk away, argue for improvements, or stick with it. Exit, as he describes it, is an economic mechanism, a highl

The mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot updated the model in a 1982 book about fractals to posit that comedians who have made appearances in the past are more likely to make them in the future. Nicholas Taleb carried Mandelbrot’s concept into his book Black Swan, and in his book Antifragile put a specific math to the notion that as an idea survives, it

When I land in a new city and need to drive from the airport into town, Google Maps offers me a handful of options—here’s one highway, here’s another, here’s the no-tolls route. And I dutifully choose from among them. It used to be that I’d push back against this process and seek out whatever bakeries and landmarks and vistas I could find by drivin

Representativeness, availability, and anchoring would make us prone to believe the most familiar, most memorable, most recent story we hear. As they’d written in a 1973 paper, “The production of a compelling scenario is likely to constrain future thinking.”

The innermost loop is human behavior as we inherited it, the natural tendencies and autopilot functions that evolution gave us.

It’s our greatest success as a society to have devised systems for settling our differences, measuring the immeasurable, sorting through controversy. It’s not easy, and the work isn’t finished. Mediation, negotiation, deciding which of two bad choices is less harmful—that’s the very hardest stuff of modern society. In some cases, we’ve barely begun

And it shows that someone experiencing poverty is intensely distracted at all times. They are literally impaired by it. He went on to write a book about this work with psychologist Eldar Shafir, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much.

In a sense, tribalism and religion and the rest of it use a separate processing system. As Hamid, Atran, and their coauthors wrote, “Sacred value choices involved less activation of brain regions previously associated with cognitive control and cost-benefit calculations.”

The second loop is the way that modern forces—consumer technology, capitalism, marketing, politics—have sampled the innermost loop of behavior and reflected those patterns back at us, resulting in everything from our addiction to cigarettes and gambling to systemic racism in real estate and machine learning.