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

Our unconscious tendencies are the control surfaces by which technology will shape our lives.

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.”

that reality is the simplest story our brains can cobble together from an overwhelming flood of raw sensory information.

The Loop is a downward tailspin of shrinking choices, supercharged by capitalist efficiency, in which human agency is under threat from irresistible systems packaged for our unconscious acceptance.

As Slovic described it in a 2006 paper with psychologist Ellen Peters, “People judge a risk not only by what they think about it but also by how they feel about it. If their feelings toward an activity are favorable, they tend to judge the risks as low and the benefits as high; if their feelings toward the activity are unfavorable, they tend to mak

In a single paper, “Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases,” they laid out a dozen systematic biases and a trio of heuristics—calling them representativeness, availability, and anchoring—that form a trinity of human weirdness.

we believe the story our mind is telling us because we believe that’s the only story there is. And in this book, I’m hoping to explain that as we build machines and systems that organize, simplify, and mutate our stories for us, we are just as vulnerable to believing those new tales as well.

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

The outermost loop is the one for which this book is named. It’s what I worry is coming, a future in which our ancient and modern tendencies have been studied, sampled, fed into automated pattern-recognition systems, and sold back to us in servings we will be doubly conditioned to consume without a second thought.