Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America

by Christopher Wylie

engagement is the only metric that matters, as more engagement means more screen time to be exposed to advertisements. This is the darker side of Silicon Valley’s much celebrated metric of “user engagement.” By focusing so heavily on greater engagement, social media tends to parasitize our brain’s adaptive mechanisms. As it happens, the most engaging content on social media is often horrible or enraging. According to evolutionary psychologists, in order to survive in premodern times, humans developed a disproportionate attentiveness toward potential threats. The reason we instinctually pay more attention to the blood and gore of a rotting corpse on the ground than to marveling at the beautiful sky above is that the former was what helped us survive. In other words, we evolved to pay keen attention to potential threats. There’s a good reason you can’t turn away from grisly videos: You’re human.