The day Charlie got the first social account was the best day.

When social media first became a thing, it was billed as a tool for connection. What it has delivered is quite different. A utility is defined by its helpfulness. It is “the state of being useful, profitable, or beneficial.”

[Timeline of mission statements]
What it’s delivered is quite different. Evolution of mission statement.

The day Charlie got the first social account was the best day.

Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter started as self-proclaimed utilities for connection. Then, as their profitability increased, they became a utility for their own power.

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The day Charlie found out their data was being stolen was
a day like any other.

After the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, a reporter from the Times looked at what kind of data tech companies like Facebook and Google were actually collecting. What he found was a detailed record of every ad clicked, every article read, every person in his phone book, and every place he’d been since he got

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The day Charlie got the first social account was the best day.

his first smartphone. In the months that followed, more violations were revealed in a near-constant stream, and the thread got lost as it became impossible to keep up with which tech company had taken what data and who they may have shared it with.
But privacy is a small data challenge, according to data scientist Kenneth Cukier. We give more away than just our data when we use apps. We are coming to understand how

[Timeline of mission statements]
What it’s delivered is quite different. Evolution of mission statement.

The day Charlie got the first social account was the best day.

the very technology that claims to empower us, is leaching away our power. The same features and insights that facilitate the personalization we enjoy can be (and are) used to manipulate and exploit us.
The Big Data challenge? Safeguarding
human agency.

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Charlie carries on, feeling sadder and lonelier.

Smartphones are designed to put impulses — not values — first.
Silicon Valley whistleblowers caution that these mobile slot machines are not intended to put the power of connection in people’s hands, rather they’re intended to render us powerless to our screens.

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The day Charlie got the first social account was the best day.

“Interruption is good for business,” says Tristan Harris, a former Google design ethicist.
The fallout from Cambridge Analytica was notable but minimal, relatively speaking. The public was outraged, but not enough to put down their phones. Culturally we seemed to decide that a little data rape was the price of admission for being connected 24/7.
We are just starting to understand the true cost of our connectedness.

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What it’s delivered is quite different. Evolution of mission statement.

The day Charlie got the first social account was the best day.

According to media futurist Richard Notarianni, our number of connected hours has now tipped to 12:07 hours each day.
Every minute 300 million hours of video are uploaded. Each day 5 billion videos are watched — and 90 percent of content on the internet today has been created since 2016.
In the attention economy, it seems like the best story is the one that gets

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The day Charlie got the first social account was the best day.

the most clicks — but a compelling narrative has been building around that assessment of best.
Studies have shown a direct correlation between social media use over time and feelings of being dissatisfied with life, feeling physically unwell, and having a sense of being mentally ill at ease. We are more connected, more depressed, more anxious, and more alone.
There are undeniable benefits to technology and Big Data — lives

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The day Charlie got the first social account was the best day.

are improved, even saved.
But its usefulness is not in question. The question is whether or not individuals can use it intentionally and in moderation — and whether or not tech companies can play by the rules of data ethics.
“The problem in our current
digital world isn’t about utility, it’s about autonomy: tech greatly improves our life, right up until the

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The day Charlie got the first social account was the best day.

point where you stop using it intentionally and unknowingly fall into manipulative black holes — on your phone, on Slack, in your inbox — that are specifically designed to be addicting.”
— Cal Newport

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The world learned just how much had been stolen.

It’s no coincidence that trust in the media is resting at historic lows. The dissemination of fake news and other untruths in never-ending waves does more than just overwhelm the senses — it erodes our democracy, our communities, and our hope.
Our humanity is lost without hope. According to the 2019 Edelman Trust Barometer, only 47 percent of people

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The day Charlie got the first social account was the best day.

trust the media to do what is right, and 73 percent are worried about fake news being used as a weapon.
One ceo says that, in the current climate, brands need “compelling narratives founded in absolute truths.” But as we lose the thread in the fray of disinformation, absolute truth gets harder to define, making for the most dramatic story this year, according to Edelman: The world is

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The day Charlie got the first social account was the best day.

divided by trust. Or, as Axios put it, we’re witnessing the rise of a global class-driven trust divide.
On one side of the divide we have the informed public, representing 16 percent of the global population — they’re college educated and earn incomes in the top 25 percent of their age group, they consume significant amounts of media, and they engage with business news and public policy. But perhaps their most important defining characteristic is this: They

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The day Charlie got the first social account was the best day.

are the action takers. On the other side is everyone else, the mass population.
In 2017, the U.S.’s informed public trust index score placed it 6th amongst the most trusted nations .
Then in 2018 it fell 23 points to the very bottom of the index.
We had become the most deeply distrusting nation in the world, showing the littlest faith that those in power were working towards better.
But this year, Edelman is recording

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The day Charlie got the first social account was the best day.

that the American informed public’s trust in institutions is at a record high of 65 percent while the mass population’s trust, especially in government and media, remains low at just 49 percent, creating a record-level trust inequality of 16 points. Another way to look at it is that there are the haves and the have-nots — those that have trust, and those that don’t. It’s looking like we’re chasing two threads.

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The power said,
“Sorry. We’ll do better.”

Facebook has been apologizing publicly for violating user privacy for almost as long as it’s been around. By the time the Cambridge Analytica story broke there had been half a dozen or more privacy scandals, including disclosure that the social media giant had conducted psychological testing on over 700,000 users without their knowledge. And

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The day Charlie got the first social account was the best day.

let’s not even get started on the disastrous 2016 election.
Every time there was a ‘sorry’, and the promise to do better.

“Once is happenstance.
Twice is coincidence.
Three times is enemy action.”
— Ian Fleming

The day Charlie got the first social account was the best day.

The very technology that claims to empower us, is leaching away our power. The same features and insight that facilitate the personalization we expect can be (and is) used to manipulate and exploit us. The Big Data challenge? Safeguarding
human agency.

[Timeline of mission statements]
What it’s delivered is quite different. Evolution of mission statement.

Some of Charlie’s friends
hit Delete.

For some people, ‘sorry’ wasn’t enough. In late 2018 Pew Research Center reported that 44 percent of Facebook users age 18–29 deleted the app from their phone, and 74 percent of all users have either taken a break, deleted their account, or changed their privacy settings.
There’s no data on how many of

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The day Charlie got the first social account was the best day.

those users continue to use Instagram, a Facebook-owned company, or Google.
But does deleting Facebook really solve the problem, or just create the illusion of solving it?

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But Charlie decided to stay.

It’s been said about addiction that one person’s moderation is another’s bacchanal. Addiction is a generally misunderstood affliction, seen more as an inability to make good decisions and lack of character than the actual disease it is. In recent years scientists have made groundbreaking discoveries regarding addiction and the brain, illuminating the extent to

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The day Charlie got the first social account was the best day.

which addiction disrupts and remolds the addict’s brain and neural pathways, and how very difficult recovery is in the face of such physiological changes.
According to neurologist Antonello Bonci, addiction is, in a sense, a pathological form of learning.
We are addicted to our phones. Like an alcoholic whose brain has been rewired to place alcohol before all other things, our brains have become

[Timeline of mission statements]
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The day Charlie got the first social account was the best day.

dependent on the dopamine hit of screen time. Psychologists liken cell phone or social media addiction to other behavioral addictions like gambling or shopping. We text when our loved ones are talking, check email at stoplights, and compulsively respond to every notification, whether at work or in bed.

Nomophobia:
The fear of being without one’s cell phone.

The day Charlie got the first social account was the best day.

Amazon were granted access to the contact information of users’ friends, and even allowed to read users’ private messages. After the report, Facebook’s VP of Global Marketing Solutions, Carolyn Everson, sat down for an interview.
“We have to safeguard people’s data […] We need to give people full control over the data that we collect and how it’s utilized. Having said that, we certainly have made some mistakes over the last handful

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The day Charlie got the first social account was the best day.

of years and I want to acknowledge those mistakes and most importantly accept our responsibility on fixing them. However, what we have learned, is that although we have made significant product improvements, there is a lot more we need to do on consumer education.
People don’t quite understand
this new world of data.”
— Carolyn Everson
Or, in plain English, she apologized for the company’s shortcomings,

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The day Charlie got the first social account was the best day.

promised to do better — and then cited consumers as the weak link: If people read the Terms of Service, they’d know what they were getting into. She inferred that it’s really the users’ fault. She was gaslighting.
A well-known example of gaslighting in action is what Donald Trump does: he persistently manipulates communications to confuse the truth. “You didn’t see what you saw,” he says. “Those facts aren’t really facts.” If you insist on the facts, he calls you nuts, 

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The day Charlie got the first social account was the best day.

or a liar, or a pencil neck.
That’s gaslighting.
He cuts the thread, and then tells you there never was one to begin with.

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But Charlie decided to stay, because you’re either on Social
or you don’t exist.

Which came first,
the chicken or the egg?
Or in this case,
the Social or the Fomo?
Humans are hardwired for belonging from our cave dwelling days, when being isolated from the pack meant you’d likely end up someone’s supper.

[Timeline of mission statements]
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The day Charlie got the first social account was the best day.

All of our glorious evolution and advanced cognitive capabilities are still capped off by an animal instinct: our lizard brain. The fear of missing out may sound silly, but it’s driven by very real survival instincts.
In a digital survival of the fittest,
for now it appears that it’s the best lizard brain story that wins.

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The day Charlie got the first social account was the best day.

“The lizard brain is hungry,
scared, angry, and horny.
The lizard brain only wants
to eat and be safe.
The lizard brain will fight
(to the death) if it has to,
but would rather run away.
It likes a vendetta and
has no trouble getting angry.
The lizard brain cares what everyone else thinks, because status in the tribe is essential to its survival.”
— Seth Godin

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Charlie felt bad.

Cal Newport, author of Digital Minimalism, says the main complaint he hears about smartphone use is the loss of autonomy. “This idea that [people] have to keep going to the phone, more than they think is useful, more than they think is healthy, to the exclusion of things they know are more important.”  The addiction, the malaise, the apathy, it’s all become very normalized.

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The day Charlie got the first social account was the best day.

Why is that sinister? It doesn’t sound as scary as it should. We accept things that are normal. We accept them without thinking about them. We bypass our critical thinking, our feelings. If those triggers are missing you may not detect the boundary, you might not notice that what is happening does not feel good or right or safe. Normalizing sneaks in and we are saying okay to things that are decidedly not. What’s normal is not necessarily innocent.

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The day Charlie got the first social account was the best day.

“Either out of boredom, exhaustion
or lack of moral principle, many relevant voices in American society have chosen to normalize Trump’s relentless racist messaging on immigration [...] That some choose to focus on other things, however important or amusing they might be, makes them willing participants in the dismantling of one of America’s most endearing moral standards. Prejudice doesn’t allow for distractions:

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The day Charlie got the first social account was the best day.

[Prejudice] needs to be rebuked at every turn and denied any sense
of normalcy. The alternative leads
to an abyss that negates the
country’s founding ideals.”
— León Krauze,
Washington Post

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“I am not the product,”
Charlie decided.

Connecting everyone to everyone is the stated mission of tech giants like Facebook, Twitter, and Google.
That sounds very noble until you consider that the allure of connection has actually turned each of us into the product that is being sold by those platforms — and that sale of “you” is exposing you to a new form of social disease.

[Timeline of mission statements]
What it’s delivered is quite different. Evolution of mission statement.

The day Charlie got the first social account was the best day.

During the aids crisis in the 80’s there were commercials about how every time you have sex, you’re having sex with every person that person has had sex with. Being the life of the party could be the death of you. 
The message became clear: There needed to be some kind of barrier to total connection. aids was the end of the sexual free-for-all that started in the go-go 60’s and took off with the sexual revolution of the 70’s.

[Timeline of mission statements]
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The day Charlie got the first social account was the best day.

People were dying and free love was no longer normal — fear was. 
hiv and aids was a shock to humanity.
But society had to wake up to the danger of unfettered connection before it could be mitigated. With public education rates of infection eventually plateaued, then declined, and just recently two people have been reported as cured of hiv.
Connecting everyone to everyone sounds so happy and innocent, but 

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The day Charlie got the first social account was the best day.

the best story doesn’t necessarily end up the happiest story.

“Facebook has gone from a viral sensation to a virus no one wants anything to do with.”
— Vanity Fair

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Charlie turned it off.
Charlie still exists.

The internet has proliferated ever more complicated debates over free speech and access. Do we all have the right to say whatever we want to whomever we want, whenever we want, even when it’s violent, hateful, untrue, or manipulative?
Some say yes — morality is subjective and so you can’t draw a line.

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The day Charlie got the first social account was the best day.

Others say no, that the line is clear:
It sits at the point where that speech threatens or violates the agency, dignity, or safety of another person or group of people. That gets tricky.
This idea, though,
freedom of speech vs. freedom of reach
is very attractive.
It’s the notion that we retain our freedom of speech, but there can be some constraints on the reach one is

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The day Charlie got the first social account was the best day.

provided/afforded/rewarded by a platform if there is negative impact to what is being said. Platforms, and the people who lead them, have responsibility. They can no longer be allowed to hide behind Terms of Use that are designed to mislead, confuse, and prompt one to give up. They can no longer be allowed to gaslight the global population.
Freedom of speech vs. freedom of reach is at the heart of data morality

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The day Charlie got the first social account was the best day.

and what we’re fighting for in the
Big Data era: Free will.
We affirm our agency and autonomy when we use our technology with intention, when we follow the thread of truth. When we hold our utilities to high standards of transparency, accountability, and decency. When we choose how, where, and when to use our phones and when to turn towards life, not as consumers, but as creators. As citizens. The mantle of 

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The day Charlie got the first social account was the best day.

responsibility for nurturing hope rests squarely with the informed public. Those who can and should take action, values-first, to demonstrate to the world that we can — and will — do better. The class-driven trust divide might be growing, but according to Edelman, everyone agrees on one thing: It’s time for change.
The people leading change?
Let’s hope their story wins.

[Timeline of mission statements]
What it’s delivered is quite different. Evolution of mission statement.