Notes from Recent Reading: Ruined by Design, Mike Monteiro

Just prior to my dad going into hospital last month, I wrote an entire blog post about choosing who gets to monetise your attention as an artist working in the early 21st century.

If you got something out of that post, I recommend that you set aside an afternoon to read Mike Monteiro’s Ruined By Design: How Designers Ruined the World, and What We Can Do To Fix it. Specifically, the list on page 115, where he runs through the ways in which various online institutions make their money, culminating with a a statement that is both incredibly glib and still nails a particular discomfort I’d been feeling for a few years in social media:

“Twitter makes money by getting you to fight with Nazis.”

Mike Monteiro, Destroyed By Design

Of course, given that it occurs 115 pages in, Monteiro’s built a lot of scaffolding around that statement. He’s talked about the ways in which engagement is monetised and how various platforms have sought to maximise it, the problems with having user interfaces designed by teams of white blokes, and the way in which seemingly innocuous design choices get corrupted by the arrival of venture capitalists (which, frankly, is interesting to me because it explains the underpinning problems Patreon has had in recent years).

He’s vented his spleen about twitter and CEO Jack Dorsey (who used to operate out of an office next to Monteiro’s Mule Creative) multiple times, and goes on to illustrate his point by drawing an analogy between depression and Twitter, which feels similarly accurate.

Let’s talk about depression.

Like about twenty percent of the world, I have to deal with it. (I’m lucky enough to have access to care when I need it.) One of my warning signs is when I can’t tell the difference between a big problem and a small problem. My brain stops prioritizing. Every problem comes at me as exactly the same size. This is depression taking away a major coping mechanism. That’s exactly how we’ve designed Twitter. Every outrage is the exact same size, whether it was a US president declaring war on a foreign nation or a movie we remember fondly from our childhood being recast with (gasp!) women in the lead roles or an eighteen-year-old who made a stupid decision on what to wear to the prom. On Twitter, those problems become exactly the same size. They receive the same amount of outrage. They’re presented identically. They’re just as big as one another. Twitter works like a giant depressed brain. It can’t tell right from wrong, and it can’t tell big from small. It needs help.

The thing is, my brain works that way because it’s broken, so I get it treatment. Twitter works that way by design. Twitter is working exactly like Twitter’s leadership team wants it to be working. The constant outrage, the hatred, the anxiety, the harassment — it’s all by design. It’s engagement, and engagement brings them money and raises their stock price. They have no interest in changing it. If they wanted to do so, they would’ve taken real steps to change it.

Monteiro, Mike. Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It (p. 123).

Monteiro is witty, angry, and smart…but he’s also incredibly passionate about his chosen topic. His book is aimed at fellow designers, advocating for both an ethical code on par with those taken by doctors, but the journey to get there is entertaining, provoking, and disturbingly informative.

I find myself wishing a similar book existed on the writing front.

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