I call social media and other addictionware companies the “tobacco companies of the mind.”
The problem isn’t the phone per se. It’s the apps, which is why I don’t have that shit on my phone and use screen time and app approval with kids.
Not only do these companies addict and drain peoples’ wallets, but I largely blame them for the sorry state of political discourse. I watched it happen. When the algorithmic timelines hit around 2010-ish and everything started to be engagement-maxxed everyone (IMO across the political spectrum not just one side) lost their mind.
Sane well reasoned ideas and nuance don’t maximize engagement. Trolling, controversy baiting lunacy, tabloid and conspiranoid trash, hate, fear, and lynch mobs maximize engagement.
We’ve kind of known since the dawn of media that trash maximizes engagement and that if you engagement-max you get trash, but at this point it should be considered proven.
Right, mainstream news has been doing this same clickbait for half century at least and it is the reason we allow it from social media. We're desensitized to it and actually seek it out. We live to suffer and be enraged, because in our minds democracy depends upon it.
At some point I think humanity is going to have to really declare war on addiction. I’ve been thinking about this for years.
It’s not unprecedented. China threw off the yoke of opium for one example.
I’m all for free speech and I am against drug criminalization— as long as in both cases the stuff is not particularly addictive.
The deliberate use of addiction to ensnare, monetize, or control other people whether through substances, tech, or other media should be a crime. It could be considered a form of assault.
It would be a crime to implant a chip in someone while they slept that could be used to remotely regulate their emotions somehow, right? How is deliberate deployment of addiction different? Instead of implanting something you are exploiting what amounts to a CVE in the human brain. It’s a crime to break into your computer using a zero day, but it’s okay for me to hack your brain?
This is the “Butlerian Jihad” we need — not against technology but against addiction. “Thou shalt not exploit security vulnerabilities in the human mind.”
We know enough about the mechanisms of addiction that I think we can be reasonably objective about identifying it.
A first step might be to make it civilly actionable. If you can prove that someone deliberately worked to make their product addictive they can be the target of a class action lawsuit. You could, for example, sue social media companies for the hours of lost time resulting from their addictive designs.
I like the idea of fighting addiction, but it can't be law-based. For example, I find chess to be addictive, is that evil? What action shall we take against it?
I think it would have to be reserved for egregious cases to start with, and perhaps that would be enough to have a chilling effect and scare people away from intentional addiction engineering.
I share concerns about this but I feel like eventually it won’t matter. We are getting so good at addicting each other and it’s getting so ubiquitous that eventually I think there will be a crusade with a lot of collateral damage.
Either that or we will just accept a society with a massive Matrix-like addict slave class. Maybe that’s the outcome.
It's also very refreshing to see the the link between social degeneration and these "addictionware companies" being highlighted. I also watched it happen! And sometimes you'd think you were imagining the whole thing, watching people dance around and explain away the situation.
It can be hard to even make the point in the first place, as any sort of metacomment on politics is inevitably taken as a sneaky argument for one side or the other. It's hard to see a way out of the situation (barring some major technological or social shift, provoked by who knows what).
The problem isn’t the phone per se. It’s the apps, which is why I don’t have that shit on my phone and use screen time and app approval with kids.
Not only do these companies addict and drain peoples’ wallets, but I largely blame them for the sorry state of political discourse. I watched it happen. When the algorithmic timelines hit around 2010-ish and everything started to be engagement-maxxed everyone (IMO across the political spectrum not just one side) lost their mind.
Sane well reasoned ideas and nuance don’t maximize engagement. Trolling, controversy baiting lunacy, tabloid and conspiranoid trash, hate, fear, and lynch mobs maximize engagement.
We’ve kind of known since the dawn of media that trash maximizes engagement and that if you engagement-max you get trash, but at this point it should be considered proven.