I agree with him that social media could be very distracting, especially in the family settings, but, I get a ton of useful information and stay up-to-date with the latest research through Twitter, Reddit and HN. Cutting those out would mean putting an iron curtain on the latest insight and recent developments, and, essentially, quitting the front line.
That's the problem I faced as well, and I ultimately decided to quit a line of work that required being constantly connected to the latest developments. I realized I wanted to pursue a line of work with a bit more permanence and, for lack of a better word, timelessness.
(You might wanna remove the <> they screw up the link.)
Email seems to be an analogy for communication or perceiving information, or at least a predecessor of more fast-paced forms of that.
Could it be these new forms are so efficient and fast-paced, they overload our brain? Before the TV (which had limitations at start as well), there was telephone and radio. Both were limited. Telephone was expensive (monopoly yada yada), and radio informative (before the ~60s).
What Knuth did is enforce snail mail. This creates an artificial barrier, increasing signal to noise ratio.
as evanlivingston mentioned above, Knuth is in the position to cut off people from his email; trying to run a digital company without an email is kind of like trying to be a lumberjack without an axe
But at what cost? Having read "deep work" recently, I've started thinking much more about all of this, and for me, the cost mostly outweighs the benefits. By cutting back drastically on my use (phone typically lasts 3-4 days instead of 1 now), I'm getting a lot more done, in less time, feel better and am much more present than I have been in over a decade. I hadn't realised the creeping effect of it all, and I don't feel I've missed out in the way that attention technology was making me feel that I would be.
I realise that the balance of this particular equation is different for everyone, but I also think many people are convinced they will be missing out when in reality they won't be.
this is what they said about TVm rock and roll, comic books computer games etcetera etcetera going back to the dawn of time.
As Socrates's says “The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.”
Not mention the shocking depravity of shaving and painting statues blue
I can't really remember where I read it, but the concept of an "infinity pool" is what really gets me. I can listen to the news, read a magazine, or watch a show and it's done. But HN, Reddit, Twitter, etc are ever replenishing pools of distraction. That's where it's damaging for me, I know I can always go back for more.
Not only the new stuff that replenishes the pool, but often times when I find a new resource/subreddit that I don't know much about but find interesting, there's often a huge amount of info already there. So even depleting the pool of past information becomes a huge distraction, all while more stuff is piling on top.
You don't need those sites. Find professors in your chosen field, click on their personal pages and there should be a list of all their PhD student's personal pages. Follow those and any related academic journals, throw in Stack Overflow/Exchange, Google Scholar, and occasional HN and you'll be far more informed than anybody wading through countless junk posts on reddit or twitter.
For example if you're a user interface designer or wearables programmer, then you'd benefit from the recent papers from these PhD students more than you'd benefit from spending hours trying to find meaningful content on reddit or twitter https://www.hcii.cmu.edu/people/phd-students
Even that's not enough. I spent the last year or so switching over to consuming news through RSS, moving myself and close friends out of Facebook, and downloading textbooks. I've been teaching myself advanced mathematics that I didn't get a strong hold of in graduate school.
I found myself in the middle of a category theory exercise stuck. I wasn't getting anywhere, and couldn't figure something out. Break time, so I opened my RSS reader. Even if my RSS reader has curated content, it's easy to read. An article about urban planning here, optimizing latency there, and before I know it, an hour has passed. I spent none of that time focusing on my problem, and I'm just as stuck as ever.
I think, at least for me, I need to stem this constant flow of information. I need to take time to step aside of it, live without it, then get back.
You may be interested in these slides from a lecture (yet more information to consume) on how to find answers to grad level math like using oeis.org to identify sequences, where to post on stack exchange/mathoverflow to get answers, using the inverse symbolic calculator ect http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~15751/2016-lecture1.pdf
That lecture drastically reduced the time I spend now finding answers which usually I found myself drifting into the attention economy while I stopped working to search for things.
Does anyone see an analogy with highly processed, sugary foods? Highly addictive, thought to be miracles of convenience, but ultimately detrimental when consumed in excess, and now we are starting to realise that and demand better. I wonder if society will go through the same rejection phase with attention-seeking media consumption. Or maybe those who grow up with it will be better able to control themselves.
David Foster Wallace had the same belief about TV 20 years ago. He seemed more addicted to it than the average bear, more along the lines of how you see people tethered to smartphones today. He very much saw TV as candy - sweet, addictive, not sustaining, and unhealthy without moderation.
He talked about it in multiple places, but Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself (an interview) discusses it a lot.
Very much so, at least one of them. “The Entertainment” was sufficiently addicting to effectively zombify characters, now fulfilled by the stereotype of people that float across busy streets without raising their eyes from their phones. The repeated parallels to drug use and escape therefrom were none-too-subtly interspersed with The Entertainment for a reason.
Also, the literary broken narrative effected by story-length footnotes that had story-length endnotes imitates the short/shattered attention span experience of living that DFW was already able to feel and express—and Infinite Jest was published over twenty years ago.
I escaped into Infinite Jest to survive a period of deep depression, denial, and directionlessness, so that shattered consciousness was pretty easy to relate to at the time.
I was going to make this comment about TV. Social media has merely supplanted other forms of entertainment that Americans indulged on previously. I guess the main difference is that smart phones are with us 24/7.
In Pat Cadigan's anthology of short works "Patterns", she included this introduction to her short story[1] with the same name:
> Television will achieve its apotheosis when it is interactive.
> Of course, some people think they have that now. For some people, TV reality is as much of a reality as what they move through most of the day. I remember listening to two people I used to work with discussing the horrible burden a character on a TV series would have to bear for causing someone's death in a fire. These were not uneducated or isolated people; they had simply been drawn in so far, they were projecting the characters well beyond the end of the show -- indeed, beyond the life of the series itself. And we've all heard amusing stories about actors who play soap opera villains suddenly attacked by irate viewers who cannot separate actor and character, Maybe more people can't than can -- the host of Death Valley Days was President of the United States for eight years.
> Does TV encourage, or even induce, schizophrenia? Or does it create a separate reality in conjunction with our minds, something that is neither totally our inner life nor totally TV. The networks might call that programming.
Marshall McLuhan explained how humans see tools - such as media - as an "extension of ourselves". It's important to keep this in mind when creating tools or types of media: you're also defining part of the human that uses the tool.
[1] The short story "Patterns" was originally published in the August 1987 issue of Omni.
I think his definitive piece on the subject is E unibus pluram: television and U.S. fiction (1993) [0], definitely worth a read if you have the time. Wallace's "six hours a day" refrain is an interesting contrast to our now dominant usage pattern of dozens of 10 minutes chunks of daily social media consumption.
What explains the pointlessness of most published TV criticism is that television has become immune to charges that it lacks any meaningful connection to the world outside it. It's not that charges of nonconnection have become untrue. It's that any such connection has become otiose. Television used to point beyond itself. Those of us born in like the sixties were trained to look where it pointed, usually at versions of "real life" made prettier, sweeter, better by succumbing to a product or temptation. Today's Audience is way better trained, and TV has discarded what's not needed. A dog, if you point at something, will look only at your finger.
J.K. Rowling had a pretty fantastic facsimile of this in the Harry Potter series:
"The Mirror of Erised is an ancient, ornate mirror. It has clawed feet and a gold frame... The mirror shows the most desperate desire of a person's heart, a vision that has been known to drive men mad."
"Men have wasted away before it, not knowing if what they have seen is real, or even possible."
—Albus Dumbledore explaining the danger of the mirror to Harry Potter
>Or maybe those who grow up with it will be better able to control themselves.
Get hooked at young ages, and their tastes develop around the overly sweet/salty foods. Thus becoming adults still addicted to them. Especially with marketing to young children(Animals, Colorful packaging, etc).
Combined with the both parents working, 'busier' modern lifestyle lots of families don't have time to cook 'real' food or dinners. So quick and easy food with low nutritional value is substituted.
> Get hooked at young ages, and their tastes develop around the overly sweet/salty foods. Thus becoming adults still addicted to them.
Anecdotal, but I've noticed that higher caliber restaurants have very subtle flavors. As opposed to mass produced/fast food that tend have very strong flavors.
I'm not sure these are quite the same things. Take a North Indian curry for example: even it's detractors wouldn't call it particularly bland, but the flavors are obviously way more subtle than, say, pixie stix. This isn't particularly surprising given that you put half a teaspoon of a dozen different spices into a curry while the pixie stix are literally just sugar and maybe a single flavor, wired directly to a part of our brain that likes sugar.
People who enjoy bland things always say this. :) Those words mean the same thing "to me", does mean it does to you, wasn't an insult, subtle just isn't a word I use for food. I like what I like and I've tasted things people use that word for, I call them bland.
Eh, language is defined by usage and the usage of "bland" is pretty inseparable from its negative connotation. Hell, even all the dictionary definitions you'll find include negative connotations.
Um, yea, and usage deviates precisely because people adopt different meanings to words over time until a new meaning becomes the norm; thus definitions are descriptive, not prescriptive, so don't tell me how to use words. And yes, I'm adding the negative connotation on purpose, that's rather the point now isn't it?
I also think about distractions (pop ups, bullshit social media, etc) as interrupts that disrupt program execution. The mindfulness movement has organic parallels.
Is mainstream news nourishing to my brain?
The biggest story of the week (year?) has no leakers and limited facts. The media have made virtually no progress on explaining who this person was in Las Vegas.
We do have 12 sources that prove some DC douche called another douche a moron.
I am not letting the media run code on my cpu anymore. Their code doesn’t nourish.
Our phones, their glitziness, and the way they captivate definitely hijack the mind's operations when it's saturated by them.
It's a rough solution but simply dampening the strength of the signal is one way to manage our minds.
That's why I'm moving towards a smartwatch with cellular. I know I need to be connected, but to specific people, not to the information highway. (More information cul de sacs.)
I'm excited about the kind of lifestyle patterns we can design that would be more kind to ourselves but not any less performant.
I look forward to making more addictive programs that make me and shareholders more money. I am eager to see the next evolution of UI/experience and code, where we manage to get ever stronger feedback loops in place.
The end goal is to make money and have a good exit. To find a way to part people from their money, for the minimum effort on our our part and the best competitive release of value from our product for their time.
There’s of course diminishing returns to product quality - I mean after all, who wants to be craigslist and just do the one job good enough?
No no. We will buy out the competition or interesting startups and then expand our reach and label beyond the core product which must plateau out eventually.
Then we leverage this cross platform ability to gain more market share and dominate multiple verticals which lets us disrupt other industries.
Because if we don’t do it, someone else will. And this also has such amazing RoI!
And look at the amazing value we unlock, surfacing relevant ads all over our network.
But hey, you know not enough people are clicking on ads, so let’s push them Harder, we could model ourselves like those old companies we removed. Let’s hire some tv execs for their insight.
As For the big picture - well I’m sure there’s someone else whose job it is to worry about that.
If there is a problem we will solve it ourselves, us being the duty minded, un-incentivized corporations.
Yup. The future is shiny and usefulness is incidental.
Not too long ago, we had this story, "Social Media is the New Smoking" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14851057. The mathematician Ted Kaczynski said decades ago, "humans with technology is like an alcoholic with a barrel of wine."
Interesting, while I have known about it, I haven't really read Ted Kaczynski (aka Unabomber) essay "Industrial Society and Its Future" [1] (aka The Unabomber Manifesto) before until your comment. I absolutely abhor his actions and what he had done, but the essay is a brilliant read.
Especially interesting is paragraph 171, as it pertains to the recent concerns about AI and our increasing technological dependence. Note that he wrote this essay way back in 1995:
"What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and as machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more and more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide."
> As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and as machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more and more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide."
"The Machine Stops" is a science fiction short story (12,300 words) by E. M. Forster. After initial publication in The Oxford and Cambridge Review (November 1909), the story was republished in Forster's The Eternal Moment and Other Stories in 1928. After being voted one of the best novellas up to 1965, it was included that same year in the populist anthology Modern Short Stories.[1] In 1973 it was also included in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Two.
"The story, set in a world where humanity lives underground and relies on a giant machine to provide their needs, predicted technologies such as instant messaging and the Internet."
I won't spoil the ending, but you can guess how it plays out.
There is another part to the analogy: we've all woken up to the fact that corporations re-engineered the food supply after World War II. They were hacking the human body. I think I didn't get this say in the year 2000, but I really get it now.
Think about what your grandparents ate vs. what your parents ate (assuming you grew up in the U.S. and are in the 20's-30's age range. Anecdotally the effect seems to have been particularly strong in the midwest.). It's like night and day.
It's not a coincidence that the food was remade by large corporations during that time. And likewise it seems obvious to me that we will look back on this time in 20 years and see that big corporations were hacking the human brain, like they were hacking the human body 50 years ago.
Now I don't think it is a matter of evil people in dark boardrooms. But if you believe in capitalism, and you believe in biology, then this effect is almost inevitable. It would be surprising if it did NOT happen.
Competitive pressure. Gary Taubes in his books "The Case Against Sugar" and "Good Calories, Bad Calories" mentioned the competition between Kellogg's, Post and other cereal brands.
While it's hard to believe today, Kellogg's was founded by a health nut who was eager on bringing healthy grains to Americans. Once his descendants took over, they noticed how enriching their product with sugar increased sales. Kids specifically don't have necessary mental controls to recognize addictive behavior (which is why we have restrictions on sales of cigarettes and alcohol).
So bit by bit American breakfast table and grocery store cereal isle turned into varieties of concentrated sugar instead of the muesli, oats, granola and nuts mixes it was way back in the days.
As a (currently) flagged comment absolutely accurately notes, a major concern of the Kelloggs was matters of mental and spiritual hygiene, including concerted efforts (including surgery) to avert masturbation.
Medical historian Howard Markel addresses this in his recent book The Kelloggs, with some relevant aspects mentioned in this book-tour interview at KALW, Santa Monica:
[Dr. John Haarvey Kellogg] also was very chaste and reminded both his readers and his followers that sex outside of the marriage, of course, was not a good idea, but [that] sex for anything other than procreation really sapped the soul and sapped the spirit. And of course, he was very much opposed to masturbation of any kind, something he wrote about extensively and called "the solitary vice."
Ideologically driven reasearch in which conclusions are assumed or asserted rather than proven empirically has a poor track record for truth discovery.
The Kelloggs' theories of nutition are fairly hit or miss. Corporatising the institution they created has not helped.
Overweight people eat more. Creating obese people needn't have been a corporate goal; a blind optimization process could have produced the same outcome. Just tweak the product until it sells more.
this is exactly what's happening with digital media. Optimize for human attention. Direct real time feedback on how people react to your media. Tweak for more attention. Repeat. No intentional malice needed.
Another reply summarized my view: there doesn't need to be a goal other than optimizing for profit for this type of "hacking" to arise.
I guess the word "hacking" conveys intentionality, or an explicit goal, but I'm using it in the sense that it's "exploiting bugs" in human brains.
Human brains/bodies didn't evolve in a situation with unlimited supplies of fat, sugar, and salt. Likewise, human brains didn't evolve in a situation where you can have an instant audience of 1,000, 100K, or even 100M people.
If you consider facts of about human biology (we like fat, sugar, salt, and to belong to a social group, etc.), and if you understand what a powerful mechanism capitalism is, then it's not surprising that corporations could remake the entire food industry or remake our social lives / belief systems in the span of a single generation.
Whether it's intentional or not is perhaps a secondary issue. I'm saying that in the absence of any opposing force, it would be surprising if this phenomenon did NOT occur.
So I guess my takeaway is that it doesn't hurt to treat current social networks and tech products like smartphones as adversaries. Just like it is reasonable to treat McDonald's and cigarette companies as adversaries. They were designed to deliver concentrated pleasure to your brain without regard to long term consequences.
My impression is that tobacco was a traditional, social, harmless pleasure until "capitalist optimization" morphed it into something deadly and addictive.
(BTW there is evidence that the human brain grew bigger to keep track of our peer group, i.e. it didn't grow big in order to solve math problems. The social part of the brain is large and critical for survival.)
Thanks for clarifying. Hacking has strong connotations with having a smart individual doing the exploiting on purpose. Also, hacking has strong connotations with that purpose being cool, not evil.
But since you mean companies just following the market gradient - that is precisely what happens.
> So I guess my takeaway is that it doesn't hurt to treat current social networks and tech products like smartphones as adversaries. Just like it is reasonable to treat McDonald's and cigarette companies as adversaries. They were designed to deliver concentrated pleasure to your brain without regard to long term consequences.
This is the key. The goal of companies is to make money off you, not to do good to you. If doing good to you helps them make money, they will do it. If screwing you over lets them make more money off you, they will screw you over. This is obvious both in observational evidence and in theory (if you look at the incentive structures of the market economy), and yet some people still persist in the belief that companies do only what consumers want, and that consumers have any agency in this process.
I believe one of their goals was to lower testosterone in general population, to make for a meeker and more easily controlled population. This probably wasn't a 'fully evil' goal, since the horrors of WW2 were recent, and some of them thought that they could prevent that from happening again by engineering a less aggressive population.
From the onset of 20th century at least, it was known that testosterone is responsible for 'manly' characteristics (aggressiveness etc); in 1935 it was synthesized from cholesterol by Lavoslav Ruzicka. So, by the end of WW2 it was already well known that a) testosterone is what makes people aggressive and b) body needs cholesterol to synthezise testosterone. With this information in hand, it's easy to conclude that to get a less aggressive population, one should make them eat less saturated fat/cholesterol.
Enter Ancel Keys, a military-related dietologist (he created the ww2 K-rations, for example). Before mid 1950s, he was making rational scientific research into good/bad foods, and even published some material about the negative health effects of 'grain' ie carbs. But by the mid 1950s he made a full 180 and started attacking saturated fats and cholesterol as the cause of (especially heart-related) health problems. He started using bad science (selectively choosing countries for study to confirm his claim that it's high fat and not high carb diet that causes health issues), and using his pull to silence everyone claiming otherwise.
In 1960s/1970s he was joined by the Big Agro/Food who poured a lot of money into continued shifting of the blame from carbs onto fat, including silencing and ostracizing scientists and studies who dared to claim otherwise; this is the 'conspiracy' that we are familiar with, but I believe it started even earlier, with Ancel Keys, military, and 'powers that be'.
It is sad that you are downvoted (however you may have told it without hints to conspiracies), because there are parallels to what you say about that time's mentality in for example the "Morgenthau Plan" that was fortunately dumped in 1947 and replaced with its opposite the "Marshall plan".
During implementation of the Morgenthau Plan, Germans had to live with 1200 calories per day:
Yes and no, on one hand there is definitely a potential for misuse, on the other I use mine to constantly be learning something, it's like I'm a book worm except I'm reading what ever I find relevant to the thing I'm currently interested in.
The invention of TV dinners and the preservative revolution is the best parallel ive seen compared to the invention of the internet from a regulation and unintended consequence perspective.
The other analogy that I've used is to asbestos and lead paint. Both of those products were very good at accomplishing their immediate purpose but had pretty devastating health consequences that were only discovered after they'd become ubiquitous. I think in a decade or two, we'll look back at smartphones in the same way.
I think the "lead" in this case is nonprogrammability. We in the professional tech world design our development tools for other professional programmers. Very few of us take the time to make those tools consumable by a first week coder.
And we all have a good excuse: there are great tools and best practices for publishing a development tool to other professionals. If you want to design something for a first week coder you have a lot more work to do, few examples to follow, and no obvious personal benefit.
Except the end result of that is that we sell computers to people which are useless for actual computing. All they give the average consumer is the opportunity to follow a path worn by someone like you or me.
We barely notice this, because we do have the ability to do real computation. We forget that it's something we are hoarding for ourselves.
I am just an average tech worker with zero political inclinations. Just saw a comment on this article [1] that referenced a line from Ted Kaczynski's (aka Unabomber) essay, "Industrial Society and Its Future" [2]. I have heard about it, but this is the first time I read this essay.
I absolutely abhor and condemn his actions and what he had done, but his essay is absolutely brilliant, and is prescient, taking into account it was written way back in 1995.
He is wrong on many counts, but some paragraphs are interesting:
* You can’t get rid of the “bad” parts of technology and retain only the “good” parts.
* Technology is a more powerful social force than the aspiration for freedom.
* A technological advance that appears not to threaten freedom often turns out to threaten it very seriously later on.
* While technological progress AS A WHOLE continually narrows our sphere of freedom, each new technical advance CONSIDERED BY ITSELF appears to be desirable.
* Another reason why technology is such a powerful social force is that, within the context of a given society, technological progress marches in only one direction; it can never be reversed. Once a technical innovation has been introduced, people usually become dependent on it, so that they can never again do without it, unless it is replaced by some still more advanced innovation.
* Technicians tend to be so involved in their work (their surrogate activity) that when a conflict arises between their technical work and freedom, they almost always decide in favor of their technical work.
* In paragraph 127 we pointed out that if the use of a new item of technology is INITIALLY optional, it does not necessarily REMAIN optional, because the new technology tends to change society in such a way that it becomes difficult or impossible for an individual to function without using that technology.
* Will public resistance prevent the introduction of technological control of human behavior? It certainly would if an attempt were made to introduce such control all at once. But since technological control will be introduced through a long sequence of small advances, there will be no rational and effective public resistance. (See paragraphs 127, 132, 153.)
* What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and as machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more and more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.
* On the other hand it is possible that human control over the machines may be retained. In that case the average man may have control over certain private machines of his own, such as his car or his personal computer, but control over large systems of machines will be in the hands of a tiny elite—just as it is today, but with two differences. Due to improved techniques the elite will have greater control over the masses; and because human work will no longer be necessary the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system.
I hate his actions and his strategy, but it's a chilling read.
The realization that processed, sugary foods are not good for you dates back to at least the 1950s when the term "junk food" appeared. Even so, the problem got much much worse over time and it's still not at all clear that people are rejecting such foods.
This is a very critical discussion that designers, technologists, PMs, founders & maybe everyone needs. Few reasons I find it to be critical:
1. Digital's impact footprint is far more than 10 years back.
2. As we move towards using more complex Algorithms, its highly important what metrics will be deemed relevant while analyzing success.
3. Technology is becoming more people centric as we speak with Blockchain & other tech on the rise, however the way their applications are designed is still the same as 10/20 years old.
I mean Steve Jobs tried to treat his completely curable pancreatic cancer, which was caught early, with alternative medicine and diet changes. The guy was a genius at some things, but not everything.
You are correct, most pancreatic adenocarcinomas are rapidly fatal. He had a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor, which is more treatable with resection and chemotherapy.
I don’t like how this comes up when Jobs is mentioned but I wanted to put a real reference here. Ignoring other factors a stage I patient is looking at 61%.
I have become afraid of my feeds. YouTube has started to shape my hobbies and interests, my political leanings, my dietary patterns. If Google is getting paid to steer me towards certain products, I probably have no idea and it's probably working very well.
YouTube can make overnight superstars just through the recommendation system.
It seems like the root cause of all this is advertising. Social media companies need attention grabbing features to draw eyes on ads, makes you wonder if we'd still be facing this dilemma of social media was sites were a paid service.
And advertising is needed mostly to sell stuff. If there wasn't any need to sell, there wouldn't be much advertising. I don't see non-free social media of current scale possible, unless you count the telephone network and the whole Internet as one. You already pay for that.
But people justify paid services by the amount of attention they dedicate to it. If you barely read the magazine, you'll likely not renew the subscription.
Paid services diminish circulation / market / network size. For mass consumer products, advertisers seek higher readership. That's a conflict which dates to the Penny Press of the 1830s.
A great little book on the conflict inherent in advertising-driven media, from 1909:
HN is different because, if you play your cards right, there will be no obligation to additional, subsequent behavior modification based on your actions, and minimal (if any) real life social consequences related to your participation.
Facebook and Twitter are notorious for producing disastrous results among individuals careless with their identity. Reddit permits the free creation of pseudonyms, but the material is less engaging and currated with less rigor.
I wouldn’t rate HN as “addictive” since there aren’t any real barriers to ignoring the site, and it lacks the kind of reach other sites have in “finding you.” This is to say that the usage patterns of the other sites you mention, saturate social circles so thoroughly, that it’s hard to not hear them mentioned in daily conversation.
You may prefer HN, and it may fill certain gaps in regular daily activity, alleviating boredom to an extent, but if you find it infectous, that’s merely a reflection of the intellectual personas that get moderated into your attention based on merit.
Is stimulating conversation addictive? Is reading material deleterious? At some point the buck has to stop with the individual’s own judgement.
HN fits the pattern of addictive behaviour. (Trigger -> Action -> Variable Reward).
You are triggered to come here when you’re bored. Your action is simple loading (or reloading) the page. The variable reward is that you get interesting content and discussions...but you never know what they will be.
Over time this pattern of behaviour becomes habitual. You probably open Hacker News at similar times of the day in similar situations.
This basic pattern applies to all social media products. It’s very well understood and a key part of modern software design.
That logic could define almost anything as addictive, including food, books, conversation or travel.
People come to HN because it's interesting. If something more interesting arrives (like children!), then they often stop coming as much or at all.
So wake me up when there is a large collection of stories about people who lost their job, their wife, or who neglected their kids because they were posting to HN.
I've wrestled with this same question, and I'm not quite sure where I stand. Maybe HN is like nicotine gum, still the same chemicals and neural pathways being activated, but a better substitute for a user who can't just quit cold turkey and replace the addiction with a more productive habit.
On the other hand, if I want to be more charitable to HN (or possibly to rationalize my own addiction), I see Hacker News as a kind of social circle , like an English cofeehouse in the 18th century where thoughtful people congregate to discuss what they see as the important issues of the time.
I've completely gotten rid of facebook with the help of News Feed Eradicator, I don't have an Instagram (though I rarely will get caught up recursively stalking people which leads to feelings of envy / contempt / anomie), and I find most of reddit to be utterly banal pop culture TV-for-the-internet.
So, maybe hacker news is an addiction, but the social aspects of being able to connect with all of these brilliant people, that I otherwise wouldn't, and hear their thoughts and experiences is something I find extremely valuable, addiction or not.
It does! But it is the coffee kind of addictiveness, you know "scientists say it's good for you and you'll live longer, get anti-oxidants and so on" not heroin type "you'll sell everything you have and live on the streets" addictiveness. But at the same time those who are addicted usually say "they don't have a problem" so...
things I am (currently) addicted to: coffee, hackernews, news, computers, programming, problem-solving/puzzles, youtube/shows/movies, games/poker, reading articles, ...
I think we need to be aware of what we are (currently) addicted to. The author of the like button has been able to break free of social media, and like a former smoker, it sounds as if he is on a crusade to help others break free too. I am unsure that democracy/capitalism as the author describes is working/evil -- both are 'like' systems that allow a person to choose and receive a reward, and we can choose not to participate. There are worse systems. And, perhaps we can create better ones.
I can see it, but the end result is actually beneficial to the "user." The draw is karma (likes) and replies. Unlike most social media, you are rewarded with knowledge and thoughtful discussion for the most part.
I wonder if someone could come up with a compulsive trigger for general education. That would be something.
Yes. I went away a few months ago with my fiancé for 4 days and we did an unofficial smartphone detox. We just got there and said to each other, why not turn the phone data off and leave the phones in the corner of the room. So we did. The holiday was very relaxing.
But the most interesting part was when we got back. When I jumped onto hacker news I was overwhelmed by all the headlines about totally different things all simultaneously being interpreted by my brain as must reads. It was total overload, and not at all what I was expecting. The Hacker News feed is it’s own kind of brain hack. I wonder how much more pleasant (but less addictive surely) it would be if each page had say 5 headlines with a few paragraphs underneath. Like a newspaper.
Another interesting thing that i’ve Observed since I started observing my Hacker News usage: I read maybe 2 paragraphs of an article then read the top 3 or 4 comments then go to the next thing. I don’t stop until I have some kind of realization about something. Or I see my own views on something validated. Then I put the phone down seemingly satisfied. It seems I come here for the hit of dopamine that comes from “you learnt a thing” or “people agree with your view on a thing”. The addictive part seems to stem from this. I stay here until I get that moment.
I seem to ignore the "people agree with your view on a thing" or at least it doesn't satisfy. I already know people agree with me or don't - so rationally I don't search for that.
But I definitely experience the "you learnt a thing" addiction. And frankly, I don't know how to feel about that. If that's the thing I'm searching a hit for... do I need to stop that?
I think probably yes - but I'm not sure why. When I thought deeply about it and talked with a friend about it, we somewhat came to a consensus that as long as you still do a significant amount of deep reading, thinking, work, etc per day these little hits of "learnt a thing" probably are fine to endulge.
It's when you're always only "learnt a thing" and never digging deeply into them and applying them that you have a problem.
But what's the right balance? Or is some hits of learnt a thing always bad?
The main difference is that the people who run it aren't getting rich directly from harming its users. That's why we don't see a constant stream of new features that make our experience worse.
Ever see that photo of Mark Zuckerberg surrounded by hundreds of people in VR headsets? The backstory of the original Matrix movie doesn't seem as far fetched anymore.
Not only that but I believe the look on his face was one of joy or at least accomplishment. The media parroted that spin.
That said, metaphorically we're already in The Matrix. Humans were just fuel for the system. When I see so many over-weight/obese "consumers" I can't help but think how happy the system is to have them; how well they're fulfilling their role. VR glasses will simply close the loop.
Consuming (i.e., food, clothing,fuel,etc.) is the "energy" that drives The Matrix. Humans are mere consumers. That's how they're refered to. That's how we refer to ourselves.
The fact that we're choosing ro over-consume to the point of killing ourselves and killing to planet is about as dystopian as it gets.
This excellent article fails to mention artificial intelligence. Facebook has recruited one of the world’s top AI teams, led by Yann LeCun. Their work and Google's are the equivalent of tobacco companies engineering cigarettes to ensure that nicotine hits a smoker's brain more quickly. Facebook and other social networks are the cigarette companies of the mind. Cigarettes blackened our lungs with tar, and social media blacken our brains with distraction, alienation, envy, and loneliness.
Social media networks will become ever more addictive, and by using AI to increase the click-through rate on the ads, they will squeeze ever more money out of their addicts. AI will be essential to the "capture and sale of attention," as Tim Wu puts it, walking users from curiosity to the cash register more and more efficiently.[0]
Lewis is right to focus on addiction. Especially because behavioral addictions are easier to ignore than addictions to substances slung on street corners. But they amount to the same thing: you want something, but you don't want to want it, and being unable to resist it, you sabotage your own life. Addictions turn our brains against us.
In a prescient 2010 essay, PG warned of the acceleration of online addictions, and the lag between the introduction of an addictive product and society's response to it.[1]
Capitalism is an accelerant for addictive behavior, and we are only just realizing how unhappy people become as a result of the marketplace’s newest and most insidious products. What's worse, the necessary functions performed by our phones and the Internet are fatefully tangled with the apps that addict us. They put the heroin next to the tap water.
For anyone interested in a fictional account of American society as a tapestry of addictions, Infinite Jest will change the way you think. It's all about that buzz.[2]
Full disclosure: I prompted Paul Lewis to write this piece.
Thanks for your part in getting this story published!
If you have not seen it, the BBC series "The Century of the Self" details the pre-history of these tendencies in the creation of the public relations industry by Freud's nephew Edward Bernays [0]. It is truly fascinating and horrific -- all 4 or 5 hours of it!
Social media/big data has also made the consumer a (not fully willing or conscious) _producer_ of mass addiction, through the exploitation of their social graph data. There is a fictive "work contract": give me your data and we'll give you your buzz. This relationship is based on unwaged work. What if this work, the value of it to BigTech, were recognized? It leaves open the possibility of mass refusal. And in some sense how people use social media now is already composed of many types of refusal, some more and some less effective. To state one obvious way -- Facebook is used around the world as a tool for political organizing. The fact that this makes it an even more valuable commodity for repressive governments, starting with the US government, does not stop us from using it and finding it effective, does not stop us from getting together "in real life".
More needs to be said about the social basis of addiction. It's not only ad scientists pushing well-studied biological buttons. It's the trauma of living a society that locks up an insane number of people, puts its children on psychotropic drugs, poisons them with toxic environments and toxic fast food, separates poor children from their mothers, criminalizes their survival, abandons entire communities after natural disasters, bulldozes neighborhoods to make way for hi-rise condos no one can afford, etc. Or the even bigger trauma of living in a world that has the guns & money of this toxic society pointed at them, literally or potentially, every day, forcing migrations and threatening survival of entire populations.
All of these things come into play when we look at why virtual realities are more attractive than real ones, and lead us to have some sympathy for those who use them for networking with others and temporary escape.
If you have not seen it, I recommend reading some of Gabor Mate's work on addiction, for instance "In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts".[1]
Your analogy of cigarette companies and Facebook was accurate but deeply shocking, I felt a chill in my hands and almost lost my grip on my phone.
I’ve always wondered if in the near future, working for Facebook and Google might be considered shameful, just like how working for Big Tobacco became. I remember one person from college who got a job with a tobacco company promoting Reynolds brands cigarettes to his regions Walgreens and Gas Stations. Despite making more than me (and I’m a Linux / AWS Engineer), he was ashamed, didn’t have a LinkedIn, and would tell people he was unemployed.
The cigarette company analogy also includes the "secondhand smoke"-style problem: Even if I don't personally use their services, I'm still exposed to the problem indirectly with gmail/GA/etc.
"Capitalism is an accelerant for addictive behavior"
I'm not sure that what we have would be described as capitalism any more. If you buy FB stock, are they using that to build new machines that pay dividends over time?
You can make an analogy involving software, sure, but it really seems quite different to me. The way I think about it is this: if we all had amnesia and forgot that company XYZ existed, would it still have any value? Under traditional capitalism, yes, they would just need to advertise a bit and rebuild their customer base. But FB and google would be worth close to zero no matter how much software they have.
How much amnesia are we talking about? Google's core feature of being the best web search engine fits into your "advertise a bit and rebuild the customer base" criterion imo.
If google only had 10% of the search traffic it wouldn't just be smaller, it would be as irrelevant as Bing. So they would somehow need to advertise their way into a dominant position again, which is much harder than advertising just to bootstrap and aquire some custoners.
Articulating social media restraint as a health practice is a powerful idea. Family legend has it that my grandmother threw out her cigarettes and quit smoking the day she heard the Surgeon General's smoking warning on the radio in 1964. Having a scientifically backed recommendation for social media would provide a foundation for adults to make better decisions about their mental health.
Infinite Jest is worth the read, it's funny but potent stuff. I'm still struck by the way it depicts the ultimate futility of addiction/pleasure-as-a-goal through the impact of the "Entertainment".
Playing to our biological urges is what makes most economies function. Only the details have changed: last century it was tobacco, today it's social media.
Will we transcend the instincts that got us here, or will we become perpetual slaves to a finely tuned techno-capitalist system we don't understand?
I'm going to make a prediction. If you are correct with the analogy of comparing FB to modern cigarettes (and I am inclined to believe you've hit the nail in the head here), then FB is going to find a way to make money off of two more categories of people.
1: Those who do not use FB, and who make every effort not to be under their influence; and more importantly..
2: Those who do use FB and want to limit their exposure, along with the damage that have endured.
If there is a way to turn the second group into a lucrative business case, FB will make sure they have a piece. After all - throughout the history of the human race, few things have been more profitable than selling both the poison and the cure.[ß]
ß: Incidentally, we have already seen this, perhaps by accident, with the very same tobacco industry you made the comparison to. Tobacco industry sells addictive nicotine products. The pharmaceutical industry sells what they can to make money off of that addiction. Both industries are required to manage their wealth responsibly... and via an intermediary or three, own decent chunks of each other. The more money they individually leech off of their customers, the bigger the second bite is.
I think your post and this sort of article is a lot of hype and hysterical morality-panicking over nothing.
Google has been using AI techniques to optimise ad targeting for 15 years now, certainly since around the time they floated (I used to work there so I know this for sure). These techniques were very successful. Nothing the algorithms did was based around weird psychological hacks, it was mostly to do with NOT showing people irrelevant junk that wasted their time and attention.
You need AI at scale to stop these systems doing stuff like showing tampon ads to men, or video game ads to elderly women. But nobody sane would describe these outcomes as even remotely the same as "addiction", even though they increased click through rates a lot. To do so makes a mockery of people who suffer with actual addictions.
This sort of article in the Guardian presents vague handwaving that sounds superficially intellectual without actually being so. The goal is to whip up hysteria to justify some crusade against tech companies, when the actual problem is not addiction but rather people who actually quite enjoy social media but perhaps feel a pressure or expectation that they should be doing something else.
Two related books you may find of interest along the lines of Paul Graham's insightful "The Acceleration of Addictiveness" essay:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_Stimuli
"Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose is a book by Deirdre Barrett published by W. W. Norton & Company in 2010. Barrett is a psychologist on the faculty of Harvard Medical School. The book argues that human instincts for food, sex, and territorial protection evolved for life on the savannah 10,000 years ago, not for today’s densely populated technological world. Our instincts have not had time to adapt to the rapid changes of modern life. The book takes its title from Nikolaas Tinbergen's concept in animal ethology of the supernormal stimulus, the phenomena by which insects, birds, and fish in his experiments could be lured by a dummy object which exaggerated one or more characteristic of the natural stimulus object such as giant brilliant blue plaster eggs which birds preferred to sit on in preference to their own. Barrett extends the concept to humans and outlines how supernormal stimuli are a driving force behind today’s most pressing problems, including modern warfare, obesity and other fitness problems, while also explaining the appeal of television, video games, and pornography as social outlets."
And also "The Pleasure Trap" from 2006 by Douglas Lisle and Alan Goldhamer, which is mainly about food but much the same idea. They say humans are adapted to eat a certain variety of nutritious foods. But modern industry has made it possible for businesses to sell large quantities of tasty but non-nutritious foods which people get used to. The foods destroy people's health over time in various ways by malnutrition from missing micronutrients and fiber which leads to cancer, heart disease, stroke, and so on. Getting back to enjoying healthy eating generally requires four to twelve weeks of suffering through "neuroadaptation" to appreciate the more subtle tastes of whole healthy foods. The book is summarized here in detail:
http://web.archive.org/web/20160418155513/http://www.drfuhrm...
Here are some other related books emphasizing how children are being harmed by pervasive commercial media and what parents can do (all easier said than done) include:
* "The Cyber Effect: A Pioneering Cyberpsychologist Explains How Human Behavior Changes Online"
* "Reset Your Child's Brain: A Four-Week Plan to End Meltdowns, Raise Grades, and Boost Social Skills by Reversing the Effects of Electronic Screen-Time"
* "Glow Kids: How Screen Addiction Is Hijacking Our Kids-and How to Break the Trance"
* "So Sexy So Soon: The New Sexualized Childhood and What Parents Can Do to Protect Their Kids"
* "The War Play Dilemma: What Every Parent And Teacher Needs to Know"
Or, as I summarize in my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."
Something that helps a lot is to be ruthless with notifications on a smartphone. I basically have it set to only bother me for calls, SMS, and chat apps. Everything else is turned off.
And whenever I get a new phone, it surprising how bad the defaults are. Basically every apps default is to spam notifications.
I tried that before. Twitter still thought it was vitally important to notify me that Beyonce was pregnant. That was the last straw that made me delete it.
I consider it a luxury to not need to carry a phone. I only know where my phone currently is because I made the effort to find it.
I have a couple of dollars and can afford lots of luxuries. Yet, it's the things I don't do that seem the most luxurious.
I spent years tethered to my phone. I was on call, at all hours of the day and in pretty much any location. To not be beholden to a cell phone is true luxury.
I do use it to browse when I'd otherwise be idle. I do sometimes email from it. I do SMS, MMS, call, and take a picture once in a while. I use a dedicated GPS and MP3 player, as needed. That's about it.
There aren't any apps on it that it didn't come with. Other than a few settings, I've only really modified the ring tones. I sometimes use it as an alarm clock, if I'm on the road.
Hell, I don't even have voicemail configured. You can call up the provider and they will disable it, if you've already set it up and change your mind.
I did give smartphones my attention but I've since realized how much happier I am without being beholden to it. It's a personal thing, but I'm happier not being obligated to answer the phone, or to respond in a timely manner.
It works for me. I expect many people are much happier with their Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and the likes. If someone wants my attention bad enough, my door is unlocked. Everyone else has learned to be patient. I'll respond when I have both time and motivation.
I get basically no notifications except for IMs, important emails, and direct slack mentions. I occasionally scan facebook on my phone but I only do it like once a day.
That's exactly my setup. For the past year or even longer I've unsubscribed from basically every automated email that hit my inbox (or off to spam if unsubscribe is behind a login). Additionally I've got a huge list of muted words on twitter, mostly "politics in tech" buzz words. It's a much better experience.
Trying to replace hacker news with a hn newsletter now, but so far not really successful. But well, there are worse things.
I use it with recommended settings + any social media. I thinking about adding linkedin to the list. Maybe one day Hacker news also :)
I now use a basic phone after years using a iphone.
You know why?
I had some jobs interviews 2 years ago, and I had many problem to answer basic questions. I felt a so powerfull programmer.. But my memory was not as strong that I though.
I remember how it was before, when I was in my university. I used to know how to learn new things. And at 34 I cant think its just age. I think that google already hi jack a part of my learning process...
I can't work without google or searching SO time to time but I will for sure stop using social media, and I will try more and more to learn like I used to. Like watching video and taking note on a real paper.
But for next generations that is a real problem I think
I recommend reading The Shallows, by Nicholas Carr.
I found it to be a pretty well researched look into the way heavy internet use can change our brains.
Although the book was good on its own, I also found its references section helpful as a launching point to discover other interesting books and academic papers on related topics.
lol Okay, Freud. Tell us something every marketing student in community college doesn't already know. People can be persuaded. People have addictions. Cool story, bro.
Can we hijack this loop to create or reinforce good habits instead of selling ad space? Can we use the skinner box to dole out intangible rewards for activities with real, long-term benefits like exercising and eating better? This looks like an obvious opportunity to me, so what work is being done in this area?
I think that was pretty close to the basic premise behind a lot of public broadcasting 30+ years ago (the bits I've seen lately strike me as more commercialized, but I'm not sure whether that's a change in the shows or in my perspective). There's a lot of contention underneath that topic, but the fundamentals of shows like Sesame Street or Mister Rogers' Neighborhood are much closer to what you describe than to modern television and gaming material.
For all its downsides and astroturfing, reddit actually does some pretty good things in that regard. Some of the best posts on there are when people go out of their way to be, you know, human towards other humans. There are subreddits out there dedicated towards exercising and eating better... the orange you-got-a-new-response seratonin-bump envelop icon appears when people give social acknowledgements towards someone's exercise progress or meal prep.
It most definitely gets co-opted... karma whoring, reposting, marketing campaigns posing as that goodwill to the kid in the children's hospital with cancer amateur picture... but that's exactly what this article is about: the forces of maximizing shareholder value find what works and wiggle their way in.
The resistant subreddits appear to be the ones that look at it as a human problem, not something needing a technical fix. That is, they create community rules around what is acceptable content and what isn't welcome, they encourage the content that furthers the subreddit's mission, they moderate away content that seems to break the rules, etc. Some communities are even organized around recognizing these things (eg r/hailcorporate)
Again, all of that can be (and does get!) co-opted for evil, but there are methods that can make groups in social media more resistant.
Problem is at the end of the day, those things don't pay the bills. Ultimately you need to find a way to align profits with good habits. Until we find that, go hit the donate link on the Guardian article. And I think Wikipedia was doing a fundraising campaign recently too.
I've been trying to figure out how to implement this for myself. Increase friction to tasks that do not provide long term reward (e.g. video games, social media) and decrease friction to tasks that work toward goals I'll be stoked to have achieved 2 years from now. What I haven't figured out yet is how to do a reward system. I need random jackpot noises to play each time I get something done.
Responsive and sensitive to human sentiments AI seems to be the modern Frankenstein monster.
Right now it's about attention grabbing and using machine learning to connect content to consumers in the most addictive way in order to show advertisements on the side. How long will it take until the content itself is artificially generated on demand to fit the mental state of each and every recipient individually? What are the unintended consequences of the ever advancing technology of automatic manipulation?
I think the most frightening part of this excellent article was, "how do we know it has not already happened?"
Is it not obvious that a search algorithm for maximizing a revenue function, devoid of ethics, eventually becomes a search algorithm for identifying and exploiting human weaknesses?
AI/machine learning is just a way to optimize this function further.
Gosh, if only the existing ones were even remotely enforceable.. There's a lot of good stuff there, but the phrase "talking to a wall" comes to mind when I read it.
There's evidence that the self-awareness and intent commonly believed to be "free will" could be be a post-hoc illusion generated by the brain after decision making occurs[0]. How can something which may not even exist, or which doesn't even have an objective definition, be a right?
Internet is full of Information, good and bad. So is social media. But we should take purpose driven approach whenever we are online. Instead of getting ourselves trapped into psychologically designed products, we should remain focus on our purpose.
I recently installed Android Oreo on my 6P sans browser. No Google search app, no browser, no Facebook, no Twitter. I still have Slack, email, calendar and SMS for work, maps, Lyft, spothero, Spotify, and podcasts for travel. So far the phone is working great, only had to install aosp browser component to keep apps like Gmail functional.
Elevator rides are very different. I'm curious to see how this will work out in the long run. I figure if it's worth opening up a browser, it's also worth opening up laptop.
410 comments
[ 1.2 ms ] story [ 203 ms ] thread— Donald Knuth (http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html)
Email seems to be an analogy for communication or perceiving information, or at least a predecessor of more fast-paced forms of that.
Could it be these new forms are so efficient and fast-paced, they overload our brain? Before the TV (which had limitations at start as well), there was telephone and radio. Both were limited. Telephone was expensive (monopoly yada yada), and radio informative (before the ~60s).
What Knuth did is enforce snail mail. This creates an artificial barrier, increasing signal to noise ratio.
-- Joseph Wood Krutch
I realise that the balance of this particular equation is different for everyone, but I also think many people are convinced they will be missing out when in reality they won't be.
https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Work-Focused-Success-Distracted/...
As Socrates's says “The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.”
Not mention the shocking depravity of shaving and painting statues blue
For example if you're a user interface designer or wearables programmer, then you'd benefit from the recent papers from these PhD students more than you'd benefit from spending hours trying to find meaningful content on reddit or twitter https://www.hcii.cmu.edu/people/phd-students
I found myself in the middle of a category theory exercise stuck. I wasn't getting anywhere, and couldn't figure something out. Break time, so I opened my RSS reader. Even if my RSS reader has curated content, it's easy to read. An article about urban planning here, optimizing latency there, and before I know it, an hour has passed. I spent none of that time focusing on my problem, and I'm just as stuck as ever.
I think, at least for me, I need to stem this constant flow of information. I need to take time to step aside of it, live without it, then get back.
That lecture drastically reduced the time I spend now finding answers which usually I found myself drifting into the attention economy while I stopped working to search for things.
He talked about it in multiple places, but Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself (an interview) discusses it a lot.
https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/7144014-although-of-co...
Also, the literary broken narrative effected by story-length footnotes that had story-length endnotes imitates the short/shattered attention span experience of living that DFW was already able to feel and express—and Infinite Jest was published over twenty years ago.
I escaped into Infinite Jest to survive a period of deep depression, denial, and directionlessness, so that shattered consciousness was pretty easy to relate to at the time.
(This miight be the one - “informing ourselves to death”: https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&t=1487&v=fuRVxW... )
Its interactive nature is another difference of kind not shared with books or television and likely to increase its addictiveness.
> Television will achieve its apotheosis when it is interactive.
> Of course, some people think they have that now. For some people, TV reality is as much of a reality as what they move through most of the day. I remember listening to two people I used to work with discussing the horrible burden a character on a TV series would have to bear for causing someone's death in a fire. These were not uneducated or isolated people; they had simply been drawn in so far, they were projecting the characters well beyond the end of the show -- indeed, beyond the life of the series itself. And we've all heard amusing stories about actors who play soap opera villains suddenly attacked by irate viewers who cannot separate actor and character, Maybe more people can't than can -- the host of Death Valley Days was President of the United States for eight years.
> Does TV encourage, or even induce, schizophrenia? Or does it create a separate reality in conjunction with our minds, something that is neither totally our inner life nor totally TV. The networks might call that programming.
Marshall McLuhan explained how humans see tools - such as media - as an "extension of ourselves". It's important to keep this in mind when creating tools or types of media: you're also defining part of the human that uses the tool.
[1] The short story "Patterns" was originally published in the August 1987 issue of Omni.
http://www.marshallmcluhanspeaks.com/lecture/1977-man-and-me...
What explains the pointlessness of most published TV criticism is that television has become immune to charges that it lacks any meaningful connection to the world outside it. It's not that charges of nonconnection have become untrue. It's that any such connection has become otiose. Television used to point beyond itself. Those of us born in like the sixties were trained to look where it pointed, usually at versions of "real life" made prettier, sweeter, better by succumbing to a product or temptation. Today's Audience is way better trained, and TV has discarded what's not needed. A dog, if you point at something, will look only at your finger.
[0] https://www.thefreelibrary.com/E+unibus+pluram:+television+a...
"The Mirror of Erised is an ancient, ornate mirror. It has clawed feet and a gold frame... The mirror shows the most desperate desire of a person's heart, a vision that has been known to drive men mad."
"Men have wasted away before it, not knowing if what they have seen is real, or even possible." —Albus Dumbledore explaining the danger of the mirror to Harry Potter
http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/Mirror_of_Erised
Get hooked at young ages, and their tastes develop around the overly sweet/salty foods. Thus becoming adults still addicted to them. Especially with marketing to young children(Animals, Colorful packaging, etc).
Combined with the both parents working, 'busier' modern lifestyle lots of families don't have time to cook 'real' food or dinners. So quick and easy food with low nutritional value is substituted.
Anecdotal, but I've noticed that higher caliber restaurants have very subtle flavors. As opposed to mass produced/fast food that tend have very strong flavors.
People who enjoy bland things always say this. :) Those words mean the same thing "to me", does mean it does to you, wasn't an insult, subtle just isn't a word I use for food. I like what I like and I've tasted things people use that word for, I call them bland.
I also think about distractions (pop ups, bullshit social media, etc) as interrupts that disrupt program execution. The mindfulness movement has organic parallels.
Is mainstream news nourishing to my brain?
The biggest story of the week (year?) has no leakers and limited facts. The media have made virtually no progress on explaining who this person was in Las Vegas.
We do have 12 sources that prove some DC douche called another douche a moron.
I am not letting the media run code on my cpu anymore. Their code doesn’t nourish.
There is a book on this idea "Infinite Distraction"
https://www.amazon.com/Infinite-Distraction-Theory-Dominic-P...
The idea being that our media experience is modulated in a way that people can't individually or collectively focus indignation.
It's a rough solution but simply dampening the strength of the signal is one way to manage our minds.
That's why I'm moving towards a smartwatch with cellular. I know I need to be connected, but to specific people, not to the information highway. (More information cul de sacs.)
I'm excited about the kind of lifestyle patterns we can design that would be more kind to ourselves but not any less performant.
I look forward to making more addictive programs that make me and shareholders more money. I am eager to see the next evolution of UI/experience and code, where we manage to get ever stronger feedback loops in place.
The end goal is to make money and have a good exit. To find a way to part people from their money, for the minimum effort on our our part and the best competitive release of value from our product for their time.
There’s of course diminishing returns to product quality - I mean after all, who wants to be craigslist and just do the one job good enough?
No no. We will buy out the competition or interesting startups and then expand our reach and label beyond the core product which must plateau out eventually.
Then we leverage this cross platform ability to gain more market share and dominate multiple verticals which lets us disrupt other industries.
Because if we don’t do it, someone else will. And this also has such amazing RoI!
And look at the amazing value we unlock, surfacing relevant ads all over our network.
But hey, you know not enough people are clicking on ads, so let’s push them Harder, we could model ourselves like those old companies we removed. Let’s hire some tv execs for their insight.
As For the big picture - well I’m sure there’s someone else whose job it is to worry about that.
If there is a problem we will solve it ourselves, us being the duty minded, un-incentivized corporations.
Yup. The future is shiny and usefulness is incidental.
We know that it isn’t good for us but we don’t realky have any idea just how destructive it is to not only the user but to society.
My analogy breaks down in that cigarettes have very little to 0 use where as the internet is in fact useful and can be safely used - much like sugar.
Especially interesting is paragraph 171, as it pertains to the recent concerns about AI and our increasing technological dependence. Note that he wrote this essay way back in 1995:
"What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and as machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more and more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide."
[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unabo...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops
http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html
"The Machine Stops" is a science fiction short story (12,300 words) by E. M. Forster. After initial publication in The Oxford and Cambridge Review (November 1909), the story was republished in Forster's The Eternal Moment and Other Stories in 1928. After being voted one of the best novellas up to 1965, it was included that same year in the populist anthology Modern Short Stories.[1] In 1973 it was also included in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Two.
"The story, set in a world where humanity lives underground and relies on a giant machine to provide their needs, predicted technologies such as instant messaging and the Internet."
I won't spoil the ending, but you can guess how it plays out.
Think about what your grandparents ate vs. what your parents ate (assuming you grew up in the U.S. and are in the 20's-30's age range. Anecdotally the effect seems to have been particularly strong in the midwest.). It's like night and day.
It's not a coincidence that the food was remade by large corporations during that time. And likewise it seems obvious to me that we will look back on this time in 20 years and see that big corporations were hacking the human brain, like they were hacking the human body 50 years ago.
Now I don't think it is a matter of evil people in dark boardrooms. But if you believe in capitalism, and you believe in biology, then this effect is almost inevitable. It would be surprising if it did NOT happen.
While it's hard to believe today, Kellogg's was founded by a health nut who was eager on bringing healthy grains to Americans. Once his descendants took over, they noticed how enriching their product with sugar increased sales. Kids specifically don't have necessary mental controls to recognize addictive behavior (which is why we have restrictions on sales of cigarettes and alcohol).
So bit by bit American breakfast table and grocery store cereal isle turned into varieties of concentrated sugar instead of the muesli, oats, granola and nuts mixes it was way back in the days.
Strictly speaking he was trying to prevent masturbation, but I see your point.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Harvey_Kellogg#Masturbati...
Medical historian Howard Markel addresses this in his recent book The Kelloggs, with some relevant aspects mentioned in this book-tour interview at KALW, Santa Monica:
[Dr. John Haarvey Kellogg] also was very chaste and reminded both his readers and his followers that sex outside of the marriage, of course, was not a good idea, but [that] sex for anything other than procreation really sapped the soul and sapped the spirit. And of course, he was very much opposed to masturbation of any kind, something he wrote about extensively and called "the solitary vice."
http://kalw.org/post/how-battling-kellogg-brothers-revolutio...
The Kelloggs' theories of nutition are fairly hit or miss. Corporatising the institution they created has not helped.
Overweight people eat more. Creating obese people needn't have been a corporate goal; a blind optimization process could have produced the same outcome. Just tweak the product until it sells more.
I guess the word "hacking" conveys intentionality, or an explicit goal, but I'm using it in the sense that it's "exploiting bugs" in human brains.
Human brains/bodies didn't evolve in a situation with unlimited supplies of fat, sugar, and salt. Likewise, human brains didn't evolve in a situation where you can have an instant audience of 1,000, 100K, or even 100M people.
If you consider facts of about human biology (we like fat, sugar, salt, and to belong to a social group, etc.), and if you understand what a powerful mechanism capitalism is, then it's not surprising that corporations could remake the entire food industry or remake our social lives / belief systems in the span of a single generation.
Whether it's intentional or not is perhaps a secondary issue. I'm saying that in the absence of any opposing force, it would be surprising if this phenomenon did NOT occur.
So I guess my takeaway is that it doesn't hurt to treat current social networks and tech products like smartphones as adversaries. Just like it is reasonable to treat McDonald's and cigarette companies as adversaries. They were designed to deliver concentrated pleasure to your brain without regard to long term consequences.
My impression is that tobacco was a traditional, social, harmless pleasure until "capitalist optimization" morphed it into something deadly and addictive.
(BTW there is evidence that the human brain grew bigger to keep track of our peer group, i.e. it didn't grow big in order to solve math problems. The social part of the brain is large and critical for survival.)
But since you mean companies just following the market gradient - that is precisely what happens.
> So I guess my takeaway is that it doesn't hurt to treat current social networks and tech products like smartphones as adversaries. Just like it is reasonable to treat McDonald's and cigarette companies as adversaries. They were designed to deliver concentrated pleasure to your brain without regard to long term consequences.
This is the key. The goal of companies is to make money off you, not to do good to you. If doing good to you helps them make money, they will do it. If screwing you over lets them make more money off you, they will screw you over. This is obvious both in observational evidence and in theory (if you look at the incentive structures of the market economy), and yet some people still persist in the belief that companies do only what consumers want, and that consumers have any agency in this process.
I believe one of their goals was to lower testosterone in general population, to make for a meeker and more easily controlled population. This probably wasn't a 'fully evil' goal, since the horrors of WW2 were recent, and some of them thought that they could prevent that from happening again by engineering a less aggressive population.
From the onset of 20th century at least, it was known that testosterone is responsible for 'manly' characteristics (aggressiveness etc); in 1935 it was synthesized from cholesterol by Lavoslav Ruzicka. So, by the end of WW2 it was already well known that a) testosterone is what makes people aggressive and b) body needs cholesterol to synthezise testosterone. With this information in hand, it's easy to conclude that to get a less aggressive population, one should make them eat less saturated fat/cholesterol.
Enter Ancel Keys, a military-related dietologist (he created the ww2 K-rations, for example). Before mid 1950s, he was making rational scientific research into good/bad foods, and even published some material about the negative health effects of 'grain' ie carbs. But by the mid 1950s he made a full 180 and started attacking saturated fats and cholesterol as the cause of (especially heart-related) health problems. He started using bad science (selectively choosing countries for study to confirm his claim that it's high fat and not high carb diet that causes health issues), and using his pull to silence everyone claiming otherwise.
In 1960s/1970s he was joined by the Big Agro/Food who poured a lot of money into continued shifting of the blame from carbs onto fat, including silencing and ostracizing scientists and studies who dared to claim otherwise; this is the 'conspiracy' that we are familiar with, but I believe it started even earlier, with Ancel Keys, military, and 'powers that be'.
During implementation of the Morgenthau Plan, Germans had to live with 1200 calories per day:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_in_occupied_Germany
And we all have a good excuse: there are great tools and best practices for publishing a development tool to other professionals. If you want to design something for a first week coder you have a lot more work to do, few examples to follow, and no obvious personal benefit.
Except the end result of that is that we sell computers to people which are useless for actual computing. All they give the average consumer is the opportunity to follow a path worn by someone like you or me.
We barely notice this, because we do have the ability to do real computation. We forget that it's something we are hoarding for ourselves.
I absolutely abhor and condemn his actions and what he had done, but his essay is absolutely brilliant, and is prescient, taking into account it was written way back in 1995.
He is wrong on many counts, but some paragraphs are interesting:
* You can’t get rid of the “bad” parts of technology and retain only the “good” parts.
* Technology is a more powerful social force than the aspiration for freedom.
* A technological advance that appears not to threaten freedom often turns out to threaten it very seriously later on.
* While technological progress AS A WHOLE continually narrows our sphere of freedom, each new technical advance CONSIDERED BY ITSELF appears to be desirable.
* Another reason why technology is such a powerful social force is that, within the context of a given society, technological progress marches in only one direction; it can never be reversed. Once a technical innovation has been introduced, people usually become dependent on it, so that they can never again do without it, unless it is replaced by some still more advanced innovation.
* Technicians tend to be so involved in their work (their surrogate activity) that when a conflict arises between their technical work and freedom, they almost always decide in favor of their technical work.
* In paragraph 127 we pointed out that if the use of a new item of technology is INITIALLY optional, it does not necessarily REMAIN optional, because the new technology tends to change society in such a way that it becomes difficult or impossible for an individual to function without using that technology.
* Will public resistance prevent the introduction of technological control of human behavior? It certainly would if an attempt were made to introduce such control all at once. But since technological control will be introduced through a long sequence of small advances, there will be no rational and effective public resistance. (See paragraphs 127, 132, 153.)
* What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and as machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more and more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.
* On the other hand it is possible that human control over the machines may be retained. In that case the average man may have control over certain private machines of his own, such as his car or his personal computer, but control over large systems of machines will be in the hands of a tiny elite—just as it is today, but with two differences. Due to improved techniques the elite will have greater control over the masses; and because human work will no longer be necessary the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system.
I hate his actions and his strategy, but it's a chilling read.
[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unabo...
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15423287
[2]: https://overcast.fm/+FaTQX2SRE
that's been here for at least a couple years and even normies are talking about it.
edit: thanks for the downvotes, appmakers
If there was a tech equivalent of "don't get high on your own supply", that was it.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=steve+jobs+doesn%27t+let+kid...
Just because he was smart and did some things right doesn’t mean he has some secret wisdom in unrelated fields, here.
https://www.cancer.org/cancer/pancreatic-cancer/detection-di...
YouTube can make overnight superstars just through the recommendation system.
A great little book on the conflict inherent in advertising-driven media, from 1909:
https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft
1) HN has less content, so it is much easier to run out of things to look at.
2) Its content is less digestible on average, so you don't get nearly as deep into "mindless info consumption" mode.
That being said, it definitely has those characteristics to an extent.
Facebook and Twitter are notorious for producing disastrous results among individuals careless with their identity. Reddit permits the free creation of pseudonyms, but the material is less engaging and currated with less rigor.
I wouldn’t rate HN as “addictive” since there aren’t any real barriers to ignoring the site, and it lacks the kind of reach other sites have in “finding you.” This is to say that the usage patterns of the other sites you mention, saturate social circles so thoroughly, that it’s hard to not hear them mentioned in daily conversation.
You may prefer HN, and it may fill certain gaps in regular daily activity, alleviating boredom to an extent, but if you find it infectous, that’s merely a reflection of the intellectual personas that get moderated into your attention based on merit.
Is stimulating conversation addictive? Is reading material deleterious? At some point the buck has to stop with the individual’s own judgement.
You are triggered to come here when you’re bored. Your action is simple loading (or reloading) the page. The variable reward is that you get interesting content and discussions...but you never know what they will be.
Over time this pattern of behaviour becomes habitual. You probably open Hacker News at similar times of the day in similar situations.
This basic pattern applies to all social media products. It’s very well understood and a key part of modern software design.
People come to HN because it's interesting. If something more interesting arrives (like children!), then they often stop coming as much or at all.
So wake me up when there is a large collection of stories about people who lost their job, their wife, or who neglected their kids because they were posting to HN.
On the other hand, if I want to be more charitable to HN (or possibly to rationalize my own addiction), I see Hacker News as a kind of social circle , like an English cofeehouse in the 18th century where thoughtful people congregate to discuss what they see as the important issues of the time.
I've completely gotten rid of facebook with the help of News Feed Eradicator, I don't have an Instagram (though I rarely will get caught up recursively stalking people which leads to feelings of envy / contempt / anomie), and I find most of reddit to be utterly banal pop culture TV-for-the-internet.
So, maybe hacker news is an addiction, but the social aspects of being able to connect with all of these brilliant people, that I otherwise wouldn't, and hear their thoughts and experiences is something I find extremely valuable, addiction or not.
I think we need to be aware of what we are (currently) addicted to. The author of the like button has been able to break free of social media, and like a former smoker, it sounds as if he is on a crusade to help others break free too. I am unsure that democracy/capitalism as the author describes is working/evil -- both are 'like' systems that allow a person to choose and receive a reward, and we can choose not to participate. There are worse systems. And, perhaps we can create better ones.
I wonder if someone could come up with a compulsive trigger for general education. That would be something.
But the most interesting part was when we got back. When I jumped onto hacker news I was overwhelmed by all the headlines about totally different things all simultaneously being interpreted by my brain as must reads. It was total overload, and not at all what I was expecting. The Hacker News feed is it’s own kind of brain hack. I wonder how much more pleasant (but less addictive surely) it would be if each page had say 5 headlines with a few paragraphs underneath. Like a newspaper.
Another interesting thing that i’ve Observed since I started observing my Hacker News usage: I read maybe 2 paragraphs of an article then read the top 3 or 4 comments then go to the next thing. I don’t stop until I have some kind of realization about something. Or I see my own views on something validated. Then I put the phone down seemingly satisfied. It seems I come here for the hit of dopamine that comes from “you learnt a thing” or “people agree with your view on a thing”. The addictive part seems to stem from this. I stay here until I get that moment.
But I definitely experience the "you learnt a thing" addiction. And frankly, I don't know how to feel about that. If that's the thing I'm searching a hit for... do I need to stop that?
I think probably yes - but I'm not sure why. When I thought deeply about it and talked with a friend about it, we somewhat came to a consensus that as long as you still do a significant amount of deep reading, thinking, work, etc per day these little hits of "learnt a thing" probably are fine to endulge.
It's when you're always only "learnt a thing" and never digging deeply into them and applying them that you have a problem.
But what's the right balance? Or is some hits of learnt a thing always bad?
http://www.marshallmcluhanspeaks.com/lecture/1977-man-and-me...
Alvin Toffler's Future Shock also has several quite striking observations.
http://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-virtual-reali...
That said, metaphorically we're already in The Matrix. Humans were just fuel for the system. When I see so many over-weight/obese "consumers" I can't help but think how happy the system is to have them; how well they're fulfilling their role. VR glasses will simply close the loop.
Well, if we go with The Matrix, then these battery specimens so far have only been storing energy, not releasing it.. =)
Consuming (i.e., food, clothing,fuel,etc.) is the "energy" that drives The Matrix. Humans are mere consumers. That's how they're refered to. That's how we refer to ourselves.
The fact that we're choosing ro over-consume to the point of killing ourselves and killing to planet is about as dystopian as it gets.
Sadly VR goggles might be our only hope.
"Keeping shopping."
And no one even notice. So perhaps there's some 1984 going on as well?
Social media networks will become ever more addictive, and by using AI to increase the click-through rate on the ads, they will squeeze ever more money out of their addicts. AI will be essential to the "capture and sale of attention," as Tim Wu puts it, walking users from curiosity to the cash register more and more efficiently.[0]
Lewis is right to focus on addiction. Especially because behavioral addictions are easier to ignore than addictions to substances slung on street corners. But they amount to the same thing: you want something, but you don't want to want it, and being unable to resist it, you sabotage your own life. Addictions turn our brains against us.
In a prescient 2010 essay, PG warned of the acceleration of online addictions, and the lag between the introduction of an addictive product and society's response to it.[1]
Capitalism is an accelerant for addictive behavior, and we are only just realizing how unhappy people become as a result of the marketplace’s newest and most insidious products. What's worse, the necessary functions performed by our phones and the Internet are fatefully tangled with the apps that addict us. They put the heroin next to the tap water.
For anyone interested in a fictional account of American society as a tapestry of addictions, Infinite Jest will change the way you think. It's all about that buzz.[2]
Full disclosure: I prompted Paul Lewis to write this piece.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Attention-Merchants-Scramble-Inside-H...
[1]http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Infinite-Jest-David-Foster-Wallace-eb...
If you have not seen it, the BBC series "The Century of the Self" details the pre-history of these tendencies in the creation of the public relations industry by Freud's nephew Edward Bernays [0]. It is truly fascinating and horrific -- all 4 or 5 hours of it!
Social media/big data has also made the consumer a (not fully willing or conscious) _producer_ of mass addiction, through the exploitation of their social graph data. There is a fictive "work contract": give me your data and we'll give you your buzz. This relationship is based on unwaged work. What if this work, the value of it to BigTech, were recognized? It leaves open the possibility of mass refusal. And in some sense how people use social media now is already composed of many types of refusal, some more and some less effective. To state one obvious way -- Facebook is used around the world as a tool for political organizing. The fact that this makes it an even more valuable commodity for repressive governments, starting with the US government, does not stop us from using it and finding it effective, does not stop us from getting together "in real life".
More needs to be said about the social basis of addiction. It's not only ad scientists pushing well-studied biological buttons. It's the trauma of living a society that locks up an insane number of people, puts its children on psychotropic drugs, poisons them with toxic environments and toxic fast food, separates poor children from their mothers, criminalizes their survival, abandons entire communities after natural disasters, bulldozes neighborhoods to make way for hi-rise condos no one can afford, etc. Or the even bigger trauma of living in a world that has the guns & money of this toxic society pointed at them, literally or potentially, every day, forcing migrations and threatening survival of entire populations.
All of these things come into play when we look at why virtual realities are more attractive than real ones, and lead us to have some sympathy for those who use them for networking with others and temporary escape.
If you have not seen it, I recommend reading some of Gabor Mate's work on addiction, for instance "In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts".[1]
[0] https://youtu.be/DnPmg0R1M04
[1] Interview with him: https://www.democracynow.org/2010/2/3/addiction
I’ve always wondered if in the near future, working for Facebook and Google might be considered shameful, just like how working for Big Tobacco became. I remember one person from college who got a job with a tobacco company promoting Reynolds brands cigarettes to his regions Walgreens and Gas Stations. Despite making more than me (and I’m a Linux / AWS Engineer), he was ashamed, didn’t have a LinkedIn, and would tell people he was unemployed.
I'm not sure that what we have would be described as capitalism any more. If you buy FB stock, are they using that to build new machines that pay dividends over time?
You can make an analogy involving software, sure, but it really seems quite different to me. The way I think about it is this: if we all had amnesia and forgot that company XYZ existed, would it still have any value? Under traditional capitalism, yes, they would just need to advertise a bit and rebuild their customer base. But FB and google would be worth close to zero no matter how much software they have.
Infinite Jest is worth the read, it's funny but potent stuff. I'm still struck by the way it depicts the ultimate futility of addiction/pleasure-as-a-goal through the impact of the "Entertainment".
Will we transcend the instincts that got us here, or will we become perpetual slaves to a finely tuned techno-capitalist system we don't understand?
1: Those who do not use FB, and who make every effort not to be under their influence; and more importantly..
2: Those who do use FB and want to limit their exposure, along with the damage that have endured.
If there is a way to turn the second group into a lucrative business case, FB will make sure they have a piece. After all - throughout the history of the human race, few things have been more profitable than selling both the poison and the cure.[ß]
ß: Incidentally, we have already seen this, perhaps by accident, with the very same tobacco industry you made the comparison to. Tobacco industry sells addictive nicotine products. The pharmaceutical industry sells what they can to make money off of that addiction. Both industries are required to manage their wealth responsibly... and via an intermediary or three, own decent chunks of each other. The more money they individually leech off of their customers, the bigger the second bite is.
Information I have is dated (~10 years) - Facebook had 'top' psychologists team working to design product behaviour.
Google has been using AI techniques to optimise ad targeting for 15 years now, certainly since around the time they floated (I used to work there so I know this for sure). These techniques were very successful. Nothing the algorithms did was based around weird psychological hacks, it was mostly to do with NOT showing people irrelevant junk that wasted their time and attention.
You need AI at scale to stop these systems doing stuff like showing tampon ads to men, or video game ads to elderly women. But nobody sane would describe these outcomes as even remotely the same as "addiction", even though they increased click through rates a lot. To do so makes a mockery of people who suffer with actual addictions.
This sort of article in the Guardian presents vague handwaving that sounds superficially intellectual without actually being so. The goal is to whip up hysteria to justify some crusade against tech companies, when the actual problem is not addiction but rather people who actually quite enjoy social media but perhaps feel a pressure or expectation that they should be doing something else.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_Stimuli "Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose is a book by Deirdre Barrett published by W. W. Norton & Company in 2010. Barrett is a psychologist on the faculty of Harvard Medical School. The book argues that human instincts for food, sex, and territorial protection evolved for life on the savannah 10,000 years ago, not for today’s densely populated technological world. Our instincts have not had time to adapt to the rapid changes of modern life. The book takes its title from Nikolaas Tinbergen's concept in animal ethology of the supernormal stimulus, the phenomena by which insects, birds, and fish in his experiments could be lured by a dummy object which exaggerated one or more characteristic of the natural stimulus object such as giant brilliant blue plaster eggs which birds preferred to sit on in preference to their own. Barrett extends the concept to humans and outlines how supernormal stimuli are a driving force behind today’s most pressing problems, including modern warfare, obesity and other fitness problems, while also explaining the appeal of television, video games, and pornography as social outlets."
And also "The Pleasure Trap" from 2006 by Douglas Lisle and Alan Goldhamer, which is mainly about food but much the same idea. They say humans are adapted to eat a certain variety of nutritious foods. But modern industry has made it possible for businesses to sell large quantities of tasty but non-nutritious foods which people get used to. The foods destroy people's health over time in various ways by malnutrition from missing micronutrients and fiber which leads to cancer, heart disease, stroke, and so on. Getting back to enjoying healthy eating generally requires four to twelve weeks of suffering through "neuroadaptation" to appreciate the more subtle tastes of whole healthy foods. The book is summarized here in detail: http://web.archive.org/web/20160418155513/http://www.drfuhrm...
Here are some other related books emphasizing how children are being harmed by pervasive commercial media and what parents can do (all easier said than done) include:
* "The Cyber Effect: A Pioneering Cyberpsychologist Explains How Human Behavior Changes Online"
* "Reset Your Child's Brain: A Four-Week Plan to End Meltdowns, Raise Grades, and Boost Social Skills by Reversing the Effects of Electronic Screen-Time"
* "Glow Kids: How Screen Addiction Is Hijacking Our Kids-and How to Break the Trance"
* "So Sexy So Soon: The New Sexualized Childhood and What Parents Can Do to Protect Their Kids"
* "The War Play Dilemma: What Every Parent And Teacher Needs to Know"
Or, as I summarize in my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."
And whenever I get a new phone, it surprising how bad the defaults are. Basically every apps default is to spam notifications.
And, if you can get away with it, don’t install work “productivity” apps like Slack and Asana on your personal phone.
Laptops seem just as bad now so I usually don not disturb my MBP as soon as I start my day.
I have a couple of dollars and can afford lots of luxuries. Yet, it's the things I don't do that seem the most luxurious.
I spent years tethered to my phone. I was on call, at all hours of the day and in pretty much any location. To not be beholden to a cell phone is true luxury.
There aren't any apps on it that it didn't come with. Other than a few settings, I've only really modified the ring tones. I sometimes use it as an alarm clock, if I'm on the road.
Hell, I don't even have voicemail configured. You can call up the provider and they will disable it, if you've already set it up and change your mind.
I did give smartphones my attention but I've since realized how much happier I am without being beholden to it. It's a personal thing, but I'm happier not being obligated to answer the phone, or to respond in a timely manner.
It works for me. I expect many people are much happier with their Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and the likes. If someone wants my attention bad enough, my door is unlocked. Everyone else has learned to be patient. I'll respond when I have both time and motivation.
- I have a gmail filter for emails that contain 'unsubscribe'. They skip my inbox so all emails I get are real ones I need to look at. (It's magic)
- I don't have facebook installed. Only messenger.
- Twitter notifications off.
- Snapchat notifications off. (Except direct snaps)
- Instagram notifications off except for comments.
- Slack notification only for direct messages or mentions.
- Installed 'News Feed Eradicator for Facebook' and broke the habit of passively scanning facebook when bored: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicat...
I get basically no notifications except for IMs, important emails, and direct slack mentions. I occasionally scan facebook on my phone but I only do it like once a day.
Trying to replace hacker news with a hn newsletter now, but so far not really successful. But well, there are worse things.
I can recommend K9 as the best self-control app.
I use it with recommended settings + any social media. I thinking about adding linkedin to the list. Maybe one day Hacker news also :)
I now use a basic phone after years using a iphone.
You know why?
I had some jobs interviews 2 years ago, and I had many problem to answer basic questions. I felt a so powerfull programmer.. But my memory was not as strong that I though.
I remember how it was before, when I was in my university. I used to know how to learn new things. And at 34 I cant think its just age. I think that google already hi jack a part of my learning process...
I can't work without google or searching SO time to time but I will for sure stop using social media, and I will try more and more to learn like I used to. Like watching video and taking note on a real paper.
But for next generations that is a real problem I think
I found it to be a pretty well researched look into the way heavy internet use can change our brains.
Although the book was good on its own, I also found its references section helpful as a launching point to discover other interesting books and academic papers on related topics.
The problem is training your brain to capture and monopolize that brief moment of boredom and inactivity.
It most definitely gets co-opted... karma whoring, reposting, marketing campaigns posing as that goodwill to the kid in the children's hospital with cancer amateur picture... but that's exactly what this article is about: the forces of maximizing shareholder value find what works and wiggle their way in.
The resistant subreddits appear to be the ones that look at it as a human problem, not something needing a technical fix. That is, they create community rules around what is acceptable content and what isn't welcome, they encourage the content that furthers the subreddit's mission, they moderate away content that seems to break the rules, etc. Some communities are even organized around recognizing these things (eg r/hailcorporate)
Again, all of that can be (and does get!) co-opted for evil, but there are methods that can make groups in social media more resistant.
Problem is at the end of the day, those things don't pay the bills. Ultimately you need to find a way to align profits with good habits. Until we find that, go hit the donate link on the Guardian article. And I think Wikipedia was doing a fundraising campaign recently too.
If you're not paying for it, you're the product.
Right now it's about attention grabbing and using machine learning to connect content to consumers in the most addictive way in order to show advertisements on the side. How long will it take until the content itself is artificially generated on demand to fit the mental state of each and every recipient individually? What are the unintended consequences of the ever advancing technology of automatic manipulation?
I think the most frightening part of this excellent article was, "how do we know it has not already happened?"
AI/machine learning is just a way to optimize this function further.
Perhaps it should?
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will
There is no reason for realtime feedback. Delay the feedback and lot of behaviour will return to "normal".
Elevator rides are very different. I'm curious to see how this will work out in the long run. I figure if it's worth opening up a browser, it's also worth opening up laptop.