What a coincidence. I copied this law to my collection of quotes, and the last entry was this:
"Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?"
There's the old adage: If you can't beat 'em, join 'em! Let's take that seriously. It has always been much easier to imitate the semblance of meaning than it was to find the substantively meaningful. Things with only the semblance of meaning have always proliferated. Idle talk, children's rhymes, songs, music, myths... all of these have always proliferated. Why did they not drown out actual meaning?
I think the above is one of the key questions for the survival of humanity. A part of the answer is that there has never been a clear demarcation between the meaningful and meaningless. There is valuable information in the structure of myth, songs, and idle talk.
It is clear that something in human beings acts as an effective filter for meaning and value. It is also clear that rationality isn't the totality of whatever this is, though it might be a part of it.
I would argue that those things historically have drowned out actual meaning, if by actual meaning you mean factually correct and significant information. Only with the advent of science have we been able to reliably sort the meaningless from the meaningful.
I think the major concern here, aside from the general deleterious effects of addiction of any sort on people, is that the tide of meaningless factoids and useless information is swelling and drowning out substantive, useful information which is generated with greater difficulty and spreads less easily.
A greater ratio of meaninglessness to meaningfulness is part of the problem, compounded by the aggressive way our attention is directed toward it. I think the filter you mention exists but is struggling in this environment more than in the recent past.
I would argue that those things historically have drowned out actual meaning,
Which is precisely why humanity didn't progress, never invented science, never improved human rights and the standard of living, and we died out in a state of primitive brutishness.
Clearly, actual meaning has found its way through, somehow.
I think the filter you mention exists but is struggling in this environment more than in the recent past.
What is your evidence for this? Can you quantify this in objective terms?
In comparison to the last few hundred years, and with a few notable exceptions in time and place, we have spent the great majority of the past not progressing. Compare the progress made from 10000 BCE to 1700 CE to the progress made since. The rate isn't zero but comparatively very low.
That said, I haven't put much thought into this viewpoint and was mostly extending the parent poster's idea. Proper discussion of this would require a great deal of care and nuance and I honestly don't feel like putting in the effort for that. Apologies if you were looking for a substantive debate.
I wouldn't put it that way. The problem is that a ton of the stuff impinging on us is not knowledge. It's propaganda, fluff, stupid memes, click bait, and systems with interfaces designed to be addictive and to act like Skinner boxes.
What I really see happening is a "part 2" repeat of the spam apocalypse that hit e-mail, Usenet, and other federated systems on the early Internet. In the late 1990s spam destroyed most of these systems. E-mail was so valuable it had to be saved, but saving it has mostly involved delegating it to a small oligopoly of vertically integrated e-mail providers with the resources to fight spam. Usenet and other less well known federated systems were destroyed.
I think we are now seeing a similar kind of spam assault against the open web, social media, and the news. The latter with the whole "fake news" phenomenon really resembles a Sybil attack. In recent years I've seen an avalanche of totally fake news sites that look like legitimate newspapers popped up (apparently from templates) and used to spam social media with a whole slew of unfounded allegations and other assorted bullshit. The role they've had in the election has gained a lot of press but it's in no way limited to that or even to politics. A lot of it seems to be shilling for quack medical products and other traditional mainstays of... spam!
I've started calling this whole phenomenon "spam 2.0." I'd define spam 2.0 as the semi-automated bulk creation of fake news outlets, fake social media profiles, and hoaxes and their use to engage in the coordinated manipulation of opinion.
I'm also anticipating the rise of spam 3.0. Spam 3.0 will be fully automated and AI-powered, with AI being used to create an individual "persuasive agent" for each human target. Think of it as massively parallel individual con artistry and/or "spear phishing" at scale. Social media companies are already pioneering this tech, but the spam apocalypse will really hit when it goes public and you can do it with readily available tools.
I find it rather depressing but for a while I've been predicting that the first use of AI that can (even borderline) pass the Turing test will be con artistry, cult indoctrination techniques, and demagoguery at scale. It's really pretty scary to the point that I'm wondering if the use of AI to persuade humans should be outlawed. Of course then you get the "then only criminals will have guns" effect. This is particularly true on the borderless Internet where it's unlikely to be outlawed everywhere. Users of this tech would just go offshore.
An alternative to outlawing might be to disseminate the tools as widely as possible to eliminate any comparative advantage and render the whole thing moot. If this destroys social media in the process then so be it. Going to happen anyway.
Edit: the bottom line is that "cognitive self-defense" is going to become a thing. These "warning signs for tomorrow" are becoming relevant:
> I'm also anticipating the rise of spam 3.0. Spam 3.0 will be fully automated and AI-powered, with AI being used to create an individual "persuasive agent" for each human target.
This already happens.
The other day I was exploring internet ads; I clicked on every one I saw to see where it would lead me. At one point I ended up on a dating website.
All of the profiles were good looking Asian ladies. Creating an account was free but messaging users cost you points. You have 15 free points so you can messages ladies but after that, you need to pay for points.
Problem is, all of those women were robots. Very good quality chatbots, you wouldn't know unless you were tech-savvy. (I pasted them each other messages and they broke) They use emotional manipulation in order to pressure you to answer. At first, it was simply "Hi!" but it quickly turned into "Please answer me you beautiful man" and then "I'm looking for a man like you in my bed".
You need to pay to answer, but also to do things such as change profile picture, post a message on a public profile, etc. The bots pressured you into doing those things.
In short, this means that there are already people using "AI" that pass Turing tests good enough to fool people in order to manipulate them into giving out their money.
I'm curious why this is getting downvoted without any response. You may not agree 100% but it's an interesting perspective nonetheless and certainly warrants a rebuttal instead of simply being hidden.
In particular, the idea of AI-driven ads to improve targeting to near-as-makes-no-difference perfect levels is rather unnerving. We're at a moment when the influence of companies or governments in social media is still somewhat obvious/trackable, often because it's driven by actual people. Making it better and then making it automated would result in a system where it would be basically impossible to tell the difference between ads and actual people.
Excellent comments, and very much on point about the Sybil attack. I should have seen that myself.
The spam relationship is a correct interpretation. More specifically: as any new medium or channel becomes influential enough, it will be sought by those who seek to use it to their ends: for commercial or financial return, or social or political power. And their means are distraction, disinformation, misinformation, and manipulation.
There's quite a body of literature on this topic, going back a few thousand years.
I don't think "knowledge" is necessarily what we're getting. I learn a lot more reading a single nonfiction book than I do in an equivalent amount of time spent on Twitter and Facebook.
This. I have been staunch anti-social media for a while now, but not long ago I heard someone from a community I'm involved in say that the conversation on twitter was actually pretty intelligent so I signed up. You hear about how it's good to use these sites because you occasionally get pearls of wisdom, Nassim Taleb (funny because he actually has a twitter account) referred to it as digging through mountains of shit to find diamonds, sure, you may find a diamond, but you'll also be covered in shit.
EDIT: Deleted my twitter account after a month, wanna nerf LinkedIn as well but that decision has professional impacts.
One can argue that this isn't really anything new - look back at the media hype for war surrounding an explosion of a certain U.S. warship. In 1898. Amusing, how the most vaunted prize in journalism is named for one of the most famous perpetrators of yellow journalism.
Social media is merely a slimmer middle man in that frenzied feedback loop, and the legacy media is upset that their slice of the pie is shrinking.
The difference is how we are connected now 100% with media (and mobile device notifications) where before people lived mainly unconnected and with cognitive "load" instead of cognitive offloading. Not saying that the past was better but rather than we need to build new cognitive/policy tools against new media.
You could say that a morning newspaper connected people 100% when that was a new thing. Phones/computers only connect us as often as we use them to connect.
For instance something like AR goggles with a constant ticker of information would connect us even more.
I think it's more accurate to simply say that we are more connected. In specifics that the 24 hour cycle of evening news and morning newspapers has changed into an on-demand system that pushes information to people that want to receive it and that anyone can pull it when they have free time.
Or the way that religions dominated the attentions of earlier times--with the occasional social surplus being squandered on cathedral building, crusades, heresy and it's suppression, pilgrimages, self-mortification etc.
I hate this argument so much, any along the lines of "people have always said this". It's not true that just because something has been raised as a concern before that it can't possible be a concern now. The world changes, as do the circumstances for engaging it.
Facebook quite literally connects more people across a single platform than any medium in history. That logo is the most-seen image in the world right now.
And the history of media change shows that it is tremendously disruptive. Something today's new-media moguls seem to be only just starting to realise. Or at least, admit.
As someone who works in tech, I like the analogy of a DoS attack. The root of the issue is attention capitalism. Our attention is essentially a resource being exploited for profit. In that scenario, we're effectivley no longer in control of our own free will as long as someone else can profit by controlling it. On an individual scale, we can give it relatively benign labels like "distraction". But when you look at it from macro scale it's effectively a DDoS attack on our free will perpetrated by all of the companies trying to get a slice of the pie of our attention.
> In that scenario, we're effectively no longer in control of our own free will as long as someone else can profit by controlling it.
This is a self contradiction. You always have the choice to turn off or tune out the distractions and focus your attention on more important things (which is the essence of free will). That people don't feel like doing that is a psychological problem not a problem with capitalism or profit seeking.
That raises interesting questions -- how much free will does an addict have? Are those who exploit an addiction for profit complicit in that addiction?
Behind every addict there's usually an enabler in some form. Sometimes there's a nasty feedback loop. Of course that doesn't negate human agency or its importance, however it makes for a convenient excuse. Agency seems unevenly distributed, but it also seems to vary within a single individual depending on what sorts of things they face and what excuses they have to avoid exercising it. Humans have a wide range of adaptations. In the modern world where even the very poor can live better than the wealthiest in olden times, exercising much agency isn't that important.
In London there are adverts on the steps I walk up on the underground. The busker spots are "sponsored". It's like the Clockwork Orange "aversion therapy" in terms of making you watch. I'm very aware of what the media is doing but it has to get through on some level. Much of advertising is telling you that you are incomplete and product x will complete you / cement friendships etc. Of course that is crap, but even just being told the first part has to have an effect.
The sentiment sounds like a good idea, but a nitpick. Google glass is not "mixed reality" or whatever the best term is. It's just a small display you can glance over to. It covers/integrates with nothing.
That's easy to say. But what if family, friends and work are so tied up with your phone that doing so would hurt too much? Sure, you can change your work and friends, and cut off your family, but that's hard.
For most, I think there are easy ways to massively reduce time spent on their phone without an adverse effect on career or relations otherwise, but that's predicated on a want to. Besides, I see plenty of people who are on their phone all the time, yet their life is almost void of physical interaction with others. I think it's very common to overestimate the importance of being "on", and even more common to think it has a positive effect on their lives.
It can be hard. It may be less painful to do it slowly and gradually over time rather than some sudden pronouncement.
To some degree, any time anyone says they "can't" do something like this, they are saying they don't want it bad enough. I have done a lot of rearranging of my life to get things to work in a satisfactory fashion. This includes but is not limited to changing my relationship to how I use my phone. I used to be a big phone person. I now do most stuff online. After a long time of doing very little with my phone, I am slowly doing more with it these days.
But there is also this: If your family, friends and work all are basically making you crazy, they would probably do so even if phones did not exist. So, this might be an indicator of deeper problems.
Or it might be an indicator that you aren't being driven as crazy as other people, so it just isn't really that important to you.
If you want to guess the outcome of a coin toss, no strings attached, you're completely free to choose heads or tails.
But a lot of bright minds are working very hard to convince you to pick up that phone and not the book. You're being told to pick tails by a man with a gun, offered a reward if you do and pain if you don't.
Perhaps this man is quieter for you, or maybe you have never let him in. But he is very real for a lot of people.
> You're being told to pick tails by a man with a gun
No, you are not. A man brandishing a gun and telling you do do something is threatening to kill you. Nobody at instafacetweet is going to kill you for ignoring their products or limiting your usage.
What we're dealing with isn't an armed strongman, but a clown. The clown really wants your attention and has a lot of tricks up his sleeve to get it, but regardless of the difficulty, ignoring him is not dangerous.
This is wrong because it looks exactly one layer deep and ignores the greater complexity.
Of course the answer to a DOS is to not accept the incoming requests. It's tricky to distinguish between the malicious requests and the legitimate ones, and doing so doesn't cost nothing. One way to break the defense of a DOS is to DOS the system that does the sorting.
Further, The "requests", in this case bids for our attention, exist on a spectrum from "legit" to "malicious"-- or more precisely "information I will endorse having gotten in long-term retrospect" to "information I will have wished I had no gotten in long term retrospect." So we're already fucked, because you can't even make that determination in a meaningful sense.
When do you eventually settle on a filter that is an approximation of the above, you'll find that it's trivial to DOS that filter too since we're made of meat and exist in a low trust environment.
You can live in the woods or whatever, but since you're posting on HN, I assume you haven't chosen that. And you can look at the other posts in this threads for examples of just how intrusive and unavoidable the bid for attention actually are.
And all this is only the first layer of complexity: the difficulty/impossibility of individually choosing to "free will" your way of this issue. The next layer is that we're not even talking about individuals. We're talking about Capitalism, by which I mean we're talking about systemic issues.
That's a whole different can of worms, but the headline is: in response to global, systemic issues if you find yourself saying a variation of "it's simple! humans just need to be different/better," then you're doing it wrong. You're missing most of the relevant dimensions, so you will not solve the problem, nor is your voice likely to be particularly helpful in the discussion about potential solutions.
I never denied it was complex, I denied that it was an attack on free will which is impossible. I think it is a real psychological problem and I think blaming capitalism or the "the system" or "the man", etc. are themselves rationalizations and misdirection that prey on people susceptible to suggestion or manipulation, i.e. emotionalism, to advance political agendas.
I challenge you to cross London without seeing or sensing an advert or artificial call to buy something. Mind the gap and the buses with your blind fold on. Don't forget your nose plugs.
It's true, you could do it but would it be a life?
FTFY. The structural issues mentioned in the original article are inherent in a free market economy. Democratic deployment of capital and technology would change the dynamic substantially.
An alternate approach would be to have substantial regulation on speech by companies (aka advertising and propaganda), but even this would require major changes driven by the democratic process, e.g a U.S. constitutional amendment.
I have no idea why so many people choose to give any government more and more power. This is similar to a cultural nuclear weapon. Maybe it will work in the right persons's hands for an agent of good, but really, over the course of time, is limiting what people can hear going to be a good thing for them? How can you tune your personal BS meter, if you never hear any BS? Who watches the watcher?
There is no singular policy that will solve global, complex problems. Sometimes capitalism isn't the answer, sometimes it is. Sometimes regulations are the clear answer, sometimes not.
Given free hand, corporations can be just as dangerous as governments. I don't know why you would trust corporations more, since their only goal is to make money.
Corporations have nuclear power plants that can be just as dangerous. Corporations can feed the masses miss-information, that may lead to destabilisation of a society by making them vote for the wrong person.
Corporations build unsave factories that kill 1000s when collapsing (see Bangladesh). Corporations will add addictive substances to food and sigaretes you increase sales, in the process killing millions.
The Black Hole of Calcutta is a widely known example of what can only be considered a corporate concentration camp of the (at the time privately owned) British East India Company...
That is a bad example indeed. The event of the Black Hole of Calcutta, where soldiers were rounded into a tiny dungeon which few survived, was perpetrated against British soldiers working for the East India Company by the governor of Bengal, Siraj ud-Daulah.
I agree. The danger isn't simply "Big Government" or "Big <Whatever> Corp.". It's the concentration of power, whether by private or public entities. Private entities will abuse/buy/influence any power structure that happens to exist, to server their interests.
> is limiting what people can hear going to be a good thing for them?
I mean we currently have the exact opposite problem. We can definitively answer that people hearing everything and anything is quantifiably a bad thing for a good-sized portion of the population.
See here[1] and here[2] for some quick examples.
>Who watches the watcher?
Transparency is not antithetical or exclusive to any system that allows information to be properly editorialized. Dystopian hypotheticals kind of fall flat on their face when we have practical problems that run completely counter to some far off totalitarian future.
The worst part about the media landscape for me is not the massive maze of crap you have to wade through, it's that there's enough people willing to lend credence to some part(s) of that maze of crap. It can often remove any hope of a reasonable foundation for a conversation on whatever topic.
I think the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle[3] applies well to this topic.
>The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.
The current U.S. political landscape is a perfect example of this. We have people buying into certain political mythologies (either outright lies or just plain conspiracy theories, in regards to certain political factions and general policies) with no factual basis and it's wasting what is essentially valuable political capital at an alarming rate. And disappointingly, the actual conspiracies we do have evidence for are disregarded by the very same population that seems to be completely incapable of discerning and analyzing information (or misinformation) in general, across any field. Say, I don't know, climate change.
The baffling conceit here is that people in government are angels and people in business are evil. They’re still people, with all the same motivations.
No it isn't. It's the more prosaic observation that governments are more accountable by procedural mechanisms than privately owned firms. How well those mechanisms work is subject to wide variance; nobody believes that North Korea actually operates in a democratic fashion,. but there are many countries that self-evidently do. The concept of a constitutional republic (as opposed to all of its real world implementations) is one of maximizing the citizenry's ability to participate in the decisions that affect them.
Most corporations not only function but are structured as autocracies, in which junior employees have no rights over their conditions of employment other than departure.
So you're saying to fix the problem of you voluntarily surrendering your free will to distractions brought to you by profit-seeking entities, we need to take free will out of the equation by introducing a system where resources would be centrally allocated and there would be no free will involved in what is offered for you and what you could consume, thus no distractions - you always read the content that the People's Democratic Central Party Committee decided you should read, and nothing but that is produced, because what't the point in producing it if nobody would read it anyway?
I guess this is one way to solve it - if you have no free will or free time outside of People's Democratic Central Party Committee directives, you certainly couldn't spend it on Facebook and Buzzfeed. North Korea probably doesn't have any issues with distractions. I heard they solved the obesity problem too, by similar means.
The issue is that free will cannot be exercised under certain circumstances because for-profit have found a hack to shutdown it. Sure completely surrendering it is disproportionate, but for me it would be more akin to banning certain toxic substances in food, like too much sugar cause addiction and health problems so consumers lose their ability to make an informed choice. Here we would simply ban certain practices in media.
> The issue is that free will cannot be exercised under certain circumstances because for-profit have found a hack to shutdown it.
No they did not. You don't go to Twitter/Facebook because your free will has been "shut down". You do it because you like it. If you don't want to do it, it is very easy to stop. You won't have excruciating pain and debilitating disease if you don't read what she did next, you heart won't stop and your brain won't shut down if you don't learn one weird trick to burn body fat and make all people of your preferred gender to fall in love with you forever. Literally nothing would happen. You decide whether to do it or not. If you decide to do it, it's ok - it is your time, your life, if you want to spend a little bit of it reading about one weird trick or looking at funny cats, who am I to say no? Go for it. But please stop blaming somebody else for your decision to do it. You have free will. Embrace it.
What justifies your certainty here? If history proves anything, it’s that people are eminently manipulable. That’s no surprise: we’re biological machines at the endpoint of eons of evolution. We’re not gods. Of course we can be hacked.
> If history proves anything, it’s that people are eminently manipulable.
Did you write this comment on your own free will or was manipulated into it by an invisible puppet master? If the latter, what would be the point of me trying to convince you of anything - you can't be convinced, since your actions are not sourced in you, but in the will of your puppetmaster!
However, somehow you and me are discussing things. By that you prove that you, too, believe in free will - otherwise there would be no point in you discussing anything, after all you are controlled by your puppetmaster, and I am controlled by mine, so what's the point in us puppets exchanging words, if nothing can be ever changed by our will?
The only point of having discussions, views, principles, debates, ideas, politics - is f you have free will. Otherwise this whole thing has no meaning.
> Of course we can be hacked.
Surely. There is lots of ways to subjugate other's will - by violent force, by trickery, by fraud, by lies, we have no shortage of ways developed over thousands of years to do it. That however does not deny the premise there's something to be forced, or tricked, or deceived - and thus also something that can be free from force or deception. You can be deceived, but you can also resist the deception. You will not always win, but you'll never win if you surrender in advance.
If a person (a) has the freedom to act as they will and (b) understands what is in their own best interests, why would they act in a way that is contrary to those interests? When someone says, I really want to stop spending all day on Facebook, but I find it difficult, what do they mean? Where is the difficulty? They aren't confused about what they want. You might say they "like it" too much to stop, but what is liking something in that way if it isn't a constraint on free will.
Besides which, psychology and neurology tell us that most of the time we haven't a clue what our underlying motivations are[0]. We do not have the ability to introspect our unconscious motivations, but that doesn't mean they are immune to external influence and manipulation.
Firstly most people here have been pulled by a puppet master. You too are pulled by those same strings, you just are taking the N' position to the position taken by the commenters here.
But a lot of the things people are saying here are the culmination of many other actions which have been repeated over the past many years and are finally coming to a head.
secondly - you continually make an error of generalization.
Yes, one single particular individual may be able to exercise free will. But Most dont even know that their will is being attacked.
Its not like these are telegraphed villains with evil laughs saying "I'm going to take your freedom".
This is candy crush, with its intentionally neutral and happy pictures. Its facebook, with its memmories and your friends.
WHY would anyone stop that?
Sure, someone in this thread, who is a techie and has read the past 2 months of tech news, may have an idea of what to defend.
In that very narrow, individual scenario - yes, he has a choice.
Yours is the craftsmans argument, in a world which has just seen the advent of the assembly line. Certain individuals may well craft their own will.
Those few are considered flaws in the system, and the system itself constantly focuses on those people they CAN get, and who are NOT aware, or have the wherewithal or lack the interest in stopping it.
Hell, people don't want to wear helmets when they ride motorcycles; we couldnt get people to waste less water when they shower, and instead there was an active movement to deny climate change.
Programs which never sleep, eat, and cost tiny amounts of money to execute. So even if you never log in, they just lie in wait.
The armies arrayed against an individual are far greater than what a normal person can hope to deal with - unless they drop everything and focus on beating it.
And why would a normal person do that? SO that he can keep free will? Most people would give up their free will if it would guarantee that their kids have a future, that they get food, and shelter.
Can people be manipulated, or tricked to do things that they would, when sound of mind, otherwise choose not to do?
Let's just assume you answer "yes" (because to answer "no" would be unimaginably absurd)... lets also imagine that billions of dollars are up for grabs to the people/companies who can manipulate/trick sound of mind people better than anyone else... What would that world look like?
People have tried the "Well, so stop doing it then" approach to fixing addiction. It doesn't work so well. Self-control is not infinite, and is context-dependent. I can ignore cravings when it comes to dessert, but I do feel a compulsive need to read up on everything about my latest hobby. Our brain is hard wired to be addicted to new/novel/stimulating. Naturally, different things are stimulating to different people. Programmers fall prey to this all the time. We waste countless hours tinkering with the latest shiny tech toy while our hobby projects collect dust. We click on articles detailing what we already know about the latest apple gadget, because we already read the 20 articles detailing the "leaks".
Click-bait is a real thing. It triggers a deep psychological need, varying from "let me read this article and comment on how wrong everyone is" to "this is psychological porn that completely agrees with how I feel". Companies whose business model is based on keeping your attention have gotten really good at keeping your attention. Its a form of break-down of free will. Like getting a whiff of the good stuff, when you really should know better to avoid it. Its not really that hard to understand, and I'm sure you understand it already. Whats unexplained is why you chose to blame the victim when there is an entire industry dedicated to setting up the trap.
"voluntarily surrendering your free will to distractions brought to you by profit-seeking entities"
That's one way to describe an "industry [that] employs some of the smartest people, thousands of Ph.D. designers, statisticians, engineers [that] go to work every day to get us to do this one thing, to undermine our willpower." From the article.
"People's Democratic Central Party Committee" Nice straw-man that conflates democratic socialism with authoritarian one-party rule.
There is an entire world of alternative possibilities out there for economic and governance systems. Don't throw the socialist baby out with the Soviet bathwater.
> go to work every day to get us to do this one thing, to undermine our willpower
That's ominously sounding bullshit. You decide what to do with your willpower, and if you don't like the consequences, it's your fault, not some nefarious engineers. If you don't like facebook, don't go there. If you don't like particular site, don't go there, of if you absolutely can't control yourself, install one of a thousand programs that let you block specific sites, and block that site. It's completely within your control. It's your responsibility to do it, to control your own actions and to bear the consequences.
You just don't want to bother - you want the Central Committee to take over, so whatever happens if not your responsibility but theirs. It is an extremely infantile approach.
> Nice straw-man that conflates democratic socialism with authoritarian one-party rule.
OK, let it be People's Democratic Central Multi-Party Committee is that makes you feel better. The point is not how the committee is called, the point is that it would decide how resources are allocated, thus eliminating the whole pesky free will issue.
> Don't throw the socialist baby out with the Soviet bathwater.
Somehow socialist babies have been always surrounded by Soviet bathwaters, sooner or later. If one were empirically inclined, one would be tempted to conclude that there is some strong relation between the two. But of course one shouldn't forget that True Socialism (TM) has never been tried.
Not sure where to go from here. You clearly don't believe that such a thing as structural inequality exists. Without an acknowledgement of the massive power imbalance between mass media corporations on the one hand and the citizenry on the other, there's no possible discussion here.
This kind of attitude from your parent commenter is extremely common, it is an artifact of ideology and the working of technological rationality into the consciousness. While the parent commenter probably believes he or she lives in a post-ideological world in which rationality has been obtained and found to be forever placed somewhere between right and left, a compromise of two extremes in which domination cannot be acknowledged because as Marx put it, Bentham reins, J.S Mill makes a strange comeback in the denial of structural effects and seeing totality. The kind of ignorance or blindness to the totality of society is well captured by P.W Bridman quoted by Marcuse:
>"We evidently know what we mean by length if we can tell what the length of any and every object is, and for the physicist nothing more is required. To find the length of an object, we have to perform certain physical operations. The concept of length is therefore fixed when the operations by which length is measured are fixed: that is, the concept of length involves as much and nothing more than the set of operations by which length is determined. In general, we mean by any concept nothing more than a set of operations; the concept is synonymous with the corresponding set of operations."
>Bridgman has seen the wide implications of this mode of thought for the society at large:
"To adopt the operational point of view involves much more than a mere restriction of the sense in which we understand 'concept,' but means a far-reaching change in all our habits of thought, in that we shall no longer permit ourselves to use as tools in our thinking concepts of which we cannot give an adequate account in terms of operations."
> You clearly don't believe that such a thing as structural inequality exists
I have no idea what the thing you call "structural inequality" is, so I can't say whether I believe it exists or not. It could be you call by this term some well-established phenomenon, and then I'd agree it exists, or it could be that you call some imaginary bugaboo like engineers taking your free will with their evil algorithms, and then, absent any empirical evidence of its existence, I do not believe in it. Hard to say without understanding the term.
> Without an acknowledgement of the massive power imbalance between mass media corporations on the one hand and the citizenry on the other, there's no possible discussion here.
I certainly see discussion going on right here, so it is possible, but if you mean by that "without you accepting my point as an axiom without proof, I am not ready to continue because my winning is not guaranteed and I have no means to prove my claims" then I agree that continuing the discussion in this situation is not the best move for you. If, however, you are ready to prove your points, you are welcome to do it anytime you like. Free will, you see :)
As far as I can see, there's no "massive power imbalance", on the contrary - the press is often criticized for catering for the basest instincts of the masses and being too easily swayed by a short-term fads and frivolities of the public. Scandal-of-the-day, however minor and vapid, often supplants more deep and important topics. If this criticism is true - and I believe evidence suggests to a large measure it is - then the public is the one to hold the power. If nobody wants to click on clickbait, if nobody comes to your site to view and click on the ads, if nobody reads whatever content you are providing - where is your power? What is your power? You can publish anything and nobody would even know about it, and pretty soon you couldn't publish anything because your servers will be shut down for the lack of payment.
I would say if we can see anything, it is that media corporations are too timid, foolish and cowardly to do anything but what the lowest common denominator demands from them. Clicks and ad impressions are kings, and who makes those clicks? The citizenry does. Nobody stands with the gun to your head and demands you to click or visit certain site. You decide it on your own power. If you don't like the result - maybe time to think what you can change?
Since this is HN I will make an effort to not just make a sharp one liner.
The best version of the OP’s arguing is for individual ability and choice, and the ability of a person to make a difference of their own volition.
This is a fundamentally important right because without it, we are all automatons.
The issue is that in many cases we humans make bad choices, on a truly unimaginable scale.
This is also very much a part of being human - good choices exist only if bad choices exists.
The issue is that sometimes we can agree that people will consistently make poor choices, for a variety of forgiveable reasons.
While we could conceivably go after each individual, explain and educate them in precisely the way required to convince them that they should wear seat belts - it’s is often practically impossible to do so.
Which is why we introduce laws and regulations. All cars must have seat belts - and you must wear them.
Because as a species we are able to make meta cognitive calls or simply- decisions about decisions.
As a species we don’t want our people dying, for something as trivial as not wearing a seat belt.
It causes families to lose parents, parents to lose children - often because they were just at the wrong place and time.
Getting people to wear seat belts causes large scale good, over an individuals choice to put themselves and others at risk.
What do you do then when millions of others fail to take that responsibility? Do we have a responsibility to build a system that encourages people to take responsibility for themselves and others or that eliminates means by which some are led to act irresponsibly?
Take drug addiction as an example. Sure, we can tell addicts 'well you shouldn't have done drugs' or 'just quit' to an addict. Do we then ignore those who have engineered a system to get people hooked? Many health experts point to the over-prescription of opiate painkillers led in part by a medical industry hoping to maximize profits. All the while their dependence creates negative externalities to others in society through crime and poor decision-making.
At the end of the day rationality is an abstraction of actual human behavior. We can make decisions that are 'rational' in a neo-liberal economic sense, but that we ultimately regret. When profit rules all else, businesses will exploit this discrepancy.
> That's ominously sounding bullshit. You decide what to do with your willpower, and if you don't like the consequences, it's your fault, not some nefarious engineers.
This is simply a fallacy. You can’t decide to switch off selective psychological mechanisms in your brain.
Facebook, Snapchat etc. are weaponizing and exploiting these against us/humanity in ways similar to Vegas casinos.
It is easy to not drive to Vegas, enter a casino and engage in a psychological loop designed to hack my brain.
It is not so easy to escape the all-permeating tentacles of social media and its finely tuned intermittent rewards etc. mechanisms.
Given that willpower is a limited cognitive resource, your proposition is not realistic.
Did they? European social democratic countries (Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Germnay), Britain (e.g. the NHS), Costa Rica, Mondragon Spain, etc.
Lots of workers' blood was spilled to ensure the capitalist systems we see in the US and other countries, too. All sides in the history of politics and economic systems are bloody-handed monsters.
It might, just might, be possible to learn from history and not repeat prior mistakes. I sure hope so.
All of those have the same political and economic systems as the US. With minor customizations, but they're all capitalist democracies, with varying levels of government regulation and control.
The world has never been in a better place, and has never improved as fast as in the last 60 years. If that's your argument to try something different, your argument doesn't make any sense.
> It might, just might, be possible to learn from history and not repeat prior mistakes. I sure hope so.
Indeed, let's not try to implement socialism again. Every single time, over dozens of times, it resulted in bloody dictatorships. Let's learn from history and not repeat prior mistakes.
>Every single time, over dozens of times, it resulted in bloody dictatorships.
It is very much worth studying why this has happened and what kind of methods can be used to avert it. Not only is Marxism-Leninism not the only form of Socialist praxis (neither is Marxism the only Socialist theory for that matter), but it's unwise to dismiss "failures" for the reason that they were authoritarian. Allende, Sankara's Burkina Faso, the Paris Commune, revolutionary Catalonia, and most recently Rojava are examples of the Socialist project experiencing some faults but not nearly as uncharitably as you are painting them here.
> Not only is Marxism-Leninism not the only form of Socialist praxis (neither is Marxism the only Socialist theory for that matter), but it's unwise to dismiss "failures" for the reason that they were authoritarian.
I'm dismissing failures because every single time it ended in bloody dictatorships, but no, This Time It Will Be Different®.
No, it won't. Funny how you talk about learning with the failures of history, but you keep insisting in trying again a system that again and again has proven itself to be horrible.
And again, that's when the world has been the best that it has ever been. In 60 years, extreme poverty went from ~60% to <10% of the global population because of free trade and globalization. Free trade was the largest income distribution process in history, shifting value from developed countries to developing countries.
Sure, there is still a lot to be done, but the current system has worked miracles. It can be improved, but proposing a dramatic change to a system that ALWAYS results in bloody dictatorships makes no sense.
Keep your disastrous social and economic experiments to yourself. Socialism has done harm enough.
Why do you think strawman thought-terminating cliches are an acceptable level of discourse? At best they serve to be distracting and needlessly hostile.
>but you keep insisting in trying again a system that again and again has proven itself to be horrible.
Not really; have you heard of Badiou's concept of the Communist Hypothesis? His argument is that Socialism, well, Communism has existed as an Idea for centuries, it is always the force to break down the "present state of things", it is the first element of society, the subversive one, to oppose the action of the State. To dismiss thirty years of research into Communism, creating branches such as anarchist Communism, communalism, feminist anarchism, Socialist technocracy and others with faux-empiricism is a little heavy handed in my view.
As for your support of the wonders of capitalism, neither I, nor Marx, Engels or any contemporary Communist denies its push to reduce poverty.
>shifting value from developed countries to developing countries.
"Shifting value" is a very strange way of saying that developing countries are being systematically exploited due to the low cost of labour because they have almost no training.
>but the current system has worked miracles
So did the feudal system, and in fact so did the Soviet system (which I do not by any means support).
>It can be improved
So can Socialism.
>but proposing a dramatic change to a system that ALWAYS results in bloody dictatorships makes no sense.
Capitalism itself was extremely dramatic, it came "soaked from head to toe in blood" as Marx put it. In fact, he dedicates two chapters of his magnum opus to detailing the bloody history of capitalism and the laws passed in Western Europe that allowed it to flourish.
> Why do you think strawman thought-terminating cliches are an acceptable level of discourse? At best they serve to be distracting and needlessly hostile.
But that's the essence of your argument. You are proposing to try again something that 100% of the times led to bloody dictatorships, claiming that this time it will be different due to some vague, hand-wavy reason.
> "Shifting value" is a very strange way of saying that developing countries are being systematically exploited due to the low cost of labour because they have almost no training.
Yeah, millions being moved out of poverty is the same as "exploited".
> So did the feudal system, and in fact so did the Soviet system (which I do not by any means support).
No. Unless one of those systems did something like removing 50% of the world population from extreme poverty in half a century. Neither did. Not only that, the Soviet system purposefully murdered millions. And the key word here is "purposefully". Every system results in deaths, the Soviet (and all socialists) fall into a special category where death is part of the governing process. See Holodomor. Killing Fields. Etc.
> So can Socialism.
I'll say "maybe" to give you the benefit of the doubt, but do we need to kill millions again to find out based on your "hunch"? No, thank you very much.
> as Marx put it
And you keep citing Marx as if he is a reasonable source, that puzzles me. He's long dead, just as his economic theories. Keep them dead.
>claiming that this time it will be different due to some vague, hand-wavy reason.
Because I'm not an advocate of Marxism-Leninism nor Soviet state capitalism, or depriving people of life.
>Yeah, millions being moved out of poverty is the same as "exploited".
Both can be true, the forms of exploitation have changed but the essence remains the same - the massive extraction of surplus from those in too dire a situation to do anything about it, especially in sweatshops.
>removing 50% of the world population from extreme poverty in half a century
The Soviet model transformed Russia from a barely industrialised feudal backwater into competing with the world's largest superpowers and enduring a world war and making extreme advancements in science and technology while facing constant embargoes. It lifted many people to much better standards of living and education and liberty.
>where death is part of the governing process.
I disagree that this is a feature of Socialism, it is a feature of an authoritarian state. Pinochet's Chile and Hitler's Nazi Germany were destructive even though neither were Socialist societies.
> as if he is a reasonable source
Marx is highly respected in the fields of classical political economy, philosophy, critical theory, sociology, journalism and revolutionary and liberation movements. Even his bourgeois critics hold him as one of the best critics of capitalism. The continuance of his ideas which goes on to this day in new Communist projects and research within philosophy by the likes of Badiou, Zizek, Negri, and the Frankfurt School has ensured he hasn't died. As his friend Engels said at his funeral: his name will endure through the ages.
The criticism is that it leads to "bloody dictatorships", not necessarily that authoritarian systems are bad. Before the 20th century there were many authoritarian systems (empires and monarchies) that oversaw some of the best governed periods of human history.
I'm sure you believe if you controlled a country, you would do a much better job and not make the same mistakes that lead to a bloody dictatorship and worse outcomes for the poor. Excuse us if most of the rest here don't believe that.
So sure, there are a few benevolent dictators here and there... but what's the ratio of benevolent to malevolent dictators/authoritarians? Is there such a a stat?
Do you count Kings as dictators? I don't really (the middle eastern monarchies have weathered the chaos in the region, if Kings were no different from dictators you would expect at least some of them to fall too...) but there is of course such a thing as a 'bad king'. I recalled this simplified analysis of Polish monarchs: https://archive.is/QEY1n tldr 250 out of 835 years of bad monarchs, or a 30% failure ratio by time. 18 individual monarchs out of 48, or a 37.5% failure rate by person. Very few 20th century dictatorships have even survived into the 21st century.
I've seen similar ratings for Roman emperors as well but confess I don't remember the details, I wouldn't be surprised if someone has further compiled information to address exactly this question for other European lines of monarchs, the various Chinese dynasties, Japan's weird history, etc. (https://archive.is/I42xd is a good reminder of the excesses, no form of government is innocent.)
None of these countries implement control over the press you propose. None of them even comes close to "Democratic deployment of capital and technology" - if I understand correctly, by this you mean both allocation of capital and permission to create and use certain type of technology is controlled by government, which is elected democratically (though how you could ensure that it is elected democratically given that it controls all the technology is a mystery to me, but let's say we found the magic way to do it). None of these countries - even one with large amount of governmental redistribution - do it. There's still a huge difference between having unemployment insurance or government-sponsored housing for the poor and government taking over all capital and technology. Like between milking the cow and butchering and barbecuing the cow.
This has to be one of the most heavily-couched calls for Marxism I've seen all week.
"Democratic deployment" will still suffer from well-applied demagoguery, the people themselves are still prone to manipulation - even when their choices are abstracted away in a command economy.
A solid counter to demagoguery is economic justice and education that encourages critical thinking. People are much less prone to be swayed by that sort of thing when their health, shelter, and food are not at risk.
Should I read this as "solid counter to socialist propaganda is actually building socialism"? If so, I wholeheartedly agree. As somebody who actually lived under socialism (until it collapsed), I am inoculated against it forever. However, I think this is way too cruel punishment for a weak souls swayed by a false promise of socialist demagoguery about "justice" and "education" and inevitably finding themselves in abject poverty, monumental totalitarian tyranny and thorough thought-control likes of which had never been seen by humanity before. I'd recommend learning from other's mistakes instead, unfortunately 20th century has enough material for that.
Hey, I just wanted to thank you for articulating some of the thoughts I've had more eloquently than I can or have time to do. It's good to see HN not just sounding like an echo chamber and seeing someone speak up against socialism/communist sentiments commonly expressed here.
"People are much less prone to be swayed by that sort of thing when their health, shelter, and food are not at risk."
You seem to have disproved your own thesis, then, since there aren't that many people who have their health, shelter, or food directly affected by this race for the attention economy. (Yes, I said "aren't that many" and not "zero", but it's still not that many.)
What basis do you have for believing a centralized government with the definition of all morality and power adhering within it wouldn't simply turn the full force of this engineering on its citizens? After all, isn't it just that important for us to use these tools to maintain proper consciousness? If you don't believe that, don't you think the leadership will? And don't we actually have historical (USSR, to the extent it was technologically possible) and modern regimes (China, do an internet search on "china citizen score") doing just that right now? Before walking down that trail, you ought to make very, very, very sure it leads where you think it does, because several hundred million people who have walked it before you have discovered it doesn't.
there aren't that many people who have their health, shelter, or food directly affected by this race for the attention economy
That seems highly questionable to me. Large numbers of people in retail and service industries disrupted or threatened by technological change are arguably impacted by it.
Tone: Honest. How does attention economy abuse impact people in retail and service especially?
(I get that the internet at large is impacting them immensely, and the list of such people and professions hardly stops there, but I don't immediately see the connection between them and attention abuse specifically.)
I'm probably casting ym net a bit too wide, so as to encompass all non-specialist internet-driven retail. Amazon uses these techniques a lot, I feel, albeit in a more subtle way. But I agree that's outside the scope of the original article's journalistic focus.
I believe concentration of power and the lack of transparency is what causes the problems in both systems. A "centralized" government that works for the people is possible, as long as we avoid those things. Make the democratic process as direct as possible, don't create any positions of great power. Have all decision-making be completely transparent, so the little power that people have, they are unable to abuse without getting caught. If no one has a lot of power (be it in the form of political power, or money), no one has the power to control people.
One can argue anything, but so what? I don't think anyone has even tried implementing ParEcon so far, as it's a relatively new approach and has some problems of its own. My point is that central planning is not the desideratum of the left that some people here are claiming to be.
This is precisely correct. I think the replies to you are missing a very central point (speaking as if the accusation of advocating Marxian Communism was a serious charge, too). Perhaps the important authors about the relationship between media and capitalism are the Frankfurt School, in particular Herbert Marcuse's works. I'm reading his book One-Dimensional Man at the moment.
He's advocating exactly what you are: democratic deployment of technology. How this relates to media is very interesting, and the idea that these problems exist merely quantitatively different in a possible Socialist society is a fundamental lack of imagination for qualitative change.
The other people replying to you forget a key component of history - that rationality is not fixed. Technology has the capability to change what humans consider rational, rationality is a process, a movement in which different societies have different views. The current rationality of late capitalism is what Marcuse terms technological rationality. That is, the rationality of production. This kind of rationality is the production for the sake of production, for the sake of profit. After all, what is more rational than developing machinery, streamlining it, making it more efficient, increasing the role of mechanization in society? Hardly anyone would disagree that these are wonderful advancements - however with them, they have brought rationality of production which pervades society everywhere. This rationality is actually irrational, but few see this. Advertising, planned obsolescence, extreme marketing, the working of the market into the education systems are all simply parts of the production process. Just more costs.
Artwork is affected by technological rationality. The old pieces of art often had an alienating component, that is to say, they displayed a clear break from the state of things, and a hope for a different kind of future, the outcast, the mastermind thief, the unemployed person, etc. all fulfilled a role that was outside of the system of rationality, acting against it; even when these roles were not glorified, they existed as an opposition to the system. Marcuse notes that in modern artwork, this notion has largely disappeared; the villains and outcasts are no longer outcasts, they are within the system but in the bottom rungs, and their opposition cannot be seen as clever, but it is only misguided. Their opposition to the bourgeois system from within is always shown as a false opposition, a threat to our notions of freedom conferred by technological rationality.
When you hear Bach, Freud, Marx etc. in the supermarket, he is stripped of his alienating or any kind of critical dimension. An element of his truth has been taken away by the new consideration in the light of technological rationality, reduced and sublimated into the totality.
Socialism, what you are advocating, carries with it a very different set of rationality in which man is liberated from the freedom of being a free economic subject, free from the bounded freedom of the welfare state. The welfare state, which many proponents of "soft capitasm" advocate is another form of repression of the individual, but in different forms. It is administered living, the restriction and control of the free time made available by technological advancement and control over the intelligence necessary to comprehend self-determination.
When we advocate Socialism, we do not mean a central party committee deciding what to read, we mean the liberation of people from the restrictions of the new rationality which insists in its own mode of living through our leisure time, our work time, our sexual enjoyment and artistic pursuit.
Yes but no one claimed advertising was 'driven by a democratic process'. Marxists keep telling people what they want, and of course lying to them, even as the bodies are piling up. At the centenary of Russian Revolution, with 50 million dead, it's hard to believe one can still see hammer and sickles around the place. Yet one can.
That's exactly why the democratic process part is so important. Without the peaceful exercise of power via democracy, all that's left is violence, and nobody in their right mind wants that.
Attention as well as free will is a scarce resource on a personal level. I used to seriously question why anyone would buy almost identical Apple devices year-after-year; where-as I'd spend at least a day researching which Android devices were available. The truth is that it's a bloody phone. I was expending all my free will on trivialities and wasn't making choices that actually matter.
I think this problem is more complex than just the media. In general, people are spending their attention and free will on broad spectrum of useless junk. Media, especially Netflix ("what do I do with my free time?"), is definitely a major offender - my point is that it's not the only one.
The modern world has wound up being an attack on free will, malevolent or not. It's exponentially easier to make a choice from a menu of 5 items vs. a menu of 50. There seems to be a biological limit on our ability to choose and the modern world has far exceeded that.
* I'd spend at least a day researching which Android devices were available. The truth is that it's a bloody phone. I was expending all my free will on trivialities and wasn't making choices that actually matter.*
Given the everyday utility of a phone, a bad choice comes with significant economic costs of wasted time and frustration stemming from poor performance/reliability. If you don't already have a preference (eg based on trying the preferred device of a trusted friend) then it's entirely rational to spend some time researching your options, up to some significant portion of the cost you expected to save by picking an android over an iphone.
I'm into synthesizers and if you think people nerd out on phones you'll probably be horrified at the energy and passion spent debating the merits of machines that produce subtly different kinds of bleep bloop noises. I don't spend as much time on that any more, and have also simplified and slimmed down my synth choices to a smallish number of devices I really like, but I don't consider the prior time wasted; it was only through that extensive and intensive knowledge-gathering that I was able to make those aesthetically optimal choices for my own music-making pleasure. It's harder to be simple than it is to be complex. Simplicity is easy to imitate, but imitators aren't usually innovators.
I do agree with your larger point about the undesirability of a surfeit of economic choice. If all you wanted was a phone that worked and you could afford it, there's nothing wrong with just getting whatever is widely hailed as the best one out there. I know nothing about cars and care less, so if I have to get a car I'd probably just get a Honda Civic due to its reputation for low-maintenance reliability. But I understand why people who enjoy driving or have some other reason to care have strong preferences about different vehicles.
You make good points. I've been in IT now 20 years, and while I need a phone to text and make calls, I do nothing else with it. I'm thinking of ditching my iPhone for a flip phone.
I served in the military years ago. Just one tour. I got out with good memories but also some ideas. For example, I have standardized on Levi's 501 jeans, button down shirts of the same brand, and desert boots. I wear this daily. I don't have to think about what I wear. All my clothes fit as I expect, all the time. This frees me up to think about what matters--my family and job.
I made a comment further down about freewill you might find interesting, as freewill is now going to cost those of us who care about it.
Of all the people I know, us IT folk seem to be the most adverse to interruptions and/or needless complexity, caring most about the things that matter - this is strange considering that we are most responsible for these problems. People have stared at me blankly enough for me to realize that I shouldn't bring up the social evils of Facebook in general conversation, yet my IT friends are happy to talk about the subject to death.
> I'm thinking of ditching my iPhone for a flip phone.
I still don't think I could do without a smartphone. I have practically all notifications muted, but you need apps for too many things (most notably: Lyft to stay responsible).
> I'm thinking of ditching my iPhone for a flip phone.
That reminds me of my college days back in 2011 when I decided to go for a flip phone instead of a smartphone. Most of my friends thought I was peculiar for my insisting I use one and to do this day I still have that same flip phone, but not in use; just as a memento... sort of.
At the time, I wasn't really thinking about how my attention was a valuable resource or that most smartphone apps were major distractions. I just simply didn't like how inundated with features smartphones were. I always thought my laptop as my primary place of "getting-work-done" and my gaming laptop for entertainment (i.e. helluva lot of StarCraft II) and to have a phone that competed with that, but far worse, never sat well with me.
Looking back, I'm glad I did that and wish I could continue with a phone that could only text/call.
> I'm thinking of ditching my iPhone for a flip phone
If you are in any longstanding 100% iMessage group chats you will be silently excluded from them if you switch away from iPhone. Disabling iMessage will have no effect on those chats.
I am very dubious that could happen, for two reasons.
One that the big centalizers have too much political influence, at least in the US, and let's not forget places like China and Russia where the governments to control the web.
But even if you passed some strong regulations, the centralizers would likely keep coming up with new innovations that would break the spirit of the laws.
I would go further and say the root of the issue is adversarial markets. Essentially our markets allow me to manipulate you to do what I want, since our laws are default allow.
But this doesn't need to be the case, we already deny certain things that historically have been terrible for commerce. Like intentionally misleading weights and measures. We know that if you don't legislate and regulate businesses will change their weights to short change people.
But is there any qualitative difference between selling 0.9kg of corn as 1kg. And brainwashing people (and the volume of advertising, product placement, forum shilling is brainwashing). Brainwashing people that some suger water will make them more popular. In my mind there is not, markets work because aggregate decision making gives us good choices. When it works even bad decision makers are lifted up since the average good decisions have already killed off all the companies with bad offers.
But in our phishing for phools economy we mostly have successful manipulators to deal with and huge quantities of free hyper-stimulus to lead us there. We will not be free of this without legislation. The powerful must be banned from spending on marketing. That's it, we cannot have effective market based economics when google and facebook can find all your secrets and set an AI to convince you to act in their interests. And that's coming sooner than I'd like.
I would personally go further and say that everyone should be banned from marketing & product discovery should be nationalized (trip advisor, amazon reviews are trying to solve a problem that is trivial for government).
> Choice is such a messy thing to dive deep into, because then you realize that nobody knows what it means to choose.
Actually, I think I do know what it means, but I have the feeling that many people do not like the idea, that their decisions are based on past experiences and that their free will is actually just the evaluation of their perceptions (of their truth) and therefore, it is nothing that comes from some spritual origin within them, but instead is something that happend to them.
While it feels a little incomfortable at first, it explains a lot of human behavior as for example the impact of advertiments. The important part is to also understand that it does not free you from your own responsibility as the fact that you have beeen tought ethics is also part of the evaluation.
>> that their decisions are based on past experiences and that their free will is actually just the evaluation of their perceptions (of their truth)
This might be pretty close to the mark, actually. Our conditioning to past, even collective, social, experience can become so all encompassing that we cannot imagine something "other". Perhaps psychopaths can? And that's a pretty scary thought.
I think meditation, some types of travel, and/or certain illicit drugs are important to people because they are able to temporarily experience what you have described as "other", to varying degrees, utilizing the aforementioned agents/techniques.
b) selecting from those the outcome with the highest desired value
c) taking the action with increases the likelihood of the desired outcome
That's it, end of story. No "spiritual nonsense" necessary.
This definition lines up with human intuition, and it also applies to determinstic things like machines. For example, Using this definition we can say things like 'the load balancer chose that server' and even ask why. This definition allows you to debug choice-making processes, and reason about them.
So when we ask 'why did the load balancer choose this server', it would be absurd to answer 'because the programmer told it to.' It's true, but empty. The same applies to the claim that 'lots of what people are doing is the impact of advertising'. True, but vacuous. Why did things happen? "Well, because of physics" - that's a true answer to every question that tells us nothing.
Of COURSE we can improve the choice making mechanism inside a load balancer. That fact is obvious to us. What's less obvious is that you can improve the choice making mechanism INSIDE OF YOU because you aren't a static object but rather a sequence of different deterministic objects. In each moment, your neural connectome changes slightly. Pathways that you activate become more automatic, and pathways you don't activate atrophy.
You activate pathways by selectively activating your attention. That's how you do it. That's how you change yourself, so that you are a different person who makes different choices. That's how you improve your decision making apparatus - by being good at selectively paying increasing attention to signals that are helping you.
Individual persons can improve their choice-making mechanisms as well. I know becuase i've done it. I struggled for years making bad choices, and i always used logic like you are using to tell myself 'it wasn't my fault'. That may have been true, but it was useless. It didn't help me make better choices. Only by accepting that I am responsible for the choices i make, and _embracing this fact_ was i able to change my choice making apparatus from something that was pretty terrible to something that works quite well.
When you go around telling people they don't have free well, you're jamming up their choice making apparatus. You're convincing people not to bother making choices. It's probably worse than advertising.
Making better choices comes down, ultimately, to controlling your attention during the choice making process. I agree that advertising is super destructive. It's like the opposite of meditation.
you're completely forgetting to include "access to perfect information"
Which is the whole point of propaganda and other forms of marketing: bombard people with a message, true or false, it doesn't matter. Over time people will come to believe the message, and it will inform their future choices. People do not have the time to evaluate in depth all of the information they receive on a daily basis, and therefore are not actually capable of making truly rational choices.
Everyone is merely doing their best, and many are indeed failing. At some point, humans have to rely on trust. In our current society, that is extremely difficult.
Media has always been a way to manipulate people. What’s different ? People love to reinforce their own beliefs on the world and what they read. They will select what to read and what to ignore. People read newspapers and would believe the things that appeal to them.
What's different is that the means are now present to customise the media that you see to your exact preferences, for one; That's a step change away from (say) a newspaper which is going to have some content which doesn't align perfectly with your existing views. There's a world of other things happening (in terms of apps also being engineered to be addictive in terms of their behaviour) as well - this isn't simply that people are being manipulated, it's that the means are now present to customise the manipulation and make it entirely personal for every user.
People build a model of their world based on stimuli.
You cannot be present everywhere so you trust other people to perceive things for you.
That trust is often abused by injecting bias. And this is done to exert influence over people.
Same trust is abused to certain extent by historians through revisionism.
Same trust is abused by organized religion, where they control the rules of how you get favored by supreme beings. In some cases those rules are intrincated and arbitrary, like wasting your life building a pyramid, or entering a structure designated as temple every week, or believing other people belong to a better caste (where coincidentally the religious caste is usually at the top).
> The First Amendment protects freedom of speech, but it doesn’t necessarily protect freedom of attention.
Just to point out, it protects the freedom of speech in relation to what the government can do. Most of social and news platform are someone's property, and by default if they don't want users to talk about certain things they are free to ask them to leave. They might pay lip service and invoke a general desire for freedom of speech but are not legally bound to do any of that.
Despite the comprehensive nature, there are notability and POV neutrality requirements in Wikis. Of course, you may need even narrower filters, in which case I guess these would need additional tooling?
I am a huge fan of Blendle, the news micropayments system, which meets the first four of these criteria. The last two depend on the underlying news organization.
This actually reminds me of Delayed Gratification https://www.slow-journalism.com/ . I don't think they make an online version of anything, though. You get it in print. A quarter (3 month) time delay helps with the filtering. No bother about what Trump tweeted on any given day. Kind of like a history book being written in "real time".
This looks great, and I like the idea of print. Three months is a longer lag than what I had in mind, but it might still make for a good supplement. I'd like to preview the writing before I throw down $72, but I can't seem to find any sample articles online.
One of the things, as someone who pays a subscription, that annoys me intensely about the BBC is that they follow the pathological behaviours of the paid news outlets. Most egregious is their hiding of information to increase page views. Then there's things like adverts for their own shows that don't tell you when they're on, interstitials in free-to-air programming, burying the lede to increase page views.
The biggest (by visual size) story at the moment on http://bbc.co.uk/news is "Banned in China? Why Gigi and Katy missed big show" which is just "Singers without visas not included in advertising show for lingerie company". Why they feel the need to copy the worst traits of paid/ad supported content is beyond me.
Surely all news publications filter? That's a large component of their bias, if not the largest: what information they choose to highlight and which to suppress.
Note that the Intercept meets most of your criteria when it can, and Breitbart meets all but the "no ads" criteria. Both cite and link to sources at least sometimes, when those sources are citable.
I've been coming to resent my smartphone more and more, essentially because of this.
I recently quit using tobacco. I remembered all the warnings from my school health classes about how hard it was to quit once you start, how there's a physical dependence and all that. It was uncomfortable at times, and there were plenty of cravings to get over, but I was ultimately successful.
I can compare this to the couple of times I've tried to "quit the Internet" (i.e. social media, reddit, etc.). The problem is that there's nowhere to run from the Internet. I can avoid tobacco stores, I can't avoid my iPhone. For what it's worth, I'd love to smash my phone and throw it in a ditch, but there are certain social and professional obligations that require me to hold onto it. I have to be able to check my work email on the go. I have to use Facebook to stay in the loop about social events because all my friends use Facebook to schedule those social events. I have to call my parents once in a while. One device is a tool for all of those, in addition to being an ultra-high-tech meme-box with which I can mainline information to make myself feel good. It is of course not all bad, but the wonderful connectivity of the Internet is inextricably wrapped up with the "DoS Attack on Your Free Will".
To get back to the analogy, I'd like to think I was successful at quitting tobacco because I can avoid it. If I were giving someone tips to quit something, that's the best advice I could think to offer: avoid it. If you want to quit smoking, wouldn't it be preposterous to buy a pack of cigarettes and carry it everywhere? The temptation would always be there.
So it is with smartphones. When the best minds in attention capitalism are trying to pull me in every time I send a text message, how can I quit that? It's always in my pocket, and I can't simply throw it away because there are now certain expectations that I carry that tool with me almost everywhere I go. There is nowhere to run from this modern media, and that terrifies me.
I don't know why you got downvoted. It's both simple and hard.
I quit facebook back in March. Yep, some people don't talk to me anymore. But you know what? I talk with other people more, and I'm enjoying those relationships more.
It's also hard; this is a top-of-class addiction. There's nothing easy about rewiring the reward circuit of your brain. And definitely Facebook, work email and in my case ycombinator news, are wired in to the reward circuit - for the relief of boredom, or even the relief of hard work (or the appearance of that relief anyway.)
This is true but at least HN has the noprocrast setting to fill the willpower void. Facebook could use the same thing but that means less eyeballs on ads.
This may work well for you but there are somethings that cause you to have to check email and Facebook for fear of external consequences which is what the OP is saying. For example Hangouts makes me lose at least half a hour of productity a day but if I uninstalled it and never checked it then I would never talk to all of my friends on Hangouts which is not a trade-off that I am willing to take. Same for email, if I stopped checking email on my phone I could lose my job because it requires prompt responses to emails and I like my job and not willing to take that trade off. But then I am stuck with this phone that also contains all of the other things a phone can do and rob me of my attention that way. It's a Catch-22 of productivity.
For example Hangouts makes me lose at least half a hour of productity a day but if I uninstalled it and never checked it then I would never talk to all of my friends on Hangouts which is not a trade-off that I am willing to take.
A lot of people say this one (usually about Facebook), but I don't understand it. If you want to talk to those friends, why doesn't it suffice to schedule spending time with them in the same way you would have done it in 2000?
Exactly. And not just 2000, Hangouts was released in 2013, are these friendships less than four years old?
Phones and email still exist. If your relationship is predicated on a single internet based communication service then it's probably not a relationship worth maintaining.
Just use a different communication mechanism. It's really not that hard.
For me, it's actually about having additional communication that didn't exist before Hangouts came out. My family is spread around the country and hardly visits or calls each other. With Hangouts, we suddenly started communicating more, and that's not something I want to revert.
I don't know about your age but in 2000 I was in middle school and all my friends communicated by aim since we didn't have the ability to go where we wanted when we wanted. That social structure has carried over into adult life where I have several close friends that I get to see maybe twice a year due to our schedules, but can still talk to them everyday. Dropping communication through messaging apps would probably mean we just aren't friends anymore. The barriers to us meeting up more often aren't just laziness
Yeah, actually I'm the same age as you and I did most of my talking over IM too then, so my comment was poorly made. The spirit of my comment was "in a way you could have done it in 2000, whichever you prefer", e.g. email, phone, in-person, scheduling time to be online together. I use all of those to keep in touch with people now as an adult.
Ah yea, I agree then. I use Hangouts in my circle of friends because it's currently the most convenient, but we've changed what we've used before and can change again
I really don't understand the hate for facebook, it really is what you make it. For me, it's a glorified messaging app and nothing more. Well...Maybe also a museum of my less than attractive younger years.
A simple first step, which changed a lot for me: Keeping your phone on Do Not Disturb permanently.
It (AT LEAST) frees you to decide when to check the phone, rather than letting these companies, (through notifications) decide for you when you're going to check your phone.
Another benefit of this (at least on Android) is that you can set Do Not Disturb to "Priority Only" and have it allow calls/texts from your contacts, but not other notifications. This eliminates telemarketer robocalls, as they're very unlikely to get lucky and spoof a contact's number.
I also turn off the ability of most apps to display notifications. That helps.
Yep, you can do the same with iOS too with allowing contacts to get through. I turn off all notifications entirely is my first tip, at least to not be on the home screen. I have to actively want to look at notifications, push notifications are almost sheer evil.
Second is to restrict your internet use to specific times or to just say an hour every night from 9-10pm. Lets say start out by saying internet only from 0-15 minutes on the hour (initially). The idea is to get you used to not reflexively use the internet to prevent boredom or distraction.
How you accomplish that, say by killing your internal dns server to not respond or even firewall off your network from reaching the internet is up to you. But the key is to make it so you change your habit of when using the internet is ok.
Oh also, leave the phone at your desk, only pick it up when you need to look at it or if it rings etc...
Another good tip, reward yourself for each milestone, you want to encourage yourself to do the right thing. Don't use negative reinforcement unless you really know how to make that work. Its easier to do stuff like: if I don't go online at all today, I'll eat a container of ice cream (bad example if you do this every day but you get the gist) as a reward.
And once it's in DND mode, I trained myself to only unlock the phone when I saw a notification.
I still pull the phone out of my pocket several times an hour, but a quick push of the home-button and a confirmation that there's nothing of interest leads to it going straight back into the pocket. It's liberating!
Step 2 was removing the browser shortcut from the main screen, so there's less temptation to just 'fire it up and check HN quickly'.
having a smart watch eliminated even that for me. they’re pretty fantastic triage devices (deciding what to ignore rather than making sure you’re instantly aware). i barely ever check my notifications any more. i see friends at cafes pull out their phones every few minutes and get distracted by facebook, but i’m quite content to have it just sitting on the table because i know it’s not doing anything
I switched to a flip phone. The benefits strongly outweigh the advantages of being hooked on a smartphone. My sleep has improved, the quality-time I spend with my kids is actually quality-time now, and my night vision has even improved (this one shocked me the most).
It's not for everyone, but I have a very addictive personality when it comes to technology.
Edit: I see you can't do that because of professional obligations. What about carrying around an iPad - it could be more of a barrier to just random surfing?
Actually I dont' think the analogy is valid. Tobacco is addictive, true. And tobacco has only one use. A smartphone has many use cases (mp3 player, camera, compass, notebook, encyclopedia and many more).
And why would you like to "quit internet"? Yes, many sites try to get your attention, try to manipulate you into buying their products. But you can avoid that. Using ad blockers wherever you can. And regarding Facebook. You can use it more like a newsreader (subscribing to newspapers, ignoring my friend's posts mostly).
Edit: Re smartphone. I also have my phone on `do not disturb', permanently. I try to educate my friends / family members that I don't necessarily pick up the phone when it rings, but I will always call back. They are ok with that.
I agree that the analogy isn’t valid. Only because information technologies today are a lot worse than tobacco. Unlike apps, tobacco does not have a team of PHDs constantly reformulating itself to draw in those people who have found a way out of it, and ensuring that the ones already addicted remain.
I think the tobacco industry has been no slouch in the marketing department, but the real difference is that there's no way to use tobacco that is safe and beneficial for you.
Let's start a startup making a replacement for the internet! Some kind of locked down phone that lets you communicate with people you care about, but not get high on random information. With a built-in limitation to check for emails only a few times a day. Something you could buy and then ditch all other devices without remorse.
You can ditch Facebook and not lose out socially. My life got a lot more social after I got off social media because there weren't easy fixes to my social needs.
Ditching reddit or hacker news is much harder. I mean, how do you even use the internet these days?
Anecdotally, my life became less social after I quit Facebook. A lot less off-the-cuff chitchat occurs now. Funny thing, though: I don't feel like I lost a great deal. I didn't lose any lasting connections with people. I just don't have the surrogate standing in for time spent together. Though I also see people less, because I don't feel pulled to others' events.
Now, I either mean to do it or I don't go. My social life certainly feels more organic:
met my girlfriend at a former job, not social media. I get invited out with her colleagues from time-to-time or we go on a date or spend time together at home or I commit my time to studying or some other enjoyment. I'd like to think I can build a new social life in that way, but maybe it's a pipe dream now.
It does feel like there's a whole other life going on that I'm not a part of sometimes.
Without the Facebook, Twitter, etc thing, the internet is either topical discussion, news, study/research, music, or nil.
I frequently disable reddit, and sometimes HN, in my hosts file.
I'm both happy and sad to discover that I don't even know what to do on the internet when they're not available. Happy because it forces me to do something else. Sad because I remember when I truly loved the internet, before reddit or HN, and I wonder why I don't have that love anymore.
I really don't know how to use the internet these days.
> I really don't know how to use the internet these days.
Same for me. Nowadays when I get bored and have some unproductive time to kill, I usually surf hacker news because I can't think of any other website to read as I quit other social media websites.
It's the same happiness/sadness you mention, although the lack of options on the internet has been turning out to be more positive than negative as I've been reading much much more.
I have turned to other things (that involve being outdoors or at least standing), but I do want to replace some misspent time with reading. I was a voracious reader in my youth, pre-internet, and I miss that. And even when comparing with HN comments--where the average quality is very high--most books just have a lot more to offer. When you add in FB and reddit, it's not even a comparison.
Sadly I find my attention span, even with a great read, has suffered greatly. I blame the internet, but maybe it's just me. It's very difficult to suffer through even a brief boring stretch now.
> Nowadays when I get bored and have some unproductive time to kill, I usually surf hacker news because I can't think of any other website to read as I quit other social media websites.
An RSS reader really helped me with this. Over years, I found a good handful of blogs that I find insightful more often than not, and I can reliably find something in my RSS feed when I choose to look at it. The SNR is much higher than somewhere like Reddit and Hacker News, and the lack of an account and upvotes means that a big chunk of the dopamine fix is removed.
I would be lying if I didn't mention that I occasionally feel something missing: if I read an article that I think is insightful but wrong in some important way, I miss the pressure-release valve of being able to discuss it with others (Obligatory Xkcd: https://xkcd.com/386/). But I view this more like a compulsion than a legitimate desire, akin to someone with a bad diet craving sugar.
For some people like me it doesn't matter if I have social media or not, nobody notices. I decided there are more fruitful endeavours than taking part in the commercial and absurd nature of almost all social media networks--it encourages superficial relationship with the user to drive consumerism. Selfies, group selfies, documentation of every fucking noise of things in your waking life masquerading as insight, (fuck soc-) are all aimed at you buying things from the companies that sell you a vision of life to distract you from your own intrinsic values.
I disabled all facebook notifications and I don't get wrapped in other notifications. I just check in on stuff from my desktop when I feel like it instead of feeling compelled to do so. If waiting in a lobby then I might do something on my phone or just cross my legs and meditate (yeah I'm odd).
For using Facebook for social events only, you can minimize your actual interaction with Facebook itself. I have my account set up to email me event invites, so it gets bundled together with other email-checking only. If you need/want to search for events, you can probably bookmark that page directly and visit it every week or something like that.
And I'm 100% with you. It was a huge revelation for me personally when I realized new technology doesn't necessarily make me happier. Probably like a lot of us, I grew up obsessed with new tech, new computers, new gaming consoles, new phones.
2 years ago, I traded my iPhone plus in for an SE (the smaller one). Then I moved all slot machine apps either off my phone or at least into a folder on the second screen. Primarily, my phone is for maps and camera. Everything else is suspect.
If you aren't familiar with the poster above (who I'm replying to) it's Tony from http://coach.me -- one of the best personal improvement products in the world. Tony's site provides people with a direct link to a coach -- for a very fair price -- who can hold you accountable and help you change your habits.
Tony was the founder of Lift.do which became coach.me.
His blog on betterhumans is fantastic and I highly recommend it.
I just ignore my phone sometimes. Nobody will ever call to give you money. I got off FB in 2010. Don't use Twitter. These things are a lot less hard than people make them to be. If some news is important it will arrive at some point.
I agree for those with children it becomes a different story.
My solution was to switch to a capped data plan... unlimited talk/text (which I've never found to be a problem) and 1GB of 4G data.
Having a cap forces me to be mindful about how I interact through my phone. If I use too much Reddit, for example, I run out of data and fallback to 3G - acceptable for social/professional obligations but way too slow for wasting time. Lately I've been considering switching to 3G entirely.
Actually are there any good super cheap 3g only plans in the US? I went to Poland and they were a few bucks a month for unlimited 3G data which would be amazing.
Here's how I (try to) keep the Internet-based distractions to a minimum:
* Uninstall twitter, facebook and other social apps from your phone; only use the computer (or other device that's not constantly in your pocket).
* Even on your computer, log out of twitter, facebook and others. Only log in when you want to look into something (eg. check the social events, send a message), and use private/incognito mode for this; use 2FA - besides being good security practice, it's an extra hurdle so you won't default to "quickly check" the sites when your mental energy is low.
* When you do use tw/fb/..., unfollow/block/opt out of all the meme/cute/funny stuff (at least n my fb feed, there's basically 10 sites that'd constantly crop up - blocking posts by all of these greatly increased Signal/Noise ratio on FB);
* Have a reading list ready. I use iBooks on my iPhone to load up interesting articles, but you can use whichever method you prefer. The goal is to have something interesting/worthwhile to read available for the moments when you do want to look at your phone and/or kill some time (eg when in a long queue or waiting for a train). This something shouldn't require special focus or mental energy/capacity.
* Develop heuristics to ignore content that you know is junk but that tends to drag you in. I suspect this is slightly different for anyone, mine is: anything cute, funny, outrageous, sad or is a list of things. I am aware this potentially cuts out some genuinely worthwhile stuff and I'm okay with it. Considering my attention & time is finite and the Internet is (for all purposes) not, I'd rather have false positives than false negatives.
* I also have a high bar for what's newsworthy for me: anything that personally affects me (meaning I have to change my intentions or react in some way), and stuff that'll still be considered newsworthy in a month. Anything else gets ignored, no matter the medium. Again I'm okay with false positives. Also, since my friends are colleagues typically don't have the same approach, if I miss anything important (or really interesting), I'll probably hear it on the grapevine.
I follow a similar protocol & find it very helpful. The missing link for me was the events function of Facebook, which I find endlessly useful. Luckily FB now has a standalone app specifically for this, Facebook Local. Its no-nonsense, no ads, just relevant events. Plus, the feed it gives you actually ends!
Oh wow, dod not know about facebook local. Does it let you manage events you’ve been invited to, amd host events? I could avoid facebook entirely with that. Friend’s birthdays would be tye only thing i’d miss.
I've done something similar with my Android phone, and it's worked out decently. One problem I encountered though - I spent a lot of time on Reddit, and would check it subconsciously, so I deleted it. Now I find that I'm using Google Now, the left swipe off the home screen. In effect I took the attention from Reddit and gave it to Google. I'm not convinced that was a worthwhile trade. Given I can't delete Google Now, maybe having Reddit on my phone was serving a purpose I didn't realize. Maybe there's an app that will minimize the subconscious attention blast radius. Something that I'll still check but will minimize the time I spend there.
FWIW, you can disable Google Now on your phone. On the more recent versions of Android, you long-press an empty spot on your home screen, select "Settings", and then locate and disable the "Your feed" item.
Moto G5, Android 7.0, the long press on home screen -> settings has no other settings but one. But I did locate the settings by going through Google Now's settings. Thanks for pointing this out!
This doesn't seem to work any more :( I'm trying to keep notifications of my calendar and flights but disable all the distractions like "Stories to read", and apparently Google has removed the ability to disable it... (https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/140288/how-do-i-...)
> I spent a lot of time on Reddit, and would check it subconsciously, so I deleted it.
How can you delete a website?
No seriously, how do you keep the browser from hooking you?
I don't have any apps installed and I often fall into a reddit-hn-local_news1-local_news2-it_news1-it_news2 cycle that I start all over when I'm done with it just to check if something new happened in the meantime! Especially on Weekend mornings or when I come home from work, I can sink hours into that cycle and feel increasingly miserable about it, but the sweet endorphin rush of new bits of information can push that away momentarily.
I have tried editing /etc/hosts in the past, but this tends to only shift my cycle to other websites.
I've solved this problem by simply being aware of it. When I catch myself opening a website that I just had open, I minimize my browser and do something else. It can wait, and I'll enjoy the run later anyway when the world's had some time to bake, and there's more news stories to read.
> No seriously, how do you keep the browser from hooking you?
This was a really big issue with me too. What I did in the past was to signup for low bandwidth internet connection (not by speed, but with yearly limit of 18 GiB), which made me limit the frequent visits.
These days when I do some serious work, I decides to disconnect internet for the next 45 minutes (or so). I have locally installed manpages, devhelp and devdocs.io documentations. Even if I'm tempted to visit some website (eg: stackoverflow), I delay until the time reaches.
I use Cold Turkey on my computer and the Freedom app on iOS. It works pretty well (Freedom can be buggy). I make the list of websites pretty exhaustive. Using those + meditation has helped quite a bit.
One thing that has helped me: beeminder (I don't work for them). I have a goal that tracks reddit(etc)-free days, of which I need to do several each week or they take some of my money. This has been pretty effective, in that I've been doing more than strictly required and coming back here to write this feels weird.
Do you know of an app/browser extension that lets you bookmark arbitrary HTML pages, and keeps track of how far down you've scrolled; maybe let you write notes? Or maybe one that converts an arbitrary page to PDF, and stores it locally for you?
The combination of OneNote and Edge's Web Notes gets you most of those features. There's also relatively "ancient" apps like Pocket (which Firefox presents out of the box these days) and Instapaper.
- Do not follow newspapers RSS feeds. They bombard you with news that are not relevant at all. Their newsletters are better. I get all my news from daily or weekly newsletters. I would like to get weekly digests only, but I havent found a good one from a newspaper I like.
- Actually quit Facebook. It's pure evil. I was so shocked to hear how it showed you your old, forgotten photos/memories from past just to engage you. If you can't engage with people through messaging (including whatsapp) or phone calls, they are not that close friends.
- On reddit, avoid controversial subreddits, especially on things relevant to you. As a Turkish citizen I avoid /r/Turkey because it's idiots idioting on things that directly affect me, and the urge to rant and answer is hard to suppress. Nowadays I usually only comment on /r/emacs and HN, and avoid all the controversy everywhere. Also, I push all the funny, interesting etc. stuff on reddit into multis, and subscribe only to some low traffic subs where I do not thing my participation would be a loss of time (which is basically /r/emacs, /r/istanbul, and a couple others).
- If you use HN often, subscribe to the front page RSS and to the digest [1]. This way you won't ever miss the important stuff but have less need to actually check the frontpage.
- Disable email notifications. Don't let the sender dictate you when you'll interact with them, decide it yourself. The last time I had an email notification was quite some years ago.
- Declutter your email inbox. Try to make sure that most of what's in there is what you'd just immediately read. Try to redirect the rest in relevant mailboxes. Your email setup should allow you to dispatch incoming messages on headers and body content. Especially useful are List-ID, Subject and From headers.
it's funny, your comment makes me think.. the world has too many moving parts to follow them all, so a carefully curated summary of events would be interesting. annnnd that's the press (which got injured by the stream fad.. irony)
I dream about an AI service that can curate me a newsletter given some sources (RSS, Twitter feeds, youtube feeds, whatnot) and send it to me regularly on a given interval. It would avoid duplicates and essentially identical stuff [1], weigh and choose the most interesting ones, and present them to me in a nice, readable format. Ironically I would not use such service if it existed because it would be very anti-privacy.
[1] Twitter is weird. I only follow ~15 accounts for events and (want to) use twitter only for that, but the way people usually post updates about events is to repeatedly post what is essentially the same tweet, and even with that many accounts followed it becomes a mess. I end up never checking it because it's basically a puzzle.
can't say if it's just fatigue or a valuable idea but at that point I want no more tech, I want to see people working together, even if it means lo-tech
> "Ironically I would not use such service if it existed because it would be very anti-privacy."
Does such a service necessarily have to be anti-privacy? It could be created with open-source tools and run on a cheap low power server in your home, scouring the web for stuff that it thinks interests you based on data you feed it. You will still be in charge of your data then.
I like your suggestions, but I have to tell you my anecdote. As someone relatively new to Turkey, I followed r/Turkey to find more information and understand things better. But I quickly found that your description of it is pretty accurate. But as someone still struggling to learn the language and wants information on Turkey, where are better forums to look?
I used to run my browsers with an addon that disabled user comments. I whitelisted a few sites where the Internet idiots didn't visit. It worked absolutely beautifully and forced me to avoid the worst of Internet very effectively, even during my weak moments. It cut down so much of the frustration I had about consuming content on the Internet.
I had to uninstall it, because the addon developer stopped maintaining it and the performance bugs made browsing bigger sites much too slow.
When internet connections were pay per minute, I'd think about what I wanted to look up before I connected. Then I'd go online and used Opera to follow many links to different tabs. I'd have a flurry, then disconnect and read. This worked surprisingly well.
I find I can't really read/comprehend from an LED screen well at all these days. I got into the habit of sending items of interest to my e-reader. Any long form article goes there.
Sadly I sat on my e-reader, and my system went to pot. I've just stacked up my reading list. I have no idea what is there. Going back to scrappy reading, feels like a real time and brain drain.
> Even on your computer, log out of twitter, facebook and others. Only log in when you want to look into something... use private/incognito mode... use 2FA... it's an extra hurdle so you won't default to "quickly check"
Absolutely. Latest Firefox helps here. There's an option to use private by default for all windows. This means when you close it (another habit to develop perhaps) you don't stay logged in to these social media sites.
> ignore content that you know is junk but that tends to drag you in. I suspect this is slightly different for anyone, mine is: anything cute...
I've actually started deliberately looking at the cute stuff. It's a welcome antidote to the outrage apparent in other threads/sites. I have enough natural spleen already without needing to top it up.
The problem is that the watch is dependent on the phone for notifications. If the phone is off the watch will not get notifications for Gmail or Google Voice. I can setup the regular mail client but the I get the Primary, Social, and Updates Inbox from gmail instead of just the primary inbox. Google voice notifications do not come at all so i miss text messages to my google voice number which is my primary/public phone number.
The workaround would be to port my number back to the carrier and use the carrier for SMS/Text messages.
ATT has number sync so calls to the watch and phone will hit each other, but it is not as smooth as you would hope and gets disconnected sometimes.
Battery life is much better using bluetooth than wifi or cell connection.
Just lots of little issues that are a pain to try to work around.
My goal was for me to have access to my important notifications but not have my phone "at hand" to tempt me.
> The problem is that there's nowhere to run from the Internet. I can avoid tobacco stores, I can't avoid my iPhone.
What's stopping you from not having social media apps on your phone, or even using a web browser? Nothing. Like quitting your tobacco, stop making excuses and just do it. As for social events, if none of your "friends" choose to invite you to social stuff over an SMS or a phone call if you were to quit FB, then that's not friends I'd care to keep.
There's a few things that have minimized how much my smartphone interrupts me:
1) Accept that my phone should be working for me, and I shouldn't be working for it.
2) Disable all non call notifications except a small favorite group. Not much can't wait 15-60 minutes, and if so, they will call. I mute WhatsApp groups liberally.
3) I access facebook via web browser, at https://mbasic.facebook.com, including for instant messaging. You'll be surprised how less you use it when it's painful to use. Now I just go interact with the events I need, and take messaging offline.
4) No more push emails - that benefits no one except the person asking the questions and most often having others do their work for them.
5) Install separate chat apps for small circles of people. I use one with my wife, another with friends, WhatsApp is the generic muted text, and I have let myself have LinkedIn as an app on my phone (minus notifications) to message work stuff. Compartmentalizing helps.
Ditch your sim card/mobile plan, get a voip number, phone only works on wifi like a home phone. When out and about you only have the media you pre-downloaded (podcasts, mp3s, audiobooks, offline maps) no more staring at the screen in public.
Move all personal communication to email/signal, check it in the morning after your routine (exercise, meditation etc). Ditch instagram/twitter/reddit(turned to shit anyway) etc, keep facebook just for contacts but a single post with your email and never log on. (We really need a different phonebook platform). Never look at news sites except this one and other neutral biased ones like economically focused news.
Take a note of everything you want to google, allow 1 hour a day internet/research time where you google the questions of the day. You find the phone is inferior to desktop when at home so you spend little time on your phone. Make a life plan and use your new 4 hours a day to achieve these goals. No screens 2 hours before bedtime.
The downside is you cant receive calls when out and about (for me an upside), there has been 2 times in the past 2 years I've had to stop at a coffee shop to send off a message, worth the $2000 savings.
Phone is still a great tool, camera, mp3 player, maps, guitar tuner etc etc. Knowing the latest tweet from your favorite celebrity while walking in the park isn't adding to your life. Unless there is a nuclear strike or a national draft then news wont effect you.
edit, should have read the replies, seems there's a bunch of similar responses
I switched back to an old Nokia, use Garmin for GPS and an old iPod touch for music. Limiting my usage on my home desktop sounds like a good next step, I like the idea of limiting Internet crawling as part of time management.
Wow, I've done something similar. I've gotten rid of internet completely at home (Goodbye Comcast) and I have internet access only at the office at work (9-6pm weekdays). I've been consuming all my media through podcasts, audiobooks, youtube (via gPodder), and renting physical DVDs for movies. I've made effort to buy only paper books. Also, I've switched from AT&T to a pre-paid plan on Tracfone with limited internet access ( 1GB/month ).
This post has a lot of hyperbole. I'd suggest you visit a third world country for some perspective.
There are plenty of people having real problems. If a phone in your pocket is the biggest problem you're having - you're not doing enough with your life.
Maybe it’s more like a food addiction; people suffering from that cannot just absolutely drop the substance they abuse - they have to strike a balance, with temptation always in front of them, and too many people saying, “you just need to control yourself and know when to put down the fork!"
Anyone who has managed to get control back from an addiction has my admiration, but I have a special extra bit for people who are successfully coping with a food addiction.
> I have to use Facebook to stay in the loop about social events because all my friends use Facebook to schedule those social events.
Facebook has an API. Script a poll on those events and push them to somewhere you'll see them? Log in once a week to see if your script missed anything you cared about, and modify the script if yes?
I'm in the process of cutting back (deleting apps, etc.) and will get a non-smartphone to replace my current phone soon. I plan to write some custom scripts to send me text messages when someone @-mentions me on Slack -- or they can send me text messages directly in an emergency.
I was an adult before Internet use was widespread, and many things were better back then. People don't really need to be connected to everyone on the planet at all times of the day.
I already left Facebook, and it was a great decision. I avoid all of their products, including their software libraries whenever possible.
I would recommend you to write these plans in a notebook (real notebook with pen/pencil). Write all of your plans, whenever you plan.
The problem with software solutions is that once you reschedule, its history is lost.
I have such a book which has now almost run out of pages. Once a week I read them. Most of them are not yet done. But it makes me feel good, and helps me prioritize better than software solutions.
I recently got a small paper notebook that I carry around now. I'm moving all of my digital notes to Org Mode[1], so I'll have the history there too (git).
forget the paradox of answering to that here, last month my dsl line broke down. For a week it would stabilize, then drop after a minute, repeating this forever. One day it stopped entirely and my brain expanded. Suddenly I would have to find enjoyment around me, and as most people know, suddenly time stops. Usually one might feel a dreadful bore (I used to) but this time it was relief plain and simple. At that point I know very well that a connected computer has a weird spot in ones mind, it's the source of satisfaction that is too shallow to really do so and keeps leaving you asking for more.
I might get a lot of flack for this, but the one option no one ever seems to mention in discussions like these is to “simply” cancel both your wifi and data plan. I did this almost nine months ago and neither my tech. career nor my social life has been impacted by any meaningful margin. Granted, I make more trips to Starbucks/other free wifi locations now, but my evenings are my own - they’re also significantly more peaceful.
If you want to quit the smartphone, what I did was to set a random 10 letter password, which I kept on a piece of paper in my wallet. Change the password every 3 days.
For me this made using my phone enough of a hassle to break any habit I had. It's been a few months now and I have the password memorized, but I still almost never use my phone.
I think this is a good point. People are social animals, and most of us need a community, but much of that community today is deeply tied into this modern distraction society. For instance, you mentioned quitting tobacco - I bet this is much, much harder to do in the places and times where smoking is/was an important social activity. It's not only that these distractions are everywhere, but that avoiding them can lead to some degree of isolation.
It would be nice to find some sort of community that's pushing back against these things. It's hard to do alone - for instance, when I tried going back to writing long e-mail to friends instead of merely liking Facebook posts, I got little response. People had moved on, and weren't interested in going back.
What helped me a lot was being rigorous in changing notifications so I only get alerts for important things. The defaults are really stupid, I really don’t care that “X posted a video” - why is it important and why does it need my attention NOW?
I always have my phone on silent, and the only time it even vibrates is when I receive a phone call. IM notifications are displayed on the screen, but as it doesn’t make a noise or vibrate I might not find out until a few hours later. For group chats I usually set them to muted, so I need to purposely go in and see what’s going on.
For most other apps I usually have notifications disabled, and some I have a badge count displayed - one day I will probably get around to sorting out those 2382 unread emails, but I’ve learned to ignore the 101 unlistened podcasts.
Bullshit. The only attack on my free will is people telling me what is an attack on my free will and thus pushing their agenda.
I would NEVER EVER want to give up the incredible availability of information we have today. Even if most of it is nonsense, that still means there is a mountain of gems that's larger than the eye can see.
Ironically, the first thing you're greeted with on this site is an attention-grabbing ad, if you choose to browse without protection.
If modern media a DoS attack, it's not very sophisticated since it can be easily avoided by non-participation. Install an Ad blocker. Browse the web in private mode. Turn off notifications. Treat everything you read with skepticism (assume it is trying to manipulate you). And never, ever interact with social media. Share your attention deliberately, mindfully, and voluntarily.
I don't buy into this victim mentality. Nobody is "stealing" my attention unless I agree to it.
Oh, just wait until the hordes come out of the woodwork to poo-poo you for blocking ads and such.
They have their reasons, like "No Ads means no free content", or "You're taking the money out of content creators mouths", or variations on a theme.
What's doubly silly, is I control how my computer renders what content, downloads what content, and does whatever actions I want. Once it leaves your computer/network, its no longer up to you, ad company.
(Is now waiting for Wildvine to be used on content, forcing such ad viewage, now that DRM is part of the bloody HTML5 spec.)
That's the thing though. If those ads are forced on you say like in-game ads you can't skip then I'll just do what I do with them. Something else. Volume down, attention elsewhere until it's over. Just like those old unskippable YouTube ads. I might not be able to skip them but they don't get any of my attention either way.
Also, I recommend browsing youtube via something like startpage.com or duckduckgo.com. That way you're not distracted by follow up videos, recommendations and comments.
I don't think we should be thinking about this from a psychological perspective but instead a sociological one. Yes individuals can disconnect and do whatever they need to assuming adequate resources but that's beside the point.
If you think of people as boxes with inputs and outputs I think it's very worth understanding how social media impacts those boxes and what the long term affects are.
Has nothing to do with being a victim. Just if you press this button on every box does something desirable for society happen? Or something negative? Or we can't tell still?
And if it is negative then do we as a society want regulations to reduce the impact?
You can't really know what the impact is. You probably can't even come up with a crisp, uncontroversial definition of what "social media" actually is. Most people seem to use the term to mean Twitter, but Twitter is garbage and lots of people don't use it at all. Is Hacker News "social media"? Is Slashdot? Is the comments section of the New York Times? Is IRC?
The moment you start down the "we are weak and helpless and we need the smart benevolent geniuses in Government to help us" you're just gonna lose a whole lot of people. Because there's no reason to believe there is even a problem here, let alone a problem that needs to be solved with regulation.
The demarcation line is pretty clear IMO (it isn’t even social media). It’s technology whose goal is to manipulate its users to engage with itself. And it hires an army of engineers, designers, scientists, and soon AI to achieve that goal.
Right now it’s social media that is at the forefront of this war with people. Tomorrow it might be a different technology.
That's not clear at all. Do you think the Twitter founder's goal was literally written down somewhere as "manipulate users to engage with it"? Or for Facebook? None of these companies will agree with that assessment, so it's entirely your own subjective opinion.
Well, the interviewee in the article provides a good metric.
You don't need to look at the founders' intentions. You simply need to look at the metrics they are optimizing on. For public companies like Facebook and Twitter it's even easier. You have to look at the metrics they are talking to their investors about.
First, there's a cost to gaining such technical knowledge, and many people are not literate enough to deploy all the technical measures you suggest.
Second, 'never ever interact with social media' is just a way of avoiding the problem. People like social media because we're social creatures and there's value in being able to communicate with other people of like mind. It can also be a trap if one only ever does so, but 'never use it' is just throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Why shouldn't people be able to socialize in a virtual context without any sort of legal privacy protections or tools that allow them to selectively filter out commercial information?
You might as well advise people to avoid having their telephone calls monitored by never calling anyone. Well, sure, but that's an elaborate way of saying you don't know what to do about the problem other than avoid adopting useful technologies.
Blaming technology for our dysfunctional political system is all kinds of backwards. The political system is broken because of corruption within our financial/judicial/media institutions. If anything, technology is our best hope to fix those problems. For example, look at this discussion we are having right here.
This reminds me of how easy it was in the early days of Hacker News to get on the front page with a project: In our new media world, the only way to get onto the Hacker News front page, or any other site, is to either have a post highly targeted for this site (with these sort of DoS elements) or blind chance.
This hyperbole isn't helpful, with the implication that this never happened before in history. I'm guessing that's just the specific incident that led to you being more cynical.
Deception and manipulation of public sentiment by either wholly fabricated or suddenly-scandalous news (ie digging up some old incident and setting up a great hue and cry like it just happened) is an old, old propaganda technique:
A meta comment on this article: I have posted this concept here, and on other social media platforms, and seen it posted as well... usually to the tune of a few upvotes...
It reminds me of Keyne's General Theory, where most of the ideas had already been floated for quite a while but were always derided as "crackpot," or basically heresy. It took a well-connected elite, combined with a failure to explain the current situation to really change the Groupthink of collective minds and institutions.
Here, it's similar: an idea which has been floated before, but taken in the hands of an academic is formalized, given a $100,000 prize, and published.
Which raises an interesting idea. If the problem with the radio--as the article showed, Hitler put one in every home--was that an authority could control a bombardment of information-assault on people--the same problem with tech today--should we not also be skeptical also of why authorities have now decided to grant credence to this idea?
And here's the concern: as the article also said, the role of media and newspapers has been to be a "filter." I can imagine politicians and bureaucrats latching onto this as a power grab for authorities--as a means to further marginalize independent media and the social aspects of spreading information.
The social aspects of information propagation are anything but marginalized. The problem, as in the days of yellow journalism, is that sensation is easier to monetize than the truth and this creates opportunities for bad actors to flourish.
Of course there's a possibility for over-reaction and repression, but personally I think that the best solution is more information, in the sense of accessible trackbacks (not unlike country-of-origin food labeling) so people can see where stories originate and learn to be skeptical of stuff that comes from consistently unreliable or bizarre sources. This already happens to some extent, eg if you post content from infowars you'll be rightly mocked for using such a terrible source. The Web Annotations Standard will make this vastly easier as its deployed in browsers (anyone know about progress on that, BTW?).
As for the other problem of people choosing to stay in particular media bubbles where they're only presented with information they already agree with, that's not really going to change, but I think that's OK as long as it's easy to identify which cluster people are choosing to locate in.
I fail to see what my comment has to do with your laundry list of examples. I'm not arguing for centralized autocratic filtering but a mechanism for labeling points of origin and exposing that information to consumers.
Your examples don't seem appropriate either. I suggested that people would choose to reject information from 'consistently unreliable or bizarre sources'. Your first counter-example is that of a NASA engineer whose warnings were overlooked, but engineers are not hired for their unreliability or bizarre opinions.
Many of your other examples either ignore the well-known fact of parallel discovery or are themselves relying on the mechanism you claim to deplore of pre-emptively delegitimizing the source. Yes, I know some mainstream news outlets are inaccurate or agenda-driven. I hardly ever consume any news from CNN because I find most of their output to be low quality.
I really don't understand the point of your comment. You seem to be projecting someone else's ideas onto my comment rather than evaluating what I actually wrote.
>I fail to see what my comment has to do with your laundry list of examples. I'm not arguing for centralized autocratic filtering but a mechanism for labeling points of origin and exposing that information to consumers.
Ok so let's take a look and go down the list of examples. We can start with NASA, where the "point of origin," being mere engineers who could not match the gravitas and authority of the well-respected leadership, saw the idea rejected, not on merit, but on their point of origin being less-respected than their superiors.
This problem of rejecting ideas, not on their own merit, but on the authority or gravitas of establishment figures is the thread that ties all of those ideas together--and many other setbacks in history as well.
Discrediting ideas by their point of origin can do real damage not just to the democratization of information dissemination, but also to the ideas themselves even if they have merit, as well as to indepedent journalism.
OK but for the last time I'm not advocating for a centralized gatekeeping approach and I'd appreciate if you'd stop projecting your parade of horribles onto an argument I'm not actually making.
I never said that you were. Also, relax. The examples I gave support my argument. Whether you agree or not is fine, but that you won't even admit they're relevant is strange.
The same is true for TV and radio. Think of all the popular culture that's been created and paid for, not directly, but by merely agreeing to have commercials on in your home for a few minutes. This still boggles my mind. How can viewing advertisements be an adequate substitute for paying cash?
Because the marginal cost of the advertising in a large market is so low. A handy rule of thumb is that you spend about the same amount on marketing that you do on product development; the actual production and distribution costs per unit are much lower. Either your product is a flop and you shut down and move on, or it's a hit and you have yourself a nice little income stream.
I personally haven't found the same effect in long-form media, such as:
- Non-fiction books
- University-centered online courses
- Documentaries
- Some of Netflix's original programs
- Wikipedia's monthly news summaries
- The "Great Courses" on Audible
These media aren't thoroughly monetized on a pay-per-attention-stolen model. They're more optimized around having good reviews from friends and online.
It makes me wonder if there might be the possibility of a Netflix for news, where a 3rd party curates and allows ratings of lengthier pieces on long-term issues, interviews with important figures, and 20-minute investigative reports (like I remember seeing on 60 minutes). Naturally, this wouldn't work for up-to-the minute news where everyone's attention is driven based on who's got the latest break, but it seems like it would work for these other things. It would still give the "lunch conversation" motivation, where people could talk about whatever was released in the last few days. Certainly it sounds like a less attention-assaulting place than the current state of news.
It makes me wonder if there might be the possibility of a Netflix for news, where an 3rd party curates and allows ratings of lengthier pieces on long-term issues, interviews with important figures, and 20-minute investigative reports (like I remember seeing on 60 minutes)
Isn't this essentially the model that HuffPo and other news aggregators (rewriters) use? Hasn't really panned out in that context, but maybe there needs to be a more quality-focussed site that isn't subject so much to avarice.
The question of who creates the content is mostly orthogonal to what I mean.
I'm talking about is a platform where my decision to click/watch content is based on reviews and recommendations, not loud design and attention-grabbing headlines.
In that world, the subscription model could make sense and content aggregation could make sense, but neither is required, nor does either addressing the issue on its own.
I wish there was something opposite, daily and weekly summaries where every "article" is just a title and one paragraph. Almost all lengthy articles have poor information per character ratio.
Such a site would suffer from 2 major disadvantages.
In the absence of advertisement driven revenues, it would have to charge money, raising the barrier of entry compared to the current alternatives. In addition it cannot provide regular dopamine hits (because that’s the whole point) so it even feels less appealing than the alternatives.
More expensive and less appealing is a hard combo to succeed with.
maybe it's an opportunity to go back to the old recipe of paying with money for things you want to acquire.
I'd gladly pay for a news service like that.
My company is working on this idea of Netflix for news, although we are not yet ready to test the payment part. If we succeed it may mean less news media but higher average quality.
ps: excellent article and grateful for people like James and Tristan sounding the alarm on the ill effects of the attention economy.
However, I disagree with his association of new media with populism and apparently suggesting a causal relationship. Populism has existed, and proliferated, well before mass media. It's more commonly associated with extreme wealth inequality.
There's not a way to subscribe to it, though it's not obvious how a subscription would work. The summary of any given day is not finished at the end of the day. Rather, the set of articles for that day, their summaries, and the articles themselves will all continue to grow as more information is gathered. So, it is a good way to "catch up" after some time away from current events. But to my knowledge there's no coordinated effort to "finish" a day or a month by any deadline.
I think there is almost always very little value in up-to-the-minute news - I find that it just doesn’t affect my life on a minute-to-minute basis.
Blender is an example of (supposedly) higher quality, longer pieces of (paid) news/reports. I haven’t tried it myself because they don’t allow pluses “+” in emails.
They don't value all users equally, ones in North America are generally worth considerably more. From a quick search, I can't find any more recent info, but in Jan 2016 a user from USA/Canada was worth $13.54/quarter [1], so that would be about $54/year.
Exactly, Facebook have access to eyeballs that other media corps don't. The value is in part because of the aggregate being comprehensive, as you remove people from the sample the resulting data gets less valuable much faster.
It's not a matter of simple price per user. At its core, their product is the incredibly precise and nuanced network they have constructed though their various sources of user data. The value they get per click/view is only so valuable because companies are willing to pay for the quality of targeted advertising that only a company on the scale of facebook can provide.
This model allows FB to keep their platform free for users, lowering the barrier to entry meaning that more people are likely to join the network, whose data makes FB's advertising system all the more effective. More data means a better user experience (and better advertising), which naturally draws in more users to add their data to the pool.
The end result is a virtuous cycle that provides companies with this model the best data, the most users, and the best targeted advertising in their respective fields. This model is the endgame of companies like Facebook, Gooogle and Amazon, and is the reason FB isn't interested in your $1.
It pretty much is when the question is about what the price would be for an ad-free subscription. The calculation may be more complicated, but it's all in service of a per-user number.
I have heard stories that you can be VERY selective with the advertising. I wonder if you could construct an ad that targeted only you; then, you could put family pictures or something as the ad image, so basically the ad space is filled with nice pictures for you to look at.
"The First Amendment protects freedom of speech, but it doesn’t necessarily protect freedom of attention."
Are you suggesting that people's free will is so easily lost that we needed to have, in the First Amendment, a clause stating "freedom from external thought influences"?
"Modern Media is a DoS Attack on Your Free Will"
Only if you allow it to be, just like with any other compulsive activity, if it starts affecting your life negatively, you should probably make some personal life changes.
This reads like a call for government regulation of advertising or how content is served to people because people cannot defend themselves from this media onslaught.
I believe something similar to China's regulation of the web may be what you're looking for, but I'm old enough to vote and go to war so I'm old enough to decide how often my "free will" is attacked.
The problem is that a lot of people can't help themselves from falling prey to the attention seeking media. I don't know whether this is something that should be regulated, but there is some responsibility on the party that's exploiting people's time fully knowing what they are doing, not just on the addicted consumer.
Of course they know. FOMO is a real thing evolved into your brain over millions of years in which being apart from the tribe meant greatly reduced chances of survival. When FB sends you a notification to say "your friends are doing something without you" they are knowingly and deliberately pushing that button.
> Isn’t it our own fault that we’re too easily distracted? Maybe we just need more self-discipline.
> That kind of rhetoric implicitly grants the idea that it’s okay for technology to be adversarial against us. The whole point of technology is to help us do what we want to do better. Why else would we have it?
...
> Does personal responsibility matter at all?
> I don’t think personal responsibility is unimportant. I think it’s untenable as a solution to this problem. Even people who write about these issues day to day, even me—and I worked at Google for 10 years—need to remember the sheer volume and scale of resources that are going into getting us to look at one thing over another, click on one thing over another. This industry employs some of the smartest people, thousands of Ph.D. designers, statisticians, engineers. They go to work every day to get us to do this one thing, to undermine our willpower. It’s not realistic to say you need to have more willpower. That’s the very thing being undermined!
Its funny because these points sound exactly like the ones I've heard made by former casino developers whom worked on any number of slot machines or video poker.
In any case, I'd have to disagree and say that even though you can't escape ads or even 100% avoid the lure of electronic clicks and taps, its ultimately up to you to decide what you do with your time and money and if you cannot do this yourself, then you need to seek help.
Just because a corporation has unlimited resources committed to targeting a person with ads or tappy and clicky stuff, it does not mean they should be held accountable for people's addictive habits or tendencies, just as you can't hold any existing casinos liable for a person's poor gambling choices.
>its ultimately up to you to decide what you do with your time and money and if you cannot do this yourself, then you need to seek help.
It seems like you implying people are 100% free agents independent of external influences and subconscious evolutionary drives?
>Just because a corporation has unlimited resources committed to targeting a person with ads or tappy and clicky stuff, it does not mean they should be held accountable for people's addictive habits or tendencies
Should alcohol, cigarette, and porn companies be allowed to target children?
Should opioid manufacturers be allowed to target recovering addicts?
> ...and if you cannot do this yourself, then you need to seek help.
> Just because a corporation has unlimited resources committed to targeting a person with ads or tappy and clicky stuff, it does not mean they should be held accountable for people's addictive habits or tendencies, just as you can't hold any existing casinos liable for a person's poor gambling choices.
You know, in my country there is a self-exclusion register for gambling. You put yourself on it knowing that you have a problem and as a result you're barred from entering a gaming establishment.
In doing so, gaming establishments now have a responsibility to keep you from gambling on their premises and there are consequences and liability transfers if they knowingly allow you to continue.
> "Modern Media is a DoS Attack on Your Free Will"
> Only if you allow it to be, just like with any other compulsive activity, if it starts affecting your life negatively, you should probably make some personal life changes.
I think this belief - "you can't look away" - is so prevalent among journalists because (i) the idea that vast sections of the public pay no attention to them for extended periods of time is anathema and (ii) journalists are more likely to be from the group that "can't look away."
> Only if you allow it to be, just like with any other compulsive activity, if it starts affecting your life negatively, you should probably make some personal life changes.
Replace "life" with "server" and that also rings true for a network DoS attack. Just as you don't always have complete control over the network, you don't always have complete control over the aspects of your life that influence your day-to-day decisions.
Free will IMO is an abstract and poorly defined concept. You can define free will in terms that make "non-free will" an impossibility. On the other hand, you could also amount it to very basic particle events that are either entirely deterministic or based on seemingly random quantum wave collapses.
If something is regulated by the government, one could argue that you are still able to employ your free will and break the law. Someone may force you to do something, but by a not entirely unreasonable definition of free will it is your choice to comply or not, regardless of the consequences.
Of course, the argument that "modern media is a DoS attack on free will" employs a different, less generous definition. Whether you agree with that definition or not, the discussion on how easily manipulable people are and how external agents exploit that to influence our day-to-day decisions in subtle, often negative ways is warranted. You can call it "[...] is a DoS attack on our subconscious", "[...] on our attention" or whatever, but I think it amounts to the same discussion.
I feel a sense of agency and that I have the power to ignore many of these influences, but this also presents a cognitive load problem. I wouldn't be sad for a second if for example building regulations were used to a greater extent to limit advertising in public spaces.
You also have to consider those that aren't old enough to go to war or to vote, not to make it a blanket "think of the children" argument, but because we recognize that they are not competent enough to make informed life choices. I wouldn't want my children grow up with a poor self image just because it makes them more inclined to purchase bikinis, watches, tanning lotion and cars, but I also wouldn't want to shelter my children from society when it is ultimately our responsibility as adults to shape it for the coming generations. People have made decisions that make society what it is today, and we should continue making decisions and re-evaluating the old ones.
For public advertisement, I've always been in favor of defacing and removing it. I'm old enough to go to war and infringe on the ultimate human right by killing people, so why should I not be able to make choices that improve public spaces? If I remove an online casino billboard, who is better off and who is worse off?
As AI get smarter and places like Google collect more data about you, they will eventually know all the right buttons to press to get you to look and not look away.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 300 ms ] threadEdit : Good TED talk on this topic https://www.ted.com/talks/jp_rangaswami_information_is_food [2012]
A blog entry on Brandolini's Law: https://real-psychiatry.blogspot.com/2016/12/brandolinis-law...
"Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?"
-Brian Kernighan
I think the above is one of the key questions for the survival of humanity. A part of the answer is that there has never been a clear demarcation between the meaningful and meaningless. There is valuable information in the structure of myth, songs, and idle talk.
It is clear that something in human beings acts as an effective filter for meaning and value. It is also clear that rationality isn't the totality of whatever this is, though it might be a part of it.
I think the major concern here, aside from the general deleterious effects of addiction of any sort on people, is that the tide of meaningless factoids and useless information is swelling and drowning out substantive, useful information which is generated with greater difficulty and spreads less easily.
A greater ratio of meaninglessness to meaningfulness is part of the problem, compounded by the aggressive way our attention is directed toward it. I think the filter you mention exists but is struggling in this environment more than in the recent past.
Which is precisely why humanity didn't progress, never invented science, never improved human rights and the standard of living, and we died out in a state of primitive brutishness.
Clearly, actual meaning has found its way through, somehow.
I think the filter you mention exists but is struggling in this environment more than in the recent past.
What is your evidence for this? Can you quantify this in objective terms?
That said, I haven't put much thought into this viewpoint and was mostly extending the parent poster's idea. Proper discussion of this would require a great deal of care and nuance and I honestly don't feel like putting in the effort for that. Apologies if you were looking for a substantive debate.
What I really see happening is a "part 2" repeat of the spam apocalypse that hit e-mail, Usenet, and other federated systems on the early Internet. In the late 1990s spam destroyed most of these systems. E-mail was so valuable it had to be saved, but saving it has mostly involved delegating it to a small oligopoly of vertically integrated e-mail providers with the resources to fight spam. Usenet and other less well known federated systems were destroyed.
I think we are now seeing a similar kind of spam assault against the open web, social media, and the news. The latter with the whole "fake news" phenomenon really resembles a Sybil attack. In recent years I've seen an avalanche of totally fake news sites that look like legitimate newspapers popped up (apparently from templates) and used to spam social media with a whole slew of unfounded allegations and other assorted bullshit. The role they've had in the election has gained a lot of press but it's in no way limited to that or even to politics. A lot of it seems to be shilling for quack medical products and other traditional mainstays of... spam!
I've started calling this whole phenomenon "spam 2.0." I'd define spam 2.0 as the semi-automated bulk creation of fake news outlets, fake social media profiles, and hoaxes and their use to engage in the coordinated manipulation of opinion.
I'm also anticipating the rise of spam 3.0. Spam 3.0 will be fully automated and AI-powered, with AI being used to create an individual "persuasive agent" for each human target. Think of it as massively parallel individual con artistry and/or "spear phishing" at scale. Social media companies are already pioneering this tech, but the spam apocalypse will really hit when it goes public and you can do it with readily available tools.
I find it rather depressing but for a while I've been predicting that the first use of AI that can (even borderline) pass the Turing test will be con artistry, cult indoctrination techniques, and demagoguery at scale. It's really pretty scary to the point that I'm wondering if the use of AI to persuade humans should be outlawed. Of course then you get the "then only criminals will have guns" effect. This is particularly true on the borderless Internet where it's unlikely to be outlawed everywhere. Users of this tech would just go offshore.
An alternative to outlawing might be to disseminate the tools as widely as possible to eliminate any comparative advantage and render the whole thing moot. If this destroys social media in the process then so be it. Going to happen anyway.
Edit: the bottom line is that "cognitive self-defense" is going to become a thing. These "warning signs for tomorrow" are becoming relevant:
http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/images/warning4.png
We are living in a cyberpunk novel.
This already happens.
The other day I was exploring internet ads; I clicked on every one I saw to see where it would lead me. At one point I ended up on a dating website.
All of the profiles were good looking Asian ladies. Creating an account was free but messaging users cost you points. You have 15 free points so you can messages ladies but after that, you need to pay for points.
Problem is, all of those women were robots. Very good quality chatbots, you wouldn't know unless you were tech-savvy. (I pasted them each other messages and they broke) They use emotional manipulation in order to pressure you to answer. At first, it was simply "Hi!" but it quickly turned into "Please answer me you beautiful man" and then "I'm looking for a man like you in my bed".
You need to pay to answer, but also to do things such as change profile picture, post a message on a public profile, etc. The bots pressured you into doing those things.
In short, this means that there are already people using "AI" that pass Turing tests good enough to fool people in order to manipulate them into giving out their money.
In particular, the idea of AI-driven ads to improve targeting to near-as-makes-no-difference perfect levels is rather unnerving. We're at a moment when the influence of companies or governments in social media is still somewhat obvious/trackable, often because it's driven by actual people. Making it better and then making it automated would result in a system where it would be basically impossible to tell the difference between ads and actual people.
The spam relationship is a correct interpretation. More specifically: as any new medium or channel becomes influential enough, it will be sought by those who seek to use it to their ends: for commercial or financial return, or social or political power. And their means are distraction, disinformation, misinformation, and manipulation.
There's quite a body of literature on this topic, going back a few thousand years.
EDIT: Deleted my twitter account after a month, wanna nerf LinkedIn as well but that decision has professional impacts.
Social media is merely a slimmer middle man in that frenzied feedback loop, and the legacy media is upset that their slice of the pie is shrinking.
I think 100% is misleading.
You could say that a morning newspaper connected people 100% when that was a new thing. Phones/computers only connect us as often as we use them to connect.
For instance something like AR goggles with a constant ticker of information would connect us even more.
I think it's more accurate to simply say that we are more connected. In specifics that the 24 hour cycle of evening news and morning newspapers has changed into an on-demand system that pushes information to people that want to receive it and that anyone can pull it when they have free time.
Facebook quite literally connects more people across a single platform than any medium in history. That logo is the most-seen image in the world right now.
And the history of media change shows that it is tremendously disruptive. Something today's new-media moguls seem to be only just starting to realise. Or at least, admit.
This is a self contradiction. You always have the choice to turn off or tune out the distractions and focus your attention on more important things (which is the essence of free will). That people don't feel like doing that is a psychological problem not a problem with capitalism or profit seeking.
When it comes to drug law, precedent would show that they are far more culpable than the user/addict.
To some degree, any time anyone says they "can't" do something like this, they are saying they don't want it bad enough. I have done a lot of rearranging of my life to get things to work in a satisfactory fashion. This includes but is not limited to changing my relationship to how I use my phone. I used to be a big phone person. I now do most stuff online. After a long time of doing very little with my phone, I am slowly doing more with it these days.
But there is also this: If your family, friends and work all are basically making you crazy, they would probably do so even if phones did not exist. So, this might be an indicator of deeper problems.
Or it might be an indicator that you aren't being driven as crazy as other people, so it just isn't really that important to you.
If you want to guess the outcome of a coin toss, no strings attached, you're completely free to choose heads or tails.
But a lot of bright minds are working very hard to convince you to pick up that phone and not the book. You're being told to pick tails by a man with a gun, offered a reward if you do and pain if you don't.
Perhaps this man is quieter for you, or maybe you have never let him in. But he is very real for a lot of people.
No, you are not. A man brandishing a gun and telling you do do something is threatening to kill you. Nobody at instafacetweet is going to kill you for ignoring their products or limiting your usage.
What we're dealing with isn't an armed strongman, but a clown. The clown really wants your attention and has a lot of tricks up his sleeve to get it, but regardless of the difficulty, ignoring him is not dangerous.
Of course the answer to a DOS is to not accept the incoming requests. It's tricky to distinguish between the malicious requests and the legitimate ones, and doing so doesn't cost nothing. One way to break the defense of a DOS is to DOS the system that does the sorting.
Further, The "requests", in this case bids for our attention, exist on a spectrum from "legit" to "malicious"-- or more precisely "information I will endorse having gotten in long-term retrospect" to "information I will have wished I had no gotten in long term retrospect." So we're already fucked, because you can't even make that determination in a meaningful sense.
When do you eventually settle on a filter that is an approximation of the above, you'll find that it's trivial to DOS that filter too since we're made of meat and exist in a low trust environment.
You can live in the woods or whatever, but since you're posting on HN, I assume you haven't chosen that. And you can look at the other posts in this threads for examples of just how intrusive and unavoidable the bid for attention actually are.
And all this is only the first layer of complexity: the difficulty/impossibility of individually choosing to "free will" your way of this issue. The next layer is that we're not even talking about individuals. We're talking about Capitalism, by which I mean we're talking about systemic issues.
That's a whole different can of worms, but the headline is: in response to global, systemic issues if you find yourself saying a variation of "it's simple! humans just need to be different/better," then you're doing it wrong. You're missing most of the relevant dimensions, so you will not solve the problem, nor is your voice likely to be particularly helpful in the discussion about potential solutions.
It's true, you could do it but would it be a life?
FTFY. The structural issues mentioned in the original article are inherent in a free market economy. Democratic deployment of capital and technology would change the dynamic substantially.
An alternate approach would be to have substantial regulation on speech by companies (aka advertising and propaganda), but even this would require major changes driven by the democratic process, e.g a U.S. constitutional amendment.
There is no singular policy that will solve global, complex problems. Sometimes capitalism isn't the answer, sometimes it is. Sometimes regulations are the clear answer, sometimes not.
Corporations don't have nukes or concentration camps.
I mean we currently have the exact opposite problem. We can definitively answer that people hearing everything and anything is quantifiably a bad thing for a good-sized portion of the population.
See here[1] and here[2] for some quick examples.
>Who watches the watcher?
Transparency is not antithetical or exclusive to any system that allows information to be properly editorialized. Dystopian hypotheticals kind of fall flat on their face when we have practical problems that run completely counter to some far off totalitarian future.
The worst part about the media landscape for me is not the massive maze of crap you have to wade through, it's that there's enough people willing to lend credence to some part(s) of that maze of crap. It can often remove any hope of a reasonable foundation for a conversation on whatever topic.
I think the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle[3] applies well to this topic.
>The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.
The current U.S. political landscape is a perfect example of this. We have people buying into certain political mythologies (either outright lies or just plain conspiracy theories, in regards to certain political factions and general policies) with no factual basis and it's wasting what is essentially valuable political capital at an alarming rate. And disappointingly, the actual conspiracies we do have evidence for are disregarded by the very same population that seems to be completely incapable of discerning and analyzing information (or misinformation) in general, across any field. Say, I don't know, climate change.
[1]: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1065912917721061
[2]: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ejsp.2331/epdf
[3]: https://www.slideshare.net/ziobrando/bulshit-asymmetry-princ...
Most corporations not only function but are structured as autocracies, in which junior employees have no rights over their conditions of employment other than departure.
I guess this is one way to solve it - if you have no free will or free time outside of People's Democratic Central Party Committee directives, you certainly couldn't spend it on Facebook and Buzzfeed. North Korea probably doesn't have any issues with distractions. I heard they solved the obesity problem too, by similar means.
No they did not. You don't go to Twitter/Facebook because your free will has been "shut down". You do it because you like it. If you don't want to do it, it is very easy to stop. You won't have excruciating pain and debilitating disease if you don't read what she did next, you heart won't stop and your brain won't shut down if you don't learn one weird trick to burn body fat and make all people of your preferred gender to fall in love with you forever. Literally nothing would happen. You decide whether to do it or not. If you decide to do it, it's ok - it is your time, your life, if you want to spend a little bit of it reading about one weird trick or looking at funny cats, who am I to say no? Go for it. But please stop blaming somebody else for your decision to do it. You have free will. Embrace it.
What justifies your certainty here? If history proves anything, it’s that people are eminently manipulable. That’s no surprise: we’re biological machines at the endpoint of eons of evolution. We’re not gods. Of course we can be hacked.
Did you write this comment on your own free will or was manipulated into it by an invisible puppet master? If the latter, what would be the point of me trying to convince you of anything - you can't be convinced, since your actions are not sourced in you, but in the will of your puppetmaster! However, somehow you and me are discussing things. By that you prove that you, too, believe in free will - otherwise there would be no point in you discussing anything, after all you are controlled by your puppetmaster, and I am controlled by mine, so what's the point in us puppets exchanging words, if nothing can be ever changed by our will?
The only point of having discussions, views, principles, debates, ideas, politics - is f you have free will. Otherwise this whole thing has no meaning.
> Of course we can be hacked.
Surely. There is lots of ways to subjugate other's will - by violent force, by trickery, by fraud, by lies, we have no shortage of ways developed over thousands of years to do it. That however does not deny the premise there's something to be forced, or tricked, or deceived - and thus also something that can be free from force or deception. You can be deceived, but you can also resist the deception. You will not always win, but you'll never win if you surrender in advance.
Besides which, psychology and neurology tell us that most of the time we haven't a clue what our underlying motivations are[0]. We do not have the ability to introspect our unconscious motivations, but that doesn't mean they are immune to external influence and manipulation.
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introspection_illusion#Unrel...
But a lot of the things people are saying here are the culmination of many other actions which have been repeated over the past many years and are finally coming to a head.
secondly - you continually make an error of generalization.
Yes, one single particular individual may be able to exercise free will. But Most dont even know that their will is being attacked.
Its not like these are telegraphed villains with evil laughs saying "I'm going to take your freedom".
This is candy crush, with its intentionally neutral and happy pictures. Its facebook, with its memmories and your friends.
WHY would anyone stop that?
Sure, someone in this thread, who is a techie and has read the past 2 months of tech news, may have an idea of what to defend.
In that very narrow, individual scenario - yes, he has a choice.
Yours is the craftsmans argument, in a world which has just seen the advent of the assembly line. Certain individuals may well craft their own will.
Those few are considered flaws in the system, and the system itself constantly focuses on those people they CAN get, and who are NOT aware, or have the wherewithal or lack the interest in stopping it.
Hell, people don't want to wear helmets when they ride motorcycles; we couldnt get people to waste less water when they shower, and instead there was an active movement to deny climate change.
Programs which never sleep, eat, and cost tiny amounts of money to execute. So even if you never log in, they just lie in wait.
The armies arrayed against an individual are far greater than what a normal person can hope to deal with - unless they drop everything and focus on beating it.
And why would a normal person do that? SO that he can keep free will? Most people would give up their free will if it would guarantee that their kids have a future, that they get food, and shelter.
Let's just assume you answer "yes" (because to answer "no" would be unimaginably absurd)... lets also imagine that billions of dollars are up for grabs to the people/companies who can manipulate/trick sound of mind people better than anyone else... What would that world look like?
Well, we're living in it.
Click-bait is a real thing. It triggers a deep psychological need, varying from "let me read this article and comment on how wrong everyone is" to "this is psychological porn that completely agrees with how I feel". Companies whose business model is based on keeping your attention have gotten really good at keeping your attention. Its a form of break-down of free will. Like getting a whiff of the good stuff, when you really should know better to avoid it. Its not really that hard to understand, and I'm sure you understand it already. Whats unexplained is why you chose to blame the victim when there is an entire industry dedicated to setting up the trap.
That's one way to describe an "industry [that] employs some of the smartest people, thousands of Ph.D. designers, statisticians, engineers [that] go to work every day to get us to do this one thing, to undermine our willpower." From the article.
"People's Democratic Central Party Committee" Nice straw-man that conflates democratic socialism with authoritarian one-party rule.
There is an entire world of alternative possibilities out there for economic and governance systems. Don't throw the socialist baby out with the Soviet bathwater.
That's ominously sounding bullshit. You decide what to do with your willpower, and if you don't like the consequences, it's your fault, not some nefarious engineers. If you don't like facebook, don't go there. If you don't like particular site, don't go there, of if you absolutely can't control yourself, install one of a thousand programs that let you block specific sites, and block that site. It's completely within your control. It's your responsibility to do it, to control your own actions and to bear the consequences.
You just don't want to bother - you want the Central Committee to take over, so whatever happens if not your responsibility but theirs. It is an extremely infantile approach.
> Nice straw-man that conflates democratic socialism with authoritarian one-party rule.
OK, let it be People's Democratic Central Multi-Party Committee is that makes you feel better. The point is not how the committee is called, the point is that it would decide how resources are allocated, thus eliminating the whole pesky free will issue.
> Don't throw the socialist baby out with the Soviet bathwater.
Somehow socialist babies have been always surrounded by Soviet bathwaters, sooner or later. If one were empirically inclined, one would be tempted to conclude that there is some strong relation between the two. But of course one shouldn't forget that True Socialism (TM) has never been tried.
>"We evidently know what we mean by length if we can tell what the length of any and every object is, and for the physicist nothing more is required. To find the length of an object, we have to perform certain physical operations. The concept of length is therefore fixed when the operations by which length is measured are fixed: that is, the concept of length involves as much and nothing more than the set of operations by which length is determined. In general, we mean by any concept nothing more than a set of operations; the concept is synonymous with the corresponding set of operations."
>Bridgman has seen the wide implications of this mode of thought for the society at large:
"To adopt the operational point of view involves much more than a mere restriction of the sense in which we understand 'concept,' but means a far-reaching change in all our habits of thought, in that we shall no longer permit ourselves to use as tools in our thinking concepts of which we cannot give an adequate account in terms of operations."
I have no idea what the thing you call "structural inequality" is, so I can't say whether I believe it exists or not. It could be you call by this term some well-established phenomenon, and then I'd agree it exists, or it could be that you call some imaginary bugaboo like engineers taking your free will with their evil algorithms, and then, absent any empirical evidence of its existence, I do not believe in it. Hard to say without understanding the term.
> Without an acknowledgement of the massive power imbalance between mass media corporations on the one hand and the citizenry on the other, there's no possible discussion here.
I certainly see discussion going on right here, so it is possible, but if you mean by that "without you accepting my point as an axiom without proof, I am not ready to continue because my winning is not guaranteed and I have no means to prove my claims" then I agree that continuing the discussion in this situation is not the best move for you. If, however, you are ready to prove your points, you are welcome to do it anytime you like. Free will, you see :)
As far as I can see, there's no "massive power imbalance", on the contrary - the press is often criticized for catering for the basest instincts of the masses and being too easily swayed by a short-term fads and frivolities of the public. Scandal-of-the-day, however minor and vapid, often supplants more deep and important topics. If this criticism is true - and I believe evidence suggests to a large measure it is - then the public is the one to hold the power. If nobody wants to click on clickbait, if nobody comes to your site to view and click on the ads, if nobody reads whatever content you are providing - where is your power? What is your power? You can publish anything and nobody would even know about it, and pretty soon you couldn't publish anything because your servers will be shut down for the lack of payment.
I would say if we can see anything, it is that media corporations are too timid, foolish and cowardly to do anything but what the lowest common denominator demands from them. Clicks and ad impressions are kings, and who makes those clicks? The citizenry does. Nobody stands with the gun to your head and demands you to click or visit certain site. You decide it on your own power. If you don't like the result - maybe time to think what you can change?
The best version of the OP’s arguing is for individual ability and choice, and the ability of a person to make a difference of their own volition.
This is a fundamentally important right because without it, we are all automatons.
The issue is that in many cases we humans make bad choices, on a truly unimaginable scale.
This is also very much a part of being human - good choices exist only if bad choices exists.
The issue is that sometimes we can agree that people will consistently make poor choices, for a variety of forgiveable reasons.
While we could conceivably go after each individual, explain and educate them in precisely the way required to convince them that they should wear seat belts - it’s is often practically impossible to do so.
Which is why we introduce laws and regulations. All cars must have seat belts - and you must wear them.
Because as a species we are able to make meta cognitive calls or simply- decisions about decisions.
As a species we don’t want our people dying, for something as trivial as not wearing a seat belt.
It causes families to lose parents, parents to lose children - often because they were just at the wrong place and time.
Getting people to wear seat belts causes large scale good, over an individuals choice to put themselves and others at risk.
Take drug addiction as an example. Sure, we can tell addicts 'well you shouldn't have done drugs' or 'just quit' to an addict. Do we then ignore those who have engineered a system to get people hooked? Many health experts point to the over-prescription of opiate painkillers led in part by a medical industry hoping to maximize profits. All the while their dependence creates negative externalities to others in society through crime and poor decision-making.
At the end of the day rationality is an abstraction of actual human behavior. We can make decisions that are 'rational' in a neo-liberal economic sense, but that we ultimately regret. When profit rules all else, businesses will exploit this discrepancy.
This is simply a fallacy. You can’t decide to switch off selective psychological mechanisms in your brain.
Facebook, Snapchat etc. are weaponizing and exploiting these against us/humanity in ways similar to Vegas casinos.
It is easy to not drive to Vegas, enter a casino and engage in a psychological loop designed to hack my brain.
It is not so easy to escape the all-permeating tentacles of social media and its finely tuned intermittent rewards etc. mechanisms.
Given that willpower is a limited cognitive resource, your proposition is not realistic.
Yeah, and in some way or another, every single one of them seem to end in a bloody dictatorship.
Thanks, but no thanks, please keep your "alternative possibilities" to yourself.
Lots of workers' blood was spilled to ensure the capitalist systems we see in the US and other countries, too. All sides in the history of politics and economic systems are bloody-handed monsters.
It might, just might, be possible to learn from history and not repeat prior mistakes. I sure hope so.
The world has never been in a better place, and has never improved as fast as in the last 60 years. If that's your argument to try something different, your argument doesn't make any sense.
> It might, just might, be possible to learn from history and not repeat prior mistakes. I sure hope so.
Indeed, let's not try to implement socialism again. Every single time, over dozens of times, it resulted in bloody dictatorships. Let's learn from history and not repeat prior mistakes.
It is very much worth studying why this has happened and what kind of methods can be used to avert it. Not only is Marxism-Leninism not the only form of Socialist praxis (neither is Marxism the only Socialist theory for that matter), but it's unwise to dismiss "failures" for the reason that they were authoritarian. Allende, Sankara's Burkina Faso, the Paris Commune, revolutionary Catalonia, and most recently Rojava are examples of the Socialist project experiencing some faults but not nearly as uncharitably as you are painting them here.
I'm dismissing failures because every single time it ended in bloody dictatorships, but no, This Time It Will Be Different®.
No, it won't. Funny how you talk about learning with the failures of history, but you keep insisting in trying again a system that again and again has proven itself to be horrible.
And again, that's when the world has been the best that it has ever been. In 60 years, extreme poverty went from ~60% to <10% of the global population because of free trade and globalization. Free trade was the largest income distribution process in history, shifting value from developed countries to developing countries.
Sure, there is still a lot to be done, but the current system has worked miracles. It can be improved, but proposing a dramatic change to a system that ALWAYS results in bloody dictatorships makes no sense.
Keep your disastrous social and economic experiments to yourself. Socialism has done harm enough.
Why do you think strawman thought-terminating cliches are an acceptable level of discourse? At best they serve to be distracting and needlessly hostile.
>but you keep insisting in trying again a system that again and again has proven itself to be horrible.
Not really; have you heard of Badiou's concept of the Communist Hypothesis? His argument is that Socialism, well, Communism has existed as an Idea for centuries, it is always the force to break down the "present state of things", it is the first element of society, the subversive one, to oppose the action of the State. To dismiss thirty years of research into Communism, creating branches such as anarchist Communism, communalism, feminist anarchism, Socialist technocracy and others with faux-empiricism is a little heavy handed in my view.
As for your support of the wonders of capitalism, neither I, nor Marx, Engels or any contemporary Communist denies its push to reduce poverty.
>shifting value from developed countries to developing countries.
"Shifting value" is a very strange way of saying that developing countries are being systematically exploited due to the low cost of labour because they have almost no training.
>but the current system has worked miracles
So did the feudal system, and in fact so did the Soviet system (which I do not by any means support).
>It can be improved
So can Socialism.
>but proposing a dramatic change to a system that ALWAYS results in bloody dictatorships makes no sense.
Capitalism itself was extremely dramatic, it came "soaked from head to toe in blood" as Marx put it. In fact, he dedicates two chapters of his magnum opus to detailing the bloody history of capitalism and the laws passed in Western Europe that allowed it to flourish.
But that's the essence of your argument. You are proposing to try again something that 100% of the times led to bloody dictatorships, claiming that this time it will be different due to some vague, hand-wavy reason.
> "Shifting value" is a very strange way of saying that developing countries are being systematically exploited due to the low cost of labour because they have almost no training.
Yeah, millions being moved out of poverty is the same as "exploited".
> So did the feudal system, and in fact so did the Soviet system (which I do not by any means support).
No. Unless one of those systems did something like removing 50% of the world population from extreme poverty in half a century. Neither did. Not only that, the Soviet system purposefully murdered millions. And the key word here is "purposefully". Every system results in deaths, the Soviet (and all socialists) fall into a special category where death is part of the governing process. See Holodomor. Killing Fields. Etc.
> So can Socialism.
I'll say "maybe" to give you the benefit of the doubt, but do we need to kill millions again to find out based on your "hunch"? No, thank you very much.
> as Marx put it
And you keep citing Marx as if he is a reasonable source, that puzzles me. He's long dead, just as his economic theories. Keep them dead.
Because I'm not an advocate of Marxism-Leninism nor Soviet state capitalism, or depriving people of life.
>Yeah, millions being moved out of poverty is the same as "exploited".
Both can be true, the forms of exploitation have changed but the essence remains the same - the massive extraction of surplus from those in too dire a situation to do anything about it, especially in sweatshops.
>removing 50% of the world population from extreme poverty in half a century
The Soviet model transformed Russia from a barely industrialised feudal backwater into competing with the world's largest superpowers and enduring a world war and making extreme advancements in science and technology while facing constant embargoes. It lifted many people to much better standards of living and education and liberty.
>where death is part of the governing process.
I disagree that this is a feature of Socialism, it is a feature of an authoritarian state. Pinochet's Chile and Hitler's Nazi Germany were destructive even though neither were Socialist societies.
> as if he is a reasonable source
Marx is highly respected in the fields of classical political economy, philosophy, critical theory, sociology, journalism and revolutionary and liberation movements. Even his bourgeois critics hold him as one of the best critics of capitalism. The continuance of his ideas which goes on to this day in new Communist projects and research within philosophy by the likes of Badiou, Zizek, Negri, and the Frankfurt School has ensured he hasn't died. As his friend Engels said at his funeral: his name will endure through the ages.
I'm sure you believe if you controlled a country, you would do a much better job and not make the same mistakes that lead to a bloody dictatorship and worse outcomes for the poor. Excuse us if most of the rest here don't believe that.
I've seen similar ratings for Roman emperors as well but confess I don't remember the details, I wouldn't be surprised if someone has further compiled information to address exactly this question for other European lines of monarchs, the various Chinese dynasties, Japan's weird history, etc. (https://archive.is/I42xd is a good reminder of the excesses, no form of government is innocent.)
"Democratic deployment" will still suffer from well-applied demagoguery, the people themselves are still prone to manipulation - even when their choices are abstracted away in a command economy.
A solid counter to demagoguery is economic justice and education that encourages critical thinking. People are much less prone to be swayed by that sort of thing when their health, shelter, and food are not at risk.
Maybe if we both feel this way, it's actually a balanced group? Or maybe it just comes in waves depending on the topic.
You seem to have disproved your own thesis, then, since there aren't that many people who have their health, shelter, or food directly affected by this race for the attention economy. (Yes, I said "aren't that many" and not "zero", but it's still not that many.)
What basis do you have for believing a centralized government with the definition of all morality and power adhering within it wouldn't simply turn the full force of this engineering on its citizens? After all, isn't it just that important for us to use these tools to maintain proper consciousness? If you don't believe that, don't you think the leadership will? And don't we actually have historical (USSR, to the extent it was technologically possible) and modern regimes (China, do an internet search on "china citizen score") doing just that right now? Before walking down that trail, you ought to make very, very, very sure it leads where you think it does, because several hundred million people who have walked it before you have discovered it doesn't.
That seems highly questionable to me. Large numbers of people in retail and service industries disrupted or threatened by technological change are arguably impacted by it.
(I get that the internet at large is impacting them immensely, and the list of such people and professions hardly stops there, but I don't immediately see the connection between them and attention abuse specifically.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_economics
My cursory searches have failed to find a sovereign state that has successfully implemented parecon. Feel free to cite a counterexample.
He's advocating exactly what you are: democratic deployment of technology. How this relates to media is very interesting, and the idea that these problems exist merely quantitatively different in a possible Socialist society is a fundamental lack of imagination for qualitative change.
The other people replying to you forget a key component of history - that rationality is not fixed. Technology has the capability to change what humans consider rational, rationality is a process, a movement in which different societies have different views. The current rationality of late capitalism is what Marcuse terms technological rationality. That is, the rationality of production. This kind of rationality is the production for the sake of production, for the sake of profit. After all, what is more rational than developing machinery, streamlining it, making it more efficient, increasing the role of mechanization in society? Hardly anyone would disagree that these are wonderful advancements - however with them, they have brought rationality of production which pervades society everywhere. This rationality is actually irrational, but few see this. Advertising, planned obsolescence, extreme marketing, the working of the market into the education systems are all simply parts of the production process. Just more costs.
Artwork is affected by technological rationality. The old pieces of art often had an alienating component, that is to say, they displayed a clear break from the state of things, and a hope for a different kind of future, the outcast, the mastermind thief, the unemployed person, etc. all fulfilled a role that was outside of the system of rationality, acting against it; even when these roles were not glorified, they existed as an opposition to the system. Marcuse notes that in modern artwork, this notion has largely disappeared; the villains and outcasts are no longer outcasts, they are within the system but in the bottom rungs, and their opposition cannot be seen as clever, but it is only misguided. Their opposition to the bourgeois system from within is always shown as a false opposition, a threat to our notions of freedom conferred by technological rationality.
When you hear Bach, Freud, Marx etc. in the supermarket, he is stripped of his alienating or any kind of critical dimension. An element of his truth has been taken away by the new consideration in the light of technological rationality, reduced and sublimated into the totality.
Socialism, what you are advocating, carries with it a very different set of rationality in which man is liberated from the freedom of being a free economic subject, free from the bounded freedom of the welfare state. The welfare state, which many proponents of "soft capitasm" advocate is another form of repression of the individual, but in different forms. It is administered living, the restriction and control of the free time made available by technological advancement and control over the intelligence necessary to comprehend self-determination.
When we advocate Socialism, we do not mean a central party committee deciding what to read, we mean the liberation of people from the restrictions of the new rationality which insists in its own mode of living through our leisure time, our work time, our sexual enjoyment and artistic pursuit.
Marxists tell people what's best for everyone; they don't do what people want.
I think this problem is more complex than just the media. In general, people are spending their attention and free will on broad spectrum of useless junk. Media, especially Netflix ("what do I do with my free time?"), is definitely a major offender - my point is that it's not the only one.
The modern world has wound up being an attack on free will, malevolent or not. It's exponentially easier to make a choice from a menu of 5 items vs. a menu of 50. There seems to be a biological limit on our ability to choose and the modern world has far exceeded that.
Given the everyday utility of a phone, a bad choice comes with significant economic costs of wasted time and frustration stemming from poor performance/reliability. If you don't already have a preference (eg based on trying the preferred device of a trusted friend) then it's entirely rational to spend some time researching your options, up to some significant portion of the cost you expected to save by picking an android over an iphone.
I'm into synthesizers and if you think people nerd out on phones you'll probably be horrified at the energy and passion spent debating the merits of machines that produce subtly different kinds of bleep bloop noises. I don't spend as much time on that any more, and have also simplified and slimmed down my synth choices to a smallish number of devices I really like, but I don't consider the prior time wasted; it was only through that extensive and intensive knowledge-gathering that I was able to make those aesthetically optimal choices for my own music-making pleasure. It's harder to be simple than it is to be complex. Simplicity is easy to imitate, but imitators aren't usually innovators.
I do agree with your larger point about the undesirability of a surfeit of economic choice. If all you wanted was a phone that worked and you could afford it, there's nothing wrong with just getting whatever is widely hailed as the best one out there. I know nothing about cars and care less, so if I have to get a car I'd probably just get a Honda Civic due to its reputation for low-maintenance reliability. But I understand why people who enjoy driving or have some other reason to care have strong preferences about different vehicles.
I served in the military years ago. Just one tour. I got out with good memories but also some ideas. For example, I have standardized on Levi's 501 jeans, button down shirts of the same brand, and desert boots. I wear this daily. I don't have to think about what I wear. All my clothes fit as I expect, all the time. This frees me up to think about what matters--my family and job.
I made a comment further down about freewill you might find interesting, as freewill is now going to cost those of us who care about it.
> I'm thinking of ditching my iPhone for a flip phone.
I still don't think I could do without a smartphone. I have practically all notifications muted, but you need apps for too many things (most notably: Lyft to stay responsible).
That reminds me of my college days back in 2011 when I decided to go for a flip phone instead of a smartphone. Most of my friends thought I was peculiar for my insisting I use one and to do this day I still have that same flip phone, but not in use; just as a memento... sort of.
At the time, I wasn't really thinking about how my attention was a valuable resource or that most smartphone apps were major distractions. I just simply didn't like how inundated with features smartphones were. I always thought my laptop as my primary place of "getting-work-done" and my gaming laptop for entertainment (i.e. helluva lot of StarCraft II) and to have a phone that competed with that, but far worse, never sat well with me.
Looking back, I'm glad I did that and wish I could continue with a phone that could only text/call.
edit: Formatting
If you are in any longstanding 100% iMessage group chats you will be silently excluded from them if you switch away from iPhone. Disabling iMessage will have no effect on those chats.
One that the big centalizers have too much political influence, at least in the US, and let's not forget places like China and Russia where the governments to control the web.
But even if you passed some strong regulations, the centralizers would likely keep coming up with new innovations that would break the spirit of the laws.
But this doesn't need to be the case, we already deny certain things that historically have been terrible for commerce. Like intentionally misleading weights and measures. We know that if you don't legislate and regulate businesses will change their weights to short change people.
But is there any qualitative difference between selling 0.9kg of corn as 1kg. And brainwashing people (and the volume of advertising, product placement, forum shilling is brainwashing). Brainwashing people that some suger water will make them more popular. In my mind there is not, markets work because aggregate decision making gives us good choices. When it works even bad decision makers are lifted up since the average good decisions have already killed off all the companies with bad offers.
But in our phishing for phools economy we mostly have successful manipulators to deal with and huge quantities of free hyper-stimulus to lead us there. We will not be free of this without legislation. The powerful must be banned from spending on marketing. That's it, we cannot have effective market based economics when google and facebook can find all your secrets and set an AI to convince you to act in their interests. And that's coming sooner than I'd like.
I would personally go further and say that everyone should be banned from marketing & product discovery should be nationalized (trip advisor, amazon reviews are trying to solve a problem that is trivial for government).
Actually, I think I do know what it means, but I have the feeling that many people do not like the idea, that their decisions are based on past experiences and that their free will is actually just the evaluation of their perceptions (of their truth) and therefore, it is nothing that comes from some spritual origin within them, but instead is something that happend to them.
While it feels a little incomfortable at first, it explains a lot of human behavior as for example the impact of advertiments. The important part is to also understand that it does not free you from your own responsibility as the fact that you have beeen tought ethics is also part of the evaluation.
This might be pretty close to the mark, actually. Our conditioning to past, even collective, social, experience can become so all encompassing that we cannot imagine something "other". Perhaps psychopaths can? And that's a pretty scary thought.
a) evaluating multiple possible outcomes
b) selecting from those the outcome with the highest desired value
c) taking the action with increases the likelihood of the desired outcome
That's it, end of story. No "spiritual nonsense" necessary.
This definition lines up with human intuition, and it also applies to determinstic things like machines. For example, Using this definition we can say things like 'the load balancer chose that server' and even ask why. This definition allows you to debug choice-making processes, and reason about them.
So when we ask 'why did the load balancer choose this server', it would be absurd to answer 'because the programmer told it to.' It's true, but empty. The same applies to the claim that 'lots of what people are doing is the impact of advertising'. True, but vacuous. Why did things happen? "Well, because of physics" - that's a true answer to every question that tells us nothing.
Of COURSE we can improve the choice making mechanism inside a load balancer. That fact is obvious to us. What's less obvious is that you can improve the choice making mechanism INSIDE OF YOU because you aren't a static object but rather a sequence of different deterministic objects. In each moment, your neural connectome changes slightly. Pathways that you activate become more automatic, and pathways you don't activate atrophy.
You activate pathways by selectively activating your attention. That's how you do it. That's how you change yourself, so that you are a different person who makes different choices. That's how you improve your decision making apparatus - by being good at selectively paying increasing attention to signals that are helping you.
Individual persons can improve their choice-making mechanisms as well. I know becuase i've done it. I struggled for years making bad choices, and i always used logic like you are using to tell myself 'it wasn't my fault'. That may have been true, but it was useless. It didn't help me make better choices. Only by accepting that I am responsible for the choices i make, and _embracing this fact_ was i able to change my choice making apparatus from something that was pretty terrible to something that works quite well.
When you go around telling people they don't have free well, you're jamming up their choice making apparatus. You're convincing people not to bother making choices. It's probably worse than advertising.
Making better choices comes down, ultimately, to controlling your attention during the choice making process. I agree that advertising is super destructive. It's like the opposite of meditation.
Which is the whole point of propaganda and other forms of marketing: bombard people with a message, true or false, it doesn't matter. Over time people will come to believe the message, and it will inform their future choices. People do not have the time to evaluate in depth all of the information they receive on a daily basis, and therefore are not actually capable of making truly rational choices.
Everyone is merely doing their best, and many are indeed failing. At some point, humans have to rely on trust. In our current society, that is extremely difficult.
You cannot be present everywhere so you trust other people to perceive things for you.
That trust is often abused by injecting bias. And this is done to exert influence over people.
Same trust is abused to certain extent by historians through revisionism.
Same trust is abused by organized religion, where they control the rules of how you get favored by supreme beings. In some cases those rules are intrincated and arbitrary, like wasting your life building a pyramid, or entering a structure designated as temple every week, or believing other people belong to a better caste (where coincidentally the religious caste is usually at the top).
Just to point out, it protects the freedom of speech in relation to what the government can do. Most of social and news platform are someone's property, and by default if they don't want users to talk about certain things they are free to ask them to leave. They might pay lip service and invoke a general desire for freedom of speech but are not legally bound to do any of that.
* Has the goal of filtering rather than flooding
* No ads
* No pop-ins 3/4 of the way through the article telling me about four other articles I should read
* No endless scrolling
* Upfront about bias
* Cites sources
So it's a fair bet that nothing he tweets is likely to affect you. Many others don't enjoy that luxury.
They are part of a large network: https://gijn.org/member/
The biggest (by visual size) story at the moment on http://bbc.co.uk/news is "Banned in China? Why Gigi and Katy missed big show" which is just "Singers without visas not included in advertising show for lingerie company". Why they feel the need to copy the worst traits of paid/ad supported content is beyond me.
Note that the Intercept meets most of your criteria when it can, and Breitbart meets all but the "no ads" criteria. Both cite and link to sources at least sometimes, when those sources are citable.
https://thecorrespondent.com/
https://thecorrespondent.com/principles
* The Correspondent is openly subjective
* The Correspondent is an antidote to the daily news grind
* The Correspondent is entirely free of ads
* The Correspondent does not strive to maximize profits
Example Article:
https://thecorrespondent.com/4664/why-do-the-poor-make-such-...
I recently quit using tobacco. I remembered all the warnings from my school health classes about how hard it was to quit once you start, how there's a physical dependence and all that. It was uncomfortable at times, and there were plenty of cravings to get over, but I was ultimately successful.
I can compare this to the couple of times I've tried to "quit the Internet" (i.e. social media, reddit, etc.). The problem is that there's nowhere to run from the Internet. I can avoid tobacco stores, I can't avoid my iPhone. For what it's worth, I'd love to smash my phone and throw it in a ditch, but there are certain social and professional obligations that require me to hold onto it. I have to be able to check my work email on the go. I have to use Facebook to stay in the loop about social events because all my friends use Facebook to schedule those social events. I have to call my parents once in a while. One device is a tool for all of those, in addition to being an ultra-high-tech meme-box with which I can mainline information to make myself feel good. It is of course not all bad, but the wonderful connectivity of the Internet is inextricably wrapped up with the "DoS Attack on Your Free Will".
To get back to the analogy, I'd like to think I was successful at quitting tobacco because I can avoid it. If I were giving someone tips to quit something, that's the best advice I could think to offer: avoid it. If you want to quit smoking, wouldn't it be preposterous to buy a pack of cigarettes and carry it everywhere? The temptation would always be there.
So it is with smartphones. When the best minds in attention capitalism are trying to pull me in every time I send a text message, how can I quit that? It's always in my pocket, and I can't simply throw it away because there are now certain expectations that I carry that tool with me almost everywhere I go. There is nowhere to run from this modern media, and that terrifies me.
I quit facebook back in March. Yep, some people don't talk to me anymore. But you know what? I talk with other people more, and I'm enjoying those relationships more.
It's also hard; this is a top-of-class addiction. There's nothing easy about rewiring the reward circuit of your brain. And definitely Facebook, work email and in my case ycombinator news, are wired in to the reward circuit - for the relief of boredom, or even the relief of hard work (or the appearance of that relief anyway.)
A lot of people say this one (usually about Facebook), but I don't understand it. If you want to talk to those friends, why doesn't it suffice to schedule spending time with them in the same way you would have done it in 2000?
Phones and email still exist. If your relationship is predicated on a single internet based communication service then it's probably not a relationship worth maintaining.
Just use a different communication mechanism. It's really not that hard.
Send a postcard, it's fun, I promise.
It (AT LEAST) frees you to decide when to check the phone, rather than letting these companies, (through notifications) decide for you when you're going to check your phone.
I also turn off the ability of most apps to display notifications. That helps.
Second is to restrict your internet use to specific times or to just say an hour every night from 9-10pm. Lets say start out by saying internet only from 0-15 minutes on the hour (initially). The idea is to get you used to not reflexively use the internet to prevent boredom or distraction.
How you accomplish that, say by killing your internal dns server to not respond or even firewall off your network from reaching the internet is up to you. But the key is to make it so you change your habit of when using the internet is ok.
Oh also, leave the phone at your desk, only pick it up when you need to look at it or if it rings etc...
Another good tip, reward yourself for each milestone, you want to encourage yourself to do the right thing. Don't use negative reinforcement unless you really know how to make that work. Its easier to do stuff like: if I don't go online at all today, I'll eat a container of ice cream (bad example if you do this every day but you get the gist) as a reward.
I still pull the phone out of my pocket several times an hour, but a quick push of the home-button and a confirmation that there's nothing of interest leads to it going straight back into the pocket. It's liberating!
Step 2 was removing the browser shortcut from the main screen, so there's less temptation to just 'fire it up and check HN quickly'.
It's not for everyone, but I have a very addictive personality when it comes to technology.
Edit: I see you can't do that because of professional obligations. What about carrying around an iPad - it could be more of a barrier to just random surfing?
And why would you like to "quit internet"? Yes, many sites try to get your attention, try to manipulate you into buying their products. But you can avoid that. Using ad blockers wherever you can. And regarding Facebook. You can use it more like a newsreader (subscribing to newspapers, ignoring my friend's posts mostly).
Edit: Re smartphone. I also have my phone on `do not disturb', permanently. I try to educate my friends / family members that I don't necessarily pick up the phone when it rings, but I will always call back. They are ok with that.
This is what I do, and it's drastically reduced my information addiction.
Ditching reddit or hacker news is much harder. I mean, how do you even use the internet these days?
Now, I either mean to do it or I don't go. My social life certainly feels more organic:
met my girlfriend at a former job, not social media. I get invited out with her colleagues from time-to-time or we go on a date or spend time together at home or I commit my time to studying or some other enjoyment. I'd like to think I can build a new social life in that way, but maybe it's a pipe dream now.
It does feel like there's a whole other life going on that I'm not a part of sometimes.
Without the Facebook, Twitter, etc thing, the internet is either topical discussion, news, study/research, music, or nil.
I'm both happy and sad to discover that I don't even know what to do on the internet when they're not available. Happy because it forces me to do something else. Sad because I remember when I truly loved the internet, before reddit or HN, and I wonder why I don't have that love anymore.
I really don't know how to use the internet these days.
Same for me. Nowadays when I get bored and have some unproductive time to kill, I usually surf hacker news because I can't think of any other website to read as I quit other social media websites.
It's the same happiness/sadness you mention, although the lack of options on the internet has been turning out to be more positive than negative as I've been reading much much more.
Sadly I find my attention span, even with a great read, has suffered greatly. I blame the internet, but maybe it's just me. It's very difficult to suffer through even a brief boring stretch now.
An RSS reader really helped me with this. Over years, I found a good handful of blogs that I find insightful more often than not, and I can reliably find something in my RSS feed when I choose to look at it. The SNR is much higher than somewhere like Reddit and Hacker News, and the lack of an account and upvotes means that a big chunk of the dopamine fix is removed.
I would be lying if I didn't mention that I occasionally feel something missing: if I read an article that I think is insightful but wrong in some important way, I miss the pressure-release valve of being able to discuss it with others (Obligatory Xkcd: https://xkcd.com/386/). But I view this more like a compulsion than a legitimate desire, akin to someone with a bad diet craving sugar.
And I'm 100% with you. It was a huge revelation for me personally when I realized new technology doesn't necessarily make me happier. Probably like a lot of us, I grew up obsessed with new tech, new computers, new gaming consoles, new phones.
2 years ago, I traded my iPhone plus in for an SE (the smaller one). Then I moved all slot machine apps either off my phone or at least into a folder on the second screen. Primarily, my phone is for maps and camera. Everything else is suspect.
Tony was the founder of Lift.do which became coach.me.
His blog on betterhumans is fantastic and I highly recommend it.
Keep up the fantastic work Tony!!!
https://goo.gl/fsW8Qq
I agree for those with children it becomes a different story.
Having a cap forces me to be mindful about how I interact through my phone. If I use too much Reddit, for example, I run out of data and fallback to 3G - acceptable for social/professional obligations but way too slow for wasting time. Lately I've been considering switching to 3G entirely.
* Uninstall twitter, facebook and other social apps from your phone; only use the computer (or other device that's not constantly in your pocket).
* Even on your computer, log out of twitter, facebook and others. Only log in when you want to look into something (eg. check the social events, send a message), and use private/incognito mode for this; use 2FA - besides being good security practice, it's an extra hurdle so you won't default to "quickly check" the sites when your mental energy is low.
* When you do use tw/fb/..., unfollow/block/opt out of all the meme/cute/funny stuff (at least n my fb feed, there's basically 10 sites that'd constantly crop up - blocking posts by all of these greatly increased Signal/Noise ratio on FB);
* Have a reading list ready. I use iBooks on my iPhone to load up interesting articles, but you can use whichever method you prefer. The goal is to have something interesting/worthwhile to read available for the moments when you do want to look at your phone and/or kill some time (eg when in a long queue or waiting for a train). This something shouldn't require special focus or mental energy/capacity.
* Develop heuristics to ignore content that you know is junk but that tends to drag you in. I suspect this is slightly different for anyone, mine is: anything cute, funny, outrageous, sad or is a list of things. I am aware this potentially cuts out some genuinely worthwhile stuff and I'm okay with it. Considering my attention & time is finite and the Internet is (for all purposes) not, I'd rather have false positives than false negatives.
* I also have a high bar for what's newsworthy for me: anything that personally affects me (meaning I have to change my intentions or react in some way), and stuff that'll still be considered newsworthy in a month. Anything else gets ignored, no matter the medium. Again I'm okay with false positives. Also, since my friends are colleagues typically don't have the same approach, if I miss anything important (or really interesting), I'll probably hear it on the grapevine.
Couldn't be happier.
I think the birthdays only counted as "costless" when I was already checking and filtering through Facebook notifications, but that was an illusion.
Applications Drawer\Google -> Hamburger Menu\Settings -> Your Feed
How can you delete a website?
No seriously, how do you keep the browser from hooking you?
I don't have any apps installed and I often fall into a reddit-hn-local_news1-local_news2-it_news1-it_news2 cycle that I start all over when I'm done with it just to check if something new happened in the meantime! Especially on Weekend mornings or when I come home from work, I can sink hours into that cycle and feel increasingly miserable about it, but the sweet endorphin rush of new bits of information can push that away momentarily.
I have tried editing /etc/hosts in the past, but this tends to only shift my cycle to other websites.
This was a really big issue with me too. What I did in the past was to signup for low bandwidth internet connection (not by speed, but with yearly limit of 18 GiB), which made me limit the frequent visits.
These days when I do some serious work, I decides to disconnect internet for the next 45 minutes (or so). I have locally installed manpages, devhelp and devdocs.io documentations. Even if I'm tempted to visit some website (eg: stackoverflow), I delay until the time reaches.
And set your browser to open new tabs with your homepage.
Seriously. The gentle smile of playing with this silly little low-res lion can break you out of that loop sometimes.
Does not work if you tend to just keep on reusing the same tab of course.
dnsmasq is rather good for this.
A middle ground is turning off badges and other notifications. Switching to a paper newspaper also helps.
Do you know of an app/browser extension that lets you bookmark arbitrary HTML pages, and keeps track of how far down you've scrolled; maybe let you write notes? Or maybe one that converts an arbitrary page to PDF, and stores it locally for you?
- Do not follow newspapers RSS feeds. They bombard you with news that are not relevant at all. Their newsletters are better. I get all my news from daily or weekly newsletters. I would like to get weekly digests only, but I havent found a good one from a newspaper I like.
- Actually quit Facebook. It's pure evil. I was so shocked to hear how it showed you your old, forgotten photos/memories from past just to engage you. If you can't engage with people through messaging (including whatsapp) or phone calls, they are not that close friends.
- On reddit, avoid controversial subreddits, especially on things relevant to you. As a Turkish citizen I avoid /r/Turkey because it's idiots idioting on things that directly affect me, and the urge to rant and answer is hard to suppress. Nowadays I usually only comment on /r/emacs and HN, and avoid all the controversy everywhere. Also, I push all the funny, interesting etc. stuff on reddit into multis, and subscribe only to some low traffic subs where I do not thing my participation would be a loss of time (which is basically /r/emacs, /r/istanbul, and a couple others).
- If you use HN often, subscribe to the front page RSS and to the digest [1]. This way you won't ever miss the important stuff but have less need to actually check the frontpage.
- Disable email notifications. Don't let the sender dictate you when you'll interact with them, decide it yourself. The last time I had an email notification was quite some years ago.
- Declutter your email inbox. Try to make sure that most of what's in there is what you'd just immediately read. Try to redirect the rest in relevant mailboxes. Your email setup should allow you to dispatch incoming messages on headers and body content. Especially useful are List-ID, Subject and From headers.
[1]: https://hndigest.com/
[1] Twitter is weird. I only follow ~15 accounts for events and (want to) use twitter only for that, but the way people usually post updates about events is to repeatedly post what is essentially the same tweet, and even with that many accounts followed it becomes a mess. I end up never checking it because it's basically a puzzle.
Does such a service necessarily have to be anti-privacy? It could be created with open-source tools and run on a cheap low power server in your home, scouring the web for stuff that it thinks interests you based on data you feed it. You will still be in charge of your data then.
I had to uninstall it, because the addon developer stopped maintaining it and the performance bugs made browsing bigger sites much too slow.
I find I can't really read/comprehend from an LED screen well at all these days. I got into the habit of sending items of interest to my e-reader. Any long form article goes there.
Sadly I sat on my e-reader, and my system went to pot. I've just stacked up my reading list. I have no idea what is there. Going back to scrappy reading, feels like a real time and brain drain.
Even without going as far as "incognito mode for everything", this can dovetail well with a privacy-conscious cookie or browser-profile policy.
Absolutely. Latest Firefox helps here. There's an option to use private by default for all windows. This means when you close it (another habit to develop perhaps) you don't stay logged in to these social media sites.
I've actually started deliberately looking at the cute stuff. It's a welcome antidote to the outrage apparent in other threads/sites. I have enough natural spleen already without needing to top it up.
Due to idiosyncrasies in how it works, I'm now stuck with both!
The problem is that the watch is dependent on the phone for notifications. If the phone is off the watch will not get notifications for Gmail or Google Voice. I can setup the regular mail client but the I get the Primary, Social, and Updates Inbox from gmail instead of just the primary inbox. Google voice notifications do not come at all so i miss text messages to my google voice number which is my primary/public phone number. The workaround would be to port my number back to the carrier and use the carrier for SMS/Text messages.
ATT has number sync so calls to the watch and phone will hit each other, but it is not as smooth as you would hope and gets disconnected sometimes.
Battery life is much better using bluetooth than wifi or cell connection.
Just lots of little issues that are a pain to try to work around.
My goal was for me to have access to my important notifications but not have my phone "at hand" to tempt me.
What's stopping you from not having social media apps on your phone, or even using a web browser? Nothing. Like quitting your tobacco, stop making excuses and just do it. As for social events, if none of your "friends" choose to invite you to social stuff over an SMS or a phone call if you were to quit FB, then that's not friends I'd care to keep.
1) Accept that my phone should be working for me, and I shouldn't be working for it.
2) Disable all non call notifications except a small favorite group. Not much can't wait 15-60 minutes, and if so, they will call. I mute WhatsApp groups liberally.
3) I access facebook via web browser, at https://mbasic.facebook.com, including for instant messaging. You'll be surprised how less you use it when it's painful to use. Now I just go interact with the events I need, and take messaging offline.
4) No more push emails - that benefits no one except the person asking the questions and most often having others do their work for them.
5) Install separate chat apps for small circles of people. I use one with my wife, another with friends, WhatsApp is the generic muted text, and I have let myself have LinkedIn as an app on my phone (minus notifications) to message work stuff. Compartmentalizing helps.
Ditch your sim card/mobile plan, get a voip number, phone only works on wifi like a home phone. When out and about you only have the media you pre-downloaded (podcasts, mp3s, audiobooks, offline maps) no more staring at the screen in public.
Move all personal communication to email/signal, check it in the morning after your routine (exercise, meditation etc). Ditch instagram/twitter/reddit(turned to shit anyway) etc, keep facebook just for contacts but a single post with your email and never log on. (We really need a different phonebook platform). Never look at news sites except this one and other neutral biased ones like economically focused news.
Take a note of everything you want to google, allow 1 hour a day internet/research time where you google the questions of the day. You find the phone is inferior to desktop when at home so you spend little time on your phone. Make a life plan and use your new 4 hours a day to achieve these goals. No screens 2 hours before bedtime.
The downside is you cant receive calls when out and about (for me an upside), there has been 2 times in the past 2 years I've had to stop at a coffee shop to send off a message, worth the $2000 savings.
Phone is still a great tool, camera, mp3 player, maps, guitar tuner etc etc. Knowing the latest tweet from your favorite celebrity while walking in the park isn't adding to your life. Unless there is a nuclear strike or a national draft then news wont effect you.
edit, should have read the replies, seems there's a bunch of similar responses
There are plenty of people having real problems. If a phone in your pocket is the biggest problem you're having - you're not doing enough with your life.
Anyone who has managed to get control back from an addiction has my admiration, but I have a special extra bit for people who are successfully coping with a food addiction.
Facebook has an API. Script a poll on those events and push them to somewhere you'll see them? Log in once a week to see if your script missed anything you cared about, and modify the script if yes?
Still have an iPad, but I’m an iOS developer. (Perhaps I should change that?)
I was an adult before Internet use was widespread, and many things were better back then. People don't really need to be connected to everyone on the planet at all times of the day.
I already left Facebook, and it was a great decision. I avoid all of their products, including their software libraries whenever possible.
I would recommend you to write these plans in a notebook (real notebook with pen/pencil). Write all of your plans, whenever you plan. The problem with software solutions is that once you reschedule, its history is lost.
I have such a book which has now almost run out of pages. Once a week I read them. Most of them are not yet done. But it makes me feel good, and helps me prioritize better than software solutions.
[1] http://orgmode.org/
[0] https://github.com/orgzly/orgzly-android
That's a much harder proposition than quitting tobacco normally.
For me this made using my phone enough of a hassle to break any habit I had. It's been a few months now and I have the password memorized, but I still almost never use my phone.
It would be nice to find some sort of community that's pushing back against these things. It's hard to do alone - for instance, when I tried going back to writing long e-mail to friends instead of merely liking Facebook posts, I got little response. People had moved on, and weren't interested in going back.
I always have my phone on silent, and the only time it even vibrates is when I receive a phone call. IM notifications are displayed on the screen, but as it doesn’t make a noise or vibrate I might not find out until a few hours later. For group chats I usually set them to muted, so I need to purposely go in and see what’s going on.
For most other apps I usually have notifications disabled, and some I have a badge count displayed - one day I will probably get around to sorting out those 2382 unread emails, but I’ve learned to ignore the 101 unlistened podcasts.
Please allow me to recommend my two favorite print magazines:
New Yorker London Review of Books
Highly recommended. Please subscribe. I read the New Yorker on my Kindle but I read LRB in print.
I would NEVER EVER want to give up the incredible availability of information we have today. Even if most of it is nonsense, that still means there is a mountain of gems that's larger than the eye can see.
If modern media a DoS attack, it's not very sophisticated since it can be easily avoided by non-participation. Install an Ad blocker. Browse the web in private mode. Turn off notifications. Treat everything you read with skepticism (assume it is trying to manipulate you). And never, ever interact with social media. Share your attention deliberately, mindfully, and voluntarily.
I don't buy into this victim mentality. Nobody is "stealing" my attention unless I agree to it.
They have their reasons, like "No Ads means no free content", or "You're taking the money out of content creators mouths", or variations on a theme.
What's doubly silly, is I control how my computer renders what content, downloads what content, and does whatever actions I want. Once it leaves your computer/network, its no longer up to you, ad company.
(Is now waiting for Wildvine to be used on content, forcing such ad viewage, now that DRM is part of the bloody HTML5 spec.)
* Top/Related posts (they distract)
* Newsletter signup blocks in the middle of articles (I never ever want to signup for newsletters)
* Sharing tools (I know how to cut-past a URL, thank you)
* Recent comments blocks (I don't care)
* Page footers (bloated with completely irrelevant information)
* ... and so on
You will be surprised how much stuff you can actually just block!
https://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube
I don't think we should be thinking about this from a psychological perspective but instead a sociological one. Yes individuals can disconnect and do whatever they need to assuming adequate resources but that's beside the point.
If you think of people as boxes with inputs and outputs I think it's very worth understanding how social media impacts those boxes and what the long term affects are.
Has nothing to do with being a victim. Just if you press this button on every box does something desirable for society happen? Or something negative? Or we can't tell still?
And if it is negative then do we as a society want regulations to reduce the impact?
The moment you start down the "we are weak and helpless and we need the smart benevolent geniuses in Government to help us" you're just gonna lose a whole lot of people. Because there's no reason to believe there is even a problem here, let alone a problem that needs to be solved with regulation.
Right now it’s social media that is at the forefront of this war with people. Tomorrow it might be a different technology.
You don't need to look at the founders' intentions. You simply need to look at the metrics they are optimizing on. For public companies like Facebook and Twitter it's even easier. You have to look at the metrics they are talking to their investors about.
Second, 'never ever interact with social media' is just a way of avoiding the problem. People like social media because we're social creatures and there's value in being able to communicate with other people of like mind. It can also be a trap if one only ever does so, but 'never use it' is just throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Why shouldn't people be able to socialize in a virtual context without any sort of legal privacy protections or tools that allow them to selectively filter out commercial information?
You might as well advise people to avoid having their telephone calls monitored by never calling anyone. Well, sure, but that's an elaborate way of saying you don't know what to do about the problem other than avoid adopting useful technologies.
Deception and manipulation of public sentiment by either wholly fabricated or suddenly-scandalous news (ie digging up some old incident and setting up a great hue and cry like it just happened) is an old, old propaganda technique:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_Jenkins%27_Ear
I'm sure there are similar examples from the Roman Republic when it was operating as an actual Republic rather than an appendage of empire.
It reminds me of Keyne's General Theory, where most of the ideas had already been floated for quite a while but were always derided as "crackpot," or basically heresy. It took a well-connected elite, combined with a failure to explain the current situation to really change the Groupthink of collective minds and institutions.
Here, it's similar: an idea which has been floated before, but taken in the hands of an academic is formalized, given a $100,000 prize, and published.
Which raises an interesting idea. If the problem with the radio--as the article showed, Hitler put one in every home--was that an authority could control a bombardment of information-assault on people--the same problem with tech today--should we not also be skeptical also of why authorities have now decided to grant credence to this idea?
And here's the concern: as the article also said, the role of media and newspapers has been to be a "filter." I can imagine politicians and bureaucrats latching onto this as a power grab for authorities--as a means to further marginalize independent media and the social aspects of spreading information.
Of course there's a possibility for over-reaction and repression, but personally I think that the best solution is more information, in the sense of accessible trackbacks (not unlike country-of-origin food labeling) so people can see where stories originate and learn to be skeptical of stuff that comes from consistently unreliable or bizarre sources. This already happens to some extent, eg if you post content from infowars you'll be rightly mocked for using such a terrible source. The Web Annotations Standard will make this vastly easier as its deployed in browsers (anyone know about progress on that, BTW?).
As for the other problem of people choosing to stay in particular media bubbles where they're only presented with information they already agree with, that's not really going to change, but I think that's OK as long as it's easy to identify which cluster people are choosing to locate in.
This is closer to the problem, not the solution.
This caused the NASA Challenger disaster (authorities silenced engineers who warned of foam strike).
This caused the US to lose the space race (all the authority and "intelligence community" was behind the Vanguard rocket).
This caused the Gulf of Tonkan, Iraq, Iran-Contra...
Consider the recent JPMorgan money-laundering story was for days published in English only on the site Zerohedge,[1]
The WaPo literally accused Ron Paul in their news section of being a Russian Propogandist
Consider CNN broadcasted that it is illegal to read Wikileaks.
Collusion in Syria between the US and terrorists was always published first only on "disreputable" news sites.
Democratic control is better than autocratic control.
1 - https://www.handelszeitung.ch/unternehmen/finma-jp-morgan-sc...
Your examples don't seem appropriate either. I suggested that people would choose to reject information from 'consistently unreliable or bizarre sources'. Your first counter-example is that of a NASA engineer whose warnings were overlooked, but engineers are not hired for their unreliability or bizarre opinions.
Many of your other examples either ignore the well-known fact of parallel discovery or are themselves relying on the mechanism you claim to deplore of pre-emptively delegitimizing the source. Yes, I know some mainstream news outlets are inaccurate or agenda-driven. I hardly ever consume any news from CNN because I find most of their output to be low quality.
I really don't understand the point of your comment. You seem to be projecting someone else's ideas onto my comment rather than evaluating what I actually wrote.
Ok so let's take a look and go down the list of examples. We can start with NASA, where the "point of origin," being mere engineers who could not match the gravitas and authority of the well-respected leadership, saw the idea rejected, not on merit, but on their point of origin being less-respected than their superiors.
This problem of rejecting ideas, not on their own merit, but on the authority or gravitas of establishment figures is the thread that ties all of those ideas together--and many other setbacks in history as well.
Discrediting ideas by their point of origin can do real damage not just to the democratization of information dissemination, but also to the ideas themselves even if they have merit, as well as to indepedent journalism.
- Non-fiction books
- University-centered online courses
- Documentaries
- Some of Netflix's original programs
- Wikipedia's monthly news summaries
- The "Great Courses" on Audible
These media aren't thoroughly monetized on a pay-per-attention-stolen model. They're more optimized around having good reviews from friends and online.
It makes me wonder if there might be the possibility of a Netflix for news, where a 3rd party curates and allows ratings of lengthier pieces on long-term issues, interviews with important figures, and 20-minute investigative reports (like I remember seeing on 60 minutes). Naturally, this wouldn't work for up-to-the minute news where everyone's attention is driven based on who's got the latest break, but it seems like it would work for these other things. It would still give the "lunch conversation" motivation, where people could talk about whatever was released in the last few days. Certainly it sounds like a less attention-assaulting place than the current state of news.
Isn't this essentially the model that HuffPo and other news aggregators (rewriters) use? Hasn't really panned out in that context, but maybe there needs to be a more quality-focussed site that isn't subject so much to avarice.
I'm talking about is a platform where my decision to click/watch content is based on reviews and recommendations, not loud design and attention-grabbing headlines.
In that world, the subscription model could make sense and content aggregation could make sense, but neither is required, nor does either addressing the issue on its own.
I wish there was something opposite, daily and weekly summaries where every "article" is just a title and one paragraph. Almost all lengthy articles have poor information per character ratio.
https://www.theskimm.com/archive/2017-11-20
In the absence of advertisement driven revenues, it would have to charge money, raising the barrier of entry compared to the current alternatives. In addition it cannot provide regular dopamine hits (because that’s the whole point) so it even feels less appealing than the alternatives.
More expensive and less appealing is a hard combo to succeed with.
ps: excellent article and grateful for people like James and Tristan sounding the alarm on the ill effects of the attention economy.
However, I disagree with his association of new media with populism and apparently suggesting a causal relationship. Populism has existed, and proliferated, well before mass media. It's more commonly associated with extreme wealth inequality.
I'd be glad if you could provide me with the link to subscribe these summaries if they're email newsletters. I could not find them in the wiki itself.
There's not a way to subscribe to it, though it's not obvious how a subscription would work. The summary of any given day is not finished at the end of the day. Rather, the set of articles for that day, their summaries, and the articles themselves will all continue to grow as more information is gathered. So, it is a good way to "catch up" after some time away from current events. But to my knowledge there's no coordinated effort to "finish" a day or a month by any deadline.
Blender is an example of (supposedly) higher quality, longer pieces of (paid) news/reports. I haven’t tried it myself because they don’t allow pluses “+” in emails.
UPDATE: 2016 revenue is $27B. At 2B MAUs, that's a little more than $1/mo. Hmm. Surely there's something I'm overlooking.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/28/how-much-...
It pretty much is when the question is about what the price would be for an ad-free subscription. The calculation may be more complicated, but it's all in service of a per-user number.
Wonder how much that would cost?
Are you suggesting that people's free will is so easily lost that we needed to have, in the First Amendment, a clause stating "freedom from external thought influences"?
"Modern Media is a DoS Attack on Your Free Will"
Only if you allow it to be, just like with any other compulsive activity, if it starts affecting your life negatively, you should probably make some personal life changes.
This reads like a call for government regulation of advertising or how content is served to people because people cannot defend themselves from this media onslaught.
I believe something similar to China's regulation of the web may be what you're looking for, but I'm old enough to vote and go to war so I'm old enough to decide how often my "free will" is attacked.
> Isn’t it our own fault that we’re too easily distracted? Maybe we just need more self-discipline.
> That kind of rhetoric implicitly grants the idea that it’s okay for technology to be adversarial against us. The whole point of technology is to help us do what we want to do better. Why else would we have it?
...
> Does personal responsibility matter at all?
> I don’t think personal responsibility is unimportant. I think it’s untenable as a solution to this problem. Even people who write about these issues day to day, even me—and I worked at Google for 10 years—need to remember the sheer volume and scale of resources that are going into getting us to look at one thing over another, click on one thing over another. This industry employs some of the smartest people, thousands of Ph.D. designers, statisticians, engineers. They go to work every day to get us to do this one thing, to undermine our willpower. It’s not realistic to say you need to have more willpower. That’s the very thing being undermined!
In any case, I'd have to disagree and say that even though you can't escape ads or even 100% avoid the lure of electronic clicks and taps, its ultimately up to you to decide what you do with your time and money and if you cannot do this yourself, then you need to seek help.
Just because a corporation has unlimited resources committed to targeting a person with ads or tappy and clicky stuff, it does not mean they should be held accountable for people's addictive habits or tendencies, just as you can't hold any existing casinos liable for a person's poor gambling choices.
It seems like you implying people are 100% free agents independent of external influences and subconscious evolutionary drives?
>Just because a corporation has unlimited resources committed to targeting a person with ads or tappy and clicky stuff, it does not mean they should be held accountable for people's addictive habits or tendencies
Should alcohol, cigarette, and porn companies be allowed to target children?
Should opioid manufacturers be allowed to target recovering addicts?
> Just because a corporation has unlimited resources committed to targeting a person with ads or tappy and clicky stuff, it does not mean they should be held accountable for people's addictive habits or tendencies, just as you can't hold any existing casinos liable for a person's poor gambling choices.
You know, in my country there is a self-exclusion register for gambling. You put yourself on it knowing that you have a problem and as a result you're barred from entering a gaming establishment.
In doing so, gaming establishments now have a responsibility to keep you from gambling on their premises and there are consequences and liability transfers if they knowingly allow you to continue.
> Only if you allow it to be, just like with any other compulsive activity, if it starts affecting your life negatively, you should probably make some personal life changes.
I think this belief - "you can't look away" - is so prevalent among journalists because (i) the idea that vast sections of the public pay no attention to them for extended periods of time is anathema and (ii) journalists are more likely to be from the group that "can't look away."
Replace "life" with "server" and that also rings true for a network DoS attack. Just as you don't always have complete control over the network, you don't always have complete control over the aspects of your life that influence your day-to-day decisions.
Free will IMO is an abstract and poorly defined concept. You can define free will in terms that make "non-free will" an impossibility. On the other hand, you could also amount it to very basic particle events that are either entirely deterministic or based on seemingly random quantum wave collapses.
If something is regulated by the government, one could argue that you are still able to employ your free will and break the law. Someone may force you to do something, but by a not entirely unreasonable definition of free will it is your choice to comply or not, regardless of the consequences.
Of course, the argument that "modern media is a DoS attack on free will" employs a different, less generous definition. Whether you agree with that definition or not, the discussion on how easily manipulable people are and how external agents exploit that to influence our day-to-day decisions in subtle, often negative ways is warranted. You can call it "[...] is a DoS attack on our subconscious", "[...] on our attention" or whatever, but I think it amounts to the same discussion.
I feel a sense of agency and that I have the power to ignore many of these influences, but this also presents a cognitive load problem. I wouldn't be sad for a second if for example building regulations were used to a greater extent to limit advertising in public spaces.
You also have to consider those that aren't old enough to go to war or to vote, not to make it a blanket "think of the children" argument, but because we recognize that they are not competent enough to make informed life choices. I wouldn't want my children grow up with a poor self image just because it makes them more inclined to purchase bikinis, watches, tanning lotion and cars, but I also wouldn't want to shelter my children from society when it is ultimately our responsibility as adults to shape it for the coming generations. People have made decisions that make society what it is today, and we should continue making decisions and re-evaluating the old ones.
For public advertisement, I've always been in favor of defacing and removing it. I'm old enough to go to war and infringe on the ultimate human right by killing people, so why should I not be able to make choices that improve public spaces? If I remove an online casino billboard, who is better off and who is worse off?