Bo Burnham put it succinctly, although he was talking about children on apps: "When they go to sleep at night, they have to choose between all of the information ever published in the history of the world, or the back of their eyelids."
The smartphone is a perverted implementation of the goal that people use to fantasize about back in the early days of the computer revolution: a personal terminal to the world of audio, text, and video information stored in databases across all of humanity. It's of course worth talking about how they compel us to certain behaviors via push notifications, dark patterns, nasty design, etc. but also--obviously we'd be addicted to personal terminals that let us access all the publicly available digitized information in the history of the world.
It isn't even a perverted implementation, we just overestimated ourselves.
All our sci-fi futurism of the 70s/80s showed enlightened humans elevating themselves with technology. In real Star Trek the holo deck would be used for porn, the computer would be used to play shitty podcasts while they procrastinated work and the replicator would be churning out donuts and fried foods.
It's philosophically a weird time, because we are more socially progressive than ever before, but we have a nonstop flow of evidence that people cannot self-govern. It feels paradoxical to demand freedom and protection from your own impulses at the same time.
I don't know that anyone's really asking for protection from their own impulses. Freedom requires protection from other people's impulses. That's where this is all going. A few truly free people, everyone else in a cage.
Rather than framing it as "protection from my own impulses," I think it's more fair to frame it as "protection from teams of professional researchers and engineers and marketers whose entire life's work is fine tuning how to most effectively profit from my impulses"
Well, yeah, but that type of protection isn't compatible with freedom. Neither the freedom to consume nor the freedom to iterate on a product. I don't blame companies for making their products addictive. I smoke cigarettes. I drink. Sometimes I crave a Big Mac. I don't blame them for selling me poison, as long as I recognize it as unhealthy. The best way to protect yourself is by educating yourself to recognize manipulative patterns, and by extension sharing that with other people. We know from drug addiction that simply banning something doesn't work. And an insight from some great druggies like Philip K Dick and Hunter Thompson and Burroughs is that the list of things that can be addictive is endless. If someone made an app that made people chew their nails, or lick an escalator banister, or shock themselves with electricity, people would get addicted to it.
I was hypnotized a few times as a child by a professional hypnotist. When in college I was invited to a "seminar" which turned out to be a cult indoctrination session, I immediately recognized what I was seeing the group leader doing to the audience.
We don't need external protection, we need herd immunity. It's like"give a man a fish" vs "teach a man to fish".
I like your clarity about personal responsibility, but it might also help to remember that human capacity for self-regulation isn’t uniform. We all grow through developmental stages and carry traits that shape how we handle influence, impulse, and awareness.
The idea that “we just need herd immunity” assumes we’re all equally capable of recognizing manipulation or addiction, but as ericmcer noted, the evidence all around us suggests most of us are not quite there. In many ways, that belief in our individual mastery is part of what Western culture keeps overestimating, as if understanding the trick is enough to undo the conditioning.
There also seems to be a deeper resistance in our western cultures to actually pausing, turning inward, and staying present with what’s happening inside us. We intellectualize awareness instead of living it. Real freedom will begin not with more information or clever systems, but with learning to meet our own impulses directly. To listen, to stay with discomfort, to see what drives us without immediately trying to fix it. Until we're willing to practice that kind of contact with ourselves, we’ll keep playing defense against the surface symptoms.
I agree, and I don't want what I wrote to be read as "people just need more self control." I lack self control, that's why I have addictions and bad habits. I know other people who have even less self control, and some who seem to be immaculate. I don't care to be judged or to judge anyone else. I guess that's why I framed it as herd immunity.
Here's what I mean (from an addict's perspective). What makes me hesitate when I reach for a cigarette or another drink, and decide maybe I should call it a night, is not the knowledge that it's bad for me. It's thinking about friends who have died from lung cancer and cirrhosis. As a whole, as a society, we've become more aware of the effects of certain poisons because we've witnessed the results and drawn the conclusions.
So with screen addiction, we're just starting to witness the results on a generational level. Yes - screen use is a little different because it can have good sides as well. The screens are magical devices that can educate us and improve us, too. Someone addicted to watching their diet and exercise with FitBit has a different psychological problem space from someone addicted to watching people put ants up their nose on TikTok.
I agree with you wholeheartedly that all of these things prevent us from focusing and staying present and dealing with real problems. I'm really just saying that removing any or all of them doesn't address that underlying void which causes people to seek consciousness altering substances or mass distraction. There is no distraction or game the human mind won't latch onto to avoid reality - that's the curse of knowing you're going to die. We need immunity against the surface thing that's eating us alive right now. But of course we'll keep playing defense against the next thing, because we have no immunity from it. Changing human nature seems to me like a utopian vision, which has never worked in practice. Yeah, we can romanticize some cultures that seem to be better at managing it. But give them a cell phone, a credit card and an Amazon account and you'll see how long it takes for them to fuck themselves over too. Those that do survive the modern world with things like a Sabbath day of rest or avoiding technology completely, do so because they have very strong communal practices that ensure individuals have little agency or choice - and they also happen to believe in a divine plane of existence beyond the mortal coil, which changes their calculus when making bad decisions. I'm not advocating for either thing. I think changing human nature is impossible, and I think heaven is a placebo. Changing individual human behavior to be more present and more self-aware, I think, is possible. But it's an incremental process. First you have to train each individual to notice a new danger. Then they can develop defenses against it.
I guess I just said something very classically Conservative and yet heretical, but this seems like the way the process has to work, as opposed to wish-casting us to all look inside ourselves and put down that cellphone or that cigarette. We are flawed. We as a species take advantage of each others' flaws in a climb to the top of the monkey barrel. There's no way out, even if Elon thinks there is on Mars, or Zuck thinks there is in Hawaii. Herd immunity amounts to enough of your friends and neighbors gently telling you to wake up and take care of yourself. That's probably how a communally sane society evolves in the end, too - once it reaches some kind of equilibrium with its technology, its drugs, and its environment.
> It isn't even a perverted implementation, we just overestimated ourselves.
I agree. The Internet implementers were too wide-eyed thinking the Internet would "save us" instead of realizing that it would "slave us". The human brain is highly unintelligent emotionally. Look at a toddler's emotional capacity. That all lives inside us just behing a thin facade. The Internet both taps into that and exposes us to untold amounts of emotional taps. Humans evolved to be in relatively small social groups. It's obvious why we are completely overwhelmed by literally everything these days, because everything pushes outside of those small social groups.
DS9 had frequent if oblique references to it as well, Quark’s Bar had holodecks, I think Major Kira threatened to break his arm if she found out she featured as a character in one episode.
I think the access to so much information itself isnt bad. Cuz access to all of wikipedia wouldnt do this. People would get bored because its still work to digest that information
I think this access gave opportunities to bad actors whose incentives are misalligned with society's. Social media companies. They use this opportunity to serve us easily digestible garbage thats going to get us hooked.
Its a not some grand and malicious conspiracy or anything. Greed is just a part of capitalism. Before, people loved getting others hooked on drugs because it made them so much money.
People who like capitalism know this is a bug in the system that needs to be patched with regulations. We stopped putting cocaine in coca cola. We just need to stop putting brainrot garbage in our kids information feeds. We need to penalize companies for these greed driven addiction algorithms. Itll be hard, but its what needs to be done and we can do it if we have enough societal willpower
Some people wouldn’t, we call it falling into the wiki hole for a reason.
I’ve spent more hours than a sane person should just hopping from one topic to another and often end up reading about something I had no idea was a thing an hour earlier.
But I also use YouTube only for documentaries and read a lot generally, my only social media is HN and Reddit (though not a lot).
I’m just not wired for engagement the way most the people in my life seem to be.
Other than Bank App, Kindle and Firefox I have nothing installed on my phone it didn’t come with, iOS is basically same on my iPad.
I don’t find the modern web very engaging and use unhook/ublock origin to keep YT what I want it to be which is a no distraction source of documentaries.
Idk I've gotten high and just wasted whole nights going down Wikipedia rabbit holes. I think eventually turned to stronger time wasters though. The Wikipedia thing is real though.
We didn’t have internet when I was an early teen and I would read physical encyclopedias before bed.
If academic study is on one end of a spectrum, lots of Wikipedia is maybe in the middle, pretty accessible and simple enough to keep clicking through links for someone interested, but still at least requiring active participation.
Something like TikTok (which admittedly I’ve never used) along with AI conversations which I have, can basically take place without the brain ever even engaging other than the reward pathways.
If academic books or literature are fruits and vegetables, Wikipedia is maybe a restaurant meal and social media (+ AI chat) dominos pizza or Pringle’s or some other thing that’s been processed into oblivion and just diffuses though your stomach lining directly onto your blood as you mindless binge on it.
For starters, wasn't the USA founded by, ehh.. how shall I say it tactically, very religious people?
Considering the tech companies kissing Trump's ring start of Jan 2025, we might well be going that way. I mean, it is no secret if you read Project 2025 or a decent summary of it.
Either way, if we ignore all that (too 'political'), it is being used today for amplification of (bogus) information and to influence our democratic processes. Social media is a propaganda tool in the hands of the wrong people.
East Germany is an interesting example, as it is relatively recent. There was mass surveillance in such dictatorship. People's homes were tapped, informants, all the post was opened, read and closed. About one third of the East German population worked for the East German government. This is very inefficient if you think about it. If they had more surveillance tools at their disposal, they'd also need more automation/computers/ML to aid with said surveillance.
In the same vein, something as simple as Bluetooth has been used for P2P messaging between smartphones in mass demonstrations. Think about the revolutions in countries such as Ukraine, Egypt, and many other in that region.
I agree by and large with the thrust of what you're saying, but
> wasn't the USA founded by... very religious people?
The USA was founded by a mix of people religiously, but many of them were essentially deists. That is, not outright atheists but the closest thing you could admit publicly at the time. It's true that some of them were Christians, like John Jay. Some of them, like Jefferson, retained some Christian belief but rejected many of the core Christian beliefs. Jefferson even literally cut much of Jesus out of the bible. Most of them were committed to religious freedom, and that freedom successfully became the very first enumerated right in the Bill of Rights of the Constitution. Relative to the standards of the time, I think the USA was founded by remarkably secular people.
You may be thinking of the Puritans who founded an American colony a century before the founding of the USA. They still remained a powerful community locally during the founding, but the founders of the USA (as we normally consider them) were not Puritans.
The secular roots of the country are written into the Constitution, but the country gradually Christianized over the years. For example, adding "In God We Trust" in the 1860s and adopting it as an official motto in the 1950s.
But at any rate, I agree if your point is that (consistent with my point above) widespread social media in a Puritan colony or similar would have been unpleasant. In literature, the Scarlet Letter and the Crucible raise a similar point.
I agree but it's too entwined with "freedom of speech" and section 230. Many here make too much money addicting children and don't want to turn off the fire hose of money.
That just makes it So the big boys who are making all this money can continue to operate while small platforms can no longer afford to comply with the new regulatory environment.
It's not even just children in safe situations like bedtime. I regularly see adults crossing the street typing on their phones while having headphones on.
Notice under “Managing dependency”, the focus is exclusively on technological solutions.
There is no technological solution to this. We have the equivalent of unlimited crack in everyone’s pocket 24/7 with no possible oversight over its use and no way to reel it back in. The genie has been out of the bottle for a while now.
Just like gluttony, there is no solution, only management strategies and they’re all very human.
Sensible education about these things starting at K1. Social and outreach programs for addicts. Etc
We actually don't know that there isn't a solution to gluttony, addiction, and other self-destructive and compulsive behaviors.
The brain is somewhat stupid and can be tricked by very primitive things, like bright lights. We might also be able to un-trick it, maybe with medication. That's kind of what were seeing with GLP-1 agonists.
But solutions?
Here's my take, will gladly take input (Android):
Two profiles: profile 1 has no notifications, reading apps (ebooks) and shouldn't have a browser (mine does and shouldn't); profile 2 has all apps, inclusively all of profile 1 apps. Idea: have an "offline" phone. Good for battery. Whenever I need IoT or something else, I shrug and change profile.
Use desktop apps/desktop browser: should work. Doesn't much. When I'm on laptop I tend to do terminal stuff, social apps feel like wasting time, do it fast and multitasking mode. Multitasking is not really what I want to train my attention span. Sometimes I turn on notifications but put system notifications in DnD so I can check what's notificated every half an hour or so.
Use Waydroid to have social apps: should work, never worked.
Special profiles on social apps: my current social apps have only institutional accounts being followed. Some decorum is kept, and with it, sanity. Exceptions: Facebook, Bluesky, Mastodon, Linkedin, where I follow regular people. But I really should implement something similar for my LinkedIn account.
Alternate sites/apps/mode of usage: use WhatsApp/Telegram to interact, say hi to some people online on Facebook Messenger, install Discourse; on group chats avoid links or include a short summary written by an human of why people should open your link and a quick "what's on the link" description.
These are my takes to extract some humanness from my machine mobile phone.
Fairphone (with Fairphone Moments) has a focus mode [1]. I should write a bit about it here instead of merely linking to it, but I do not have the Fairphone 6 with this mode so I feel like I cannot comment on it the way I'd like to (I've owned Fairphone 2, 3, 4, 5). They're not the first though, see e.g. Lightphone [2].
What I want (and I suppose this is kind of possible with Island or equivalent application) is a guest mode for my kids. So I can give them my smartphone without my notifications popping up between a game or movie.
Sometimes I wonder if I’m using my phone, or if it’s using me.
I know things like notifications and vibrations are designed to grab my attention, but the phone always seems to know exactly when I’m at my weakest.
The moment I feel even a little bored or empty, my finger just taps open that familiar app before I even realize it.
Have any of you found ways to break out of this cycle of being led around by your phone?
As someone who actively avoids political rage bait, was trained in rhetoric, was raised by public persuasion oriented public speakers.
The idea that the most resonant rage bait that exists at any given moment is instantly, algorithmically, propagated to our public officials and the politically engaged is insane.
All this while culture has now been trained to blindly celebrate bias, has been inculcated with a learned helplessness toward bias, have become poisoned against the idea that anyone has the goal of accuracy or objectivity and really does just wants accurate models of the world.
"Short of powering off or walking away, what can we do to manage this dependency? We can access device settings and activate only those features we truly require, adjusting them now and again as our habits and lifestyles change."
I think this is how some people feel about the dating apps. They promise love, affection, and future, but only manipulate our emotions.
I always feel conflicted when I see this problem phrased as "smartphones". I understand why but at the same time I wonder how much, if any, it detracts from solving the actual problems.
The article discusses the usual surveillance capitalism and social media stuff[0] that we're probably all pretty familiar with here. But where I feel uneasy is the blaming on the device or technology itself. Smartphones, and even social media, could be amazing technologies. We use them poorly, but that's a different issue in of itself. It is their utility that is a big part of why they won't go away. But that also makes them ripe for abuse. Anything with value will be such a target. So even though I know "smartphones" is a shorthand for "surveillance capitalism and 'engagement based' social media", I do worry that it abstracts the problems too much, making it just seem like by getting rid of our smart phones we could fix everything.
We've been using this tactic for years and tbh, I don't think it has had any meaningful success. Maybe it is time to try a different approach? I think the average person can handle a little nuance. And by breaking it down a little more we might be better at addressing the real issues. No one wants to give up the GPS in their pocket, but in 2025 do we really need that data to leave our device (except when explicitly sharing with someone like friends and family)? We don't need to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
[0] To anyone who works on feed ranking systems and engagement:
I'm genuinely curious, are you seeking to better measure engagement and look at ways to optimize different kinds of engagement? From the outside it seems like only the lazy measurements are being used, and let's be honest, arguing on the internet generates more comments and misinformation as well. Any bad comment that gets lots of responses falls down the ranking (top viewing), only to end up being replaced with similar comments which causes the process to repeat. Brandolini's law, right?
But what are the issues? Is sentiment analysis just not good enough? Is a lack of desire? Momentum?
I would seriously like to understand. Feel free to respond with an anonymous account. And please don't downvote responses, even if you disagree. Maybe we all can have an understanding that we can use votes to express our interest in the conversation (upvoting honest but disagreeable responses, downvoting quips and "mic drops") rather than our to express our agreement with a particular comment? We get to decide what votes mean, right?
[1] Follow-up
Can we at least tone down notifications? It is absolutely insane how complicated it is getting. I need to leave my bank notifications on to ensure I get notified of a fraudulent charge but that same notification system is being used to advertise to me savings bonds and referral bonuses. Same thing happens to emails. Let's be honest here, too many false alarms makes people ignore true alarms. Alarm fatigue is a real thing. If you don't believe me, watch what people do with a faulty smoke detector in an apartment. They just remove it!
I suspect that "smartphone" isn't just shorthand, and that the friction-free nature of smartphones (and their by-default emotive-triggering functionality that the article mentions like notifications, face ID, etc.) have a large hand in the problems.
If we had the same modern platforms for infinite scrolling social media and news, sports gambling, microtransaction-powered games, etc., but if we all carried dumb phones, and when you wanted to get your tiktok fix you had to walk to the desktop computer in the living room, log in, and open up the web browser to browse tiktok, I suspect that the problems would get markedly better.
But is this not abuse of the smartphone rather than inherent to the smartphone itself?
I'll put it another way: can you have a smartphone without infinite scrolling, microtransactions, advertising, overloading of notifications, etc.
Certainly the answer is "yes".
We can have GPS without tracking. We can have notifications without advertising. We can have phone calls without spam calls. We can have games without microtransactions. We can have software without locking everything down. So on and so on.
You might call this a pipe dream, but we're just talking about technical feasibility here. There's no doubt we can do those things! Funding those things is a different conversation, but it can't start to happen if we don't even recognize that it is possible. We can't make progress if we don't have direction. The pipe dream doesn't have to be completely achieved to make success, it stands as direction to work towards.
> but we all carried dumb phones
I'm sure this would be better too, but it is also better to blow my nose when I'm sick but the Kleenex doesn't cure my flu. It treats symptoms, relieves them, makes them less problematic, but it does not solve them or address the underlying issues. By not fixing the underlying issues we still leave the environment setup for abuse. To be blunt, I think you are illustrating my concern.
Why do we have to try to fix everything with duct tape? That's not a fix, that's a patch.
And let's be honest, getting rid of a phone with internet and GPS is basically a non-starter for most people.
The smartphone is a perverted implementation of the goal that people use to fantasize about back in the early days of the computer revolution: a personal terminal to the world of audio, text, and video information stored in databases across all of humanity. It's of course worth talking about how they compel us to certain behaviors via push notifications, dark patterns, nasty design, etc. but also--obviously we'd be addicted to personal terminals that let us access all the publicly available digitized information in the history of the world.
All our sci-fi futurism of the 70s/80s showed enlightened humans elevating themselves with technology. In real Star Trek the holo deck would be used for porn, the computer would be used to play shitty podcasts while they procrastinated work and the replicator would be churning out donuts and fried foods.
It's philosophically a weird time, because we are more socially progressive than ever before, but we have a nonstop flow of evidence that people cannot self-govern. It feels paradoxical to demand freedom and protection from your own impulses at the same time.
I was hypnotized a few times as a child by a professional hypnotist. When in college I was invited to a "seminar" which turned out to be a cult indoctrination session, I immediately recognized what I was seeing the group leader doing to the audience.
We don't need external protection, we need herd immunity. It's like"give a man a fish" vs "teach a man to fish".
The idea that “we just need herd immunity” assumes we’re all equally capable of recognizing manipulation or addiction, but as ericmcer noted, the evidence all around us suggests most of us are not quite there. In many ways, that belief in our individual mastery is part of what Western culture keeps overestimating, as if understanding the trick is enough to undo the conditioning.
There also seems to be a deeper resistance in our western cultures to actually pausing, turning inward, and staying present with what’s happening inside us. We intellectualize awareness instead of living it. Real freedom will begin not with more information or clever systems, but with learning to meet our own impulses directly. To listen, to stay with discomfort, to see what drives us without immediately trying to fix it. Until we're willing to practice that kind of contact with ourselves, we’ll keep playing defense against the surface symptoms.
Here's what I mean (from an addict's perspective). What makes me hesitate when I reach for a cigarette or another drink, and decide maybe I should call it a night, is not the knowledge that it's bad for me. It's thinking about friends who have died from lung cancer and cirrhosis. As a whole, as a society, we've become more aware of the effects of certain poisons because we've witnessed the results and drawn the conclusions.
So with screen addiction, we're just starting to witness the results on a generational level. Yes - screen use is a little different because it can have good sides as well. The screens are magical devices that can educate us and improve us, too. Someone addicted to watching their diet and exercise with FitBit has a different psychological problem space from someone addicted to watching people put ants up their nose on TikTok.
I agree with you wholeheartedly that all of these things prevent us from focusing and staying present and dealing with real problems. I'm really just saying that removing any or all of them doesn't address that underlying void which causes people to seek consciousness altering substances or mass distraction. There is no distraction or game the human mind won't latch onto to avoid reality - that's the curse of knowing you're going to die. We need immunity against the surface thing that's eating us alive right now. But of course we'll keep playing defense against the next thing, because we have no immunity from it. Changing human nature seems to me like a utopian vision, which has never worked in practice. Yeah, we can romanticize some cultures that seem to be better at managing it. But give them a cell phone, a credit card and an Amazon account and you'll see how long it takes for them to fuck themselves over too. Those that do survive the modern world with things like a Sabbath day of rest or avoiding technology completely, do so because they have very strong communal practices that ensure individuals have little agency or choice - and they also happen to believe in a divine plane of existence beyond the mortal coil, which changes their calculus when making bad decisions. I'm not advocating for either thing. I think changing human nature is impossible, and I think heaven is a placebo. Changing individual human behavior to be more present and more self-aware, I think, is possible. But it's an incremental process. First you have to train each individual to notice a new danger. Then they can develop defenses against it.
I guess I just said something very classically Conservative and yet heretical, but this seems like the way the process has to work, as opposed to wish-casting us to all look inside ourselves and put down that cellphone or that cigarette. We are flawed. We as a species take advantage of each others' flaws in a climb to the top of the monkey barrel. There's no way out, even if Elon thinks there is on Mars, or Zuck thinks there is in Hawaii. Herd immunity amounts to enough of your friends and neighbors gently telling you to wake up and take care of yourself. That's probably how a communally sane society evolves in the end, too - once it reaches some kind of equilibrium with its technology, its drugs, and its environment.
Maybe the lesson we should learn is our hardware should come with built in limits on use to keep our brains intact? That sounds dystopian.
I agree. The Internet implementers were too wide-eyed thinking the Internet would "save us" instead of realizing that it would "slave us". The human brain is highly unintelligent emotionally. Look at a toddler's emotional capacity. That all lives inside us just behing a thin facade. The Internet both taps into that and exposes us to untold amounts of emotional taps. Humans evolved to be in relatively small social groups. It's obvious why we are completely overwhelmed by literally everything these days, because everything pushes outside of those small social groups.
This is lampshaded in Lower Decks
Why read that when you could watch 10 solid hours of clickbait?
I think this access gave opportunities to bad actors whose incentives are misalligned with society's. Social media companies. They use this opportunity to serve us easily digestible garbage thats going to get us hooked.
Its a not some grand and malicious conspiracy or anything. Greed is just a part of capitalism. Before, people loved getting others hooked on drugs because it made them so much money.
People who like capitalism know this is a bug in the system that needs to be patched with regulations. We stopped putting cocaine in coca cola. We just need to stop putting brainrot garbage in our kids information feeds. We need to penalize companies for these greed driven addiction algorithms. Itll be hard, but its what needs to be done and we can do it if we have enough societal willpower
I’ve spent more hours than a sane person should just hopping from one topic to another and often end up reading about something I had no idea was a thing an hour earlier.
But I also use YouTube only for documentaries and read a lot generally, my only social media is HN and Reddit (though not a lot).
I’m just not wired for engagement the way most the people in my life seem to be.
Other than Bank App, Kindle and Firefox I have nothing installed on my phone it didn’t come with, iOS is basically same on my iPad.
I don’t find the modern web very engaging and use unhook/ublock origin to keep YT what I want it to be which is a no distraction source of documentaries.
If academic study is on one end of a spectrum, lots of Wikipedia is maybe in the middle, pretty accessible and simple enough to keep clicking through links for someone interested, but still at least requiring active participation.
Something like TikTok (which admittedly I’ve never used) along with AI conversations which I have, can basically take place without the brain ever even engaging other than the reward pathways.
If academic books or literature are fruits and vegetables, Wikipedia is maybe a restaurant meal and social media (+ AI chat) dominos pizza or Pringle’s or some other thing that’s been processed into oblivion and just diffuses though your stomach lining directly onto your blood as you mindless binge on it.
It's hard to think of a society where this is the right measure. A better measure would be the user's best interest.
Arguably social media is significantly worse when it's aligned with the society's incentives AND those incentives are bad.
For example, consider hypothetical always-on addictive social media in the following societies:
- Ancient Egypt
- Any fundamentalist religious community
- The Congo Free State
- Antebellum South in the United States
- East Germany
- Sparta
- The Assyrian Empire
Alignment with society isn’t a virtue when society is sick. And a society is almost always sick, or at least there's noticeable room for improvement.
For starters, wasn't the USA founded by, ehh.. how shall I say it tactically, very religious people?
Considering the tech companies kissing Trump's ring start of Jan 2025, we might well be going that way. I mean, it is no secret if you read Project 2025 or a decent summary of it.
Either way, if we ignore all that (too 'political'), it is being used today for amplification of (bogus) information and to influence our democratic processes. Social media is a propaganda tool in the hands of the wrong people.
East Germany is an interesting example, as it is relatively recent. There was mass surveillance in such dictatorship. People's homes were tapped, informants, all the post was opened, read and closed. About one third of the East German population worked for the East German government. This is very inefficient if you think about it. If they had more surveillance tools at their disposal, they'd also need more automation/computers/ML to aid with said surveillance.
In the same vein, something as simple as Bluetooth has been used for P2P messaging between smartphones in mass demonstrations. Think about the revolutions in countries such as Ukraine, Egypt, and many other in that region.
> wasn't the USA founded by... very religious people?
The USA was founded by a mix of people religiously, but many of them were essentially deists. That is, not outright atheists but the closest thing you could admit publicly at the time. It's true that some of them were Christians, like John Jay. Some of them, like Jefferson, retained some Christian belief but rejected many of the core Christian beliefs. Jefferson even literally cut much of Jesus out of the bible. Most of them were committed to religious freedom, and that freedom successfully became the very first enumerated right in the Bill of Rights of the Constitution. Relative to the standards of the time, I think the USA was founded by remarkably secular people.
You may be thinking of the Puritans who founded an American colony a century before the founding of the USA. They still remained a powerful community locally during the founding, but the founders of the USA (as we normally consider them) were not Puritans.
The secular roots of the country are written into the Constitution, but the country gradually Christianized over the years. For example, adding "In God We Trust" in the 1860s and adopting it as an official motto in the 1950s.
But at any rate, I agree if your point is that (consistent with my point above) widespread social media in a Puritan colony or similar would have been unpleasant. In literature, the Scarlet Letter and the Crucible raise a similar point.
There is no technological solution to this. We have the equivalent of unlimited crack in everyone’s pocket 24/7 with no possible oversight over its use and no way to reel it back in. The genie has been out of the bottle for a while now.
Just like gluttony, there is no solution, only management strategies and they’re all very human.
Sensible education about these things starting at K1. Social and outreach programs for addicts. Etc
The brain is somewhat stupid and can be tricked by very primitive things, like bright lights. We might also be able to un-trick it, maybe with medication. That's kind of what were seeing with GLP-1 agonists.
Two profiles: profile 1 has no notifications, reading apps (ebooks) and shouldn't have a browser (mine does and shouldn't); profile 2 has all apps, inclusively all of profile 1 apps. Idea: have an "offline" phone. Good for battery. Whenever I need IoT or something else, I shrug and change profile.
Use desktop apps/desktop browser: should work. Doesn't much. When I'm on laptop I tend to do terminal stuff, social apps feel like wasting time, do it fast and multitasking mode. Multitasking is not really what I want to train my attention span. Sometimes I turn on notifications but put system notifications in DnD so I can check what's notificated every half an hour or so.
Use Waydroid to have social apps: should work, never worked.
Special profiles on social apps: my current social apps have only institutional accounts being followed. Some decorum is kept, and with it, sanity. Exceptions: Facebook, Bluesky, Mastodon, Linkedin, where I follow regular people. But I really should implement something similar for my LinkedIn account.
Alternate sites/apps/mode of usage: use WhatsApp/Telegram to interact, say hi to some people online on Facebook Messenger, install Discourse; on group chats avoid links or include a short summary written by an human of why people should open your link and a quick "what's on the link" description.
These are my takes to extract some humanness from my machine mobile phone.
What I want (and I suppose this is kind of possible with Island or equivalent application) is a guest mode for my kids. So I can give them my smartphone without my notifications popping up between a game or movie.
[1] https://support.fairphone.com/hc/en-us/articles/268869393266...
[2] https://www.thelightphone.com
The idea that the most resonant rage bait that exists at any given moment is instantly, algorithmically, propagated to our public officials and the politically engaged is insane.
All this while culture has now been trained to blindly celebrate bias, has been inculcated with a learned helplessness toward bias, have become poisoned against the idea that anyone has the goal of accuracy or objectivity and really does just wants accurate models of the world.
We are lighting ourselves on fire.
And the majority celebrate because they feel warm.
We could all stop any time we want, but we don't. :(
I think this is how some people feel about the dating apps. They promise love, affection, and future, but only manipulate our emotions.
The article discusses the usual surveillance capitalism and social media stuff[0] that we're probably all pretty familiar with here. But where I feel uneasy is the blaming on the device or technology itself. Smartphones, and even social media, could be amazing technologies. We use them poorly, but that's a different issue in of itself. It is their utility that is a big part of why they won't go away. But that also makes them ripe for abuse. Anything with value will be such a target. So even though I know "smartphones" is a shorthand for "surveillance capitalism and 'engagement based' social media", I do worry that it abstracts the problems too much, making it just seem like by getting rid of our smart phones we could fix everything.
We've been using this tactic for years and tbh, I don't think it has had any meaningful success. Maybe it is time to try a different approach? I think the average person can handle a little nuance. And by breaking it down a little more we might be better at addressing the real issues. No one wants to give up the GPS in their pocket, but in 2025 do we really need that data to leave our device (except when explicitly sharing with someone like friends and family)? We don't need to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
[0] To anyone who works on feed ranking systems and engagement:
I'm genuinely curious, are you seeking to better measure engagement and look at ways to optimize different kinds of engagement? From the outside it seems like only the lazy measurements are being used, and let's be honest, arguing on the internet generates more comments and misinformation as well. Any bad comment that gets lots of responses falls down the ranking (top viewing), only to end up being replaced with similar comments which causes the process to repeat. Brandolini's law, right?
But what are the issues? Is sentiment analysis just not good enough? Is a lack of desire? Momentum?
I would seriously like to understand. Feel free to respond with an anonymous account. And please don't downvote responses, even if you disagree. Maybe we all can have an understanding that we can use votes to express our interest in the conversation (upvoting honest but disagreeable responses, downvoting quips and "mic drops") rather than our to express our agreement with a particular comment? We get to decide what votes mean, right?
[1] Follow-up
Can we at least tone down notifications? It is absolutely insane how complicated it is getting. I need to leave my bank notifications on to ensure I get notified of a fraudulent charge but that same notification system is being used to advertise to me savings bonds and referral bonuses. Same thing happens to emails. Let's be honest here, too many false alarms makes people ignore true alarms. Alarm fatigue is a real thing. If you don't believe me, watch what people do with a faulty smoke detector in an apartment. They just remove it!
If we had the same modern platforms for infinite scrolling social media and news, sports gambling, microtransaction-powered games, etc., but if we all carried dumb phones, and when you wanted to get your tiktok fix you had to walk to the desktop computer in the living room, log in, and open up the web browser to browse tiktok, I suspect that the problems would get markedly better.
I'll put it another way: can you have a smartphone without infinite scrolling, microtransactions, advertising, overloading of notifications, etc.
Certainly the answer is "yes".
We can have GPS without tracking. We can have notifications without advertising. We can have phone calls without spam calls. We can have games without microtransactions. We can have software without locking everything down. So on and so on.
You might call this a pipe dream, but we're just talking about technical feasibility here. There's no doubt we can do those things! Funding those things is a different conversation, but it can't start to happen if we don't even recognize that it is possible. We can't make progress if we don't have direction. The pipe dream doesn't have to be completely achieved to make success, it stands as direction to work towards.
I'm sure this would be better too, but it is also better to blow my nose when I'm sick but the Kleenex doesn't cure my flu. It treats symptoms, relieves them, makes them less problematic, but it does not solve them or address the underlying issues. By not fixing the underlying issues we still leave the environment setup for abuse. To be blunt, I think you are illustrating my concern.Why do we have to try to fix everything with duct tape? That's not a fix, that's a patch.
And let's be honest, getting rid of a phone with internet and GPS is basically a non-starter for most people.