This article gets so close but it feels like it goes right past the actual point.
Profit motivated tech companies are weaponising psychology to dominate your time. There’s nothing stopping them from turning your reward system against yourself. Plus given this time is generally being spent on passive consumption, of course people are gonna end up dumber—brains need exercise just like the rest of your body.
Regulation is basically the only way to remedy this (beyond actually nationalising these organisations) and unfortunately it’s gonna have to be American regulation for the most part, which I’m not gonna hold my breath for under the next administration
I just don’t see any way to regulate this without violating the Constitution.
It’s a really tough thing.
You mean because of Freedom of Speech? I think it’s not that hard; your freedom ends where someone else’s freedom begins. Propaganda and advertising for example are designed to force you into believing something / thinking in ways that you wouldn’t, so you are effectively cut off from thinking and believing like you would have been doing without that pressure.
An independent NGO or watchdog kind of regulatory body staffed by psychology and technology experts with the legislative teeth to issue cease notices with meaningful fines to back them up (take the GDPR penalties as inspiration) should a media platform implement a harmful user experience.
It would be important that the organisation is protected from lobbying interests and direct control from the elected politicians. Though obviously its existence would hinge on the corresponding legislation being persisted.
The result will be a couple of big fines and then everyone else will play ball
If you want to witness the last vestiges of human intellect swirling down the drain, hold your nose and type the words “skibidi toilet” into YouTube.
This is the first sentence. Ohhh the danger of skibidi toilet!!! So dumb. Who takes this boomer crap seriously? lol.
Bonus points for linking to their old (citationless) article about email. It just shows how they roll out this nonsense every couple years with the latest tech.
And if you browse through the actual studies mentioned, they don’t actually say what this article claims. It’s a conflation of “doom scrolling” (unscientific) with various internet addictions, etc. where the studies are fairly vague.
I hate it too. Kids have always had dumb media and that’s fine. I don’t think all those flash games and animations harmed anyone.
While the article is crap, the phenomena of “brain rot” does exist. The brain is like a muscle in this regard; if you never challenge it, it deteriorates. There’s even links to increased chance for neurodegenerative sicknesses in such cases. But we have this at least since TV, it’s nothing new with the internet.
I do miss the days when I could fully read a news article or a book without flicking through to the next thing, or even watch a tv show or movie without feeling compelled to reach for my phone.
BS I can totally hold my attention longer th
Old people yelling at the cloud, as is tradition for every single generation before and likely many to follow.
This „Badger badger badger” song was the funniest shit ever when I was young. The only difference is that this one was an Adobe Flash applet while the new stuff is high definition video since we have more bandwidth now.
We have never had machine learning algorithms that exploit human psychology to give precisely timed hits of dopamine. Algorithms that know you better than your family members do.
I think in the near future we’re gonna be looking at the modern social medias similar to how we see smoking cigarettes today. Addictive and bad for you.
Every single generation fixates on something new ones do because they’re scared of change. I was endlessly derided for many things that are norm now. They were supposed to end the world but somehow we keep on going. I see my generational peers turning into own parents and dooming about Skibidi toilet thing. They forgot they were children once too.
One difference I see is that unlike before, the older generations are also caught in the attention shortening dopamine trap.
It used to be parents complaining about kids watching TV while reading the newspaper. Now adults are watching 3 minute YouTube videos just like children.
Scared of change? This is not just change - we have never had social media algorithms putting shit into people’s head about themselves and others, all day, every single day.
This shit is affecting people’s entire perception of the world and who they are. It’s not just some random change.
I haven’t forgotten being a kid. But when I was growing up, the so called dangers were computer games and too much TV. That was nothing compared to weaponized algorithms picking content that will “engage” people (make them react).
Some kids today are completely out there with pluto man. They just lost any sense of reality. Their entire perception of the world is from social media algorithms from tech companies. That’s one scary thought.
Sure it’s funny with “old man yelling at the cloud”, but there is something here to be concerned about.
“they just forget they were children once” said every generation of kids.
Myself included.
We saw what was coming in the 90’s, and discussed the inevitable shitshow that social media was going to be (we didn’t know Facebook itself was coming, but we had MySpace, etc, which was also something we studiously avoided using because it was clearly problematic).
I highly recommend reading about Las Vegas and the research the gambling companies have done to get people addicted to slots, etc.
Vegas is designed to entrap you. Social media companies are using the same research to the same ends.
I understand this phenomenon and it goes all the way back to Socrates. There’s that famous quote.
The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.
And he even used to complain about the new invention of writing. Said it would weaken people’s memory because they wouldn’t have to remember everything.
So I get it. I understand what you mean.
But I think this is different. Because let me posit this.
Cigarettes existed for a very long time, but it wasn’t until the late 1800s that they started being produced en masse. Very quickly, the majority of the country was smoking and smoking a lot. Much more than before.
That eventually caused a dramatic increase in lung diseases because a lot more people were smoking. You could say “Tobacco has been around forever. Every generation has fads”
But in reality, it was different. It was a new thing. Cigarettes were hand-rolled before. Now you could buy a pack and smoke your 20 a day much more easily.
I think this is more similar to what we are seeing with social media today. I consciously make an effort not to judge the youth. And I’m not judging the youth. The social media “epidemic” does not only concern the youth, but all generations. Smartphones in general but modern social media specifically operate in manners we don’t fully understand.
Look at the brains of gambling addicts. Your brain literally gets rewired when you play slots all day. Social media operates in a similar manner as slots. We are all rewiring our brains in a way that has never happened in human history.
It could cause permanent damage for all we know. We just haven’t had the time or studies to confirm this. And if we look at research that exists right now, social media does increase rate of anxiety, depression, etc. It’s not so simple.
We have never had machine learning algorithms that exploit human psychology to give precisely timed hits of dopamine.
We still don’t.
Now, now, young one. You simply lack the taste and sophistication to appreciate the depth inherent to badger badger badger.
The sharp, minimalist vector graphics of badger badger badger gave it character and pedigree. Not like the tiktok junk of today.
And you had know how to install and patch browser plugins and computers required knowledge. You had to know about the URL and share it on MSN messenger. Not like the brain dead smartphone apps used by modern teens.
