Let's be clear. It is not the actual smartphones that do this; machines are designed and programmed by humans. Companies can choose to use technology to manipulate our emotions and trigger our reflexes, and many do choose just that, often for financial gain.
“what it does” describes the actions taken - cancer wards work to treat cancer (which is their purpose). Outcomes of what they do isn’t relevant to the point.
The purpose of most social media companies is to manipulate people for financial and political gain which is what they do.
I think that "manipulate people for financial and political gain" is an outcome of what social media companies actually do - I was under the belief that in a general sense, they want to maximise the time people spend on their apps so that they can sell this attention to advertisers, independent of whether or not a given ad buyer wants to manipulate people.
> they want to maximise the time people spend on their apps so that they can sell this attention to advertisers
This is where they manipulate in my mind. They maximize that time by exploiting human psychology, manipulating people into scrolling their feeds endlessly eh?
But note that this is deeply unethical and amounts to denying people the right to self-defense, and by extension, denying people the right to freedom.
The only thing that happens when guns are denied is the rise of corrupt and totalitarian politicians, and that the common man is either oppressed by them or by criminal gangs. Enter guns, and the common man can defend himself against both, which is a blessing.
Thankfully it is now possible to print your own guns and build one easily, so this will become less of an issue in the future, when everyone, if they want, can carry concealed guns.
I live in a country with an aggressive gun lobby, and a ludicrously corrupt government that wants to create a fascist ethnostate. The gun nuts are largely on the side of the fascist ethnostate. I don’t think guns are the perfect defenders of freedom you think they are.
I like this response to poke a hole in the parent comment, but it is worth noting that smartphones and guns are different in a pretty massive way:
Smartphones can be useful and valuable in many ways separate from the ways they can be used harmfully. Guns exist only for physical violence (or to threaten physical violence).
This is a fairly recent transition in gun use - it's not that long ago that their primary use was in feeding people (both through hunting, and through keeping predators away from livestock/crops)
> In most times and places, I'd guess the military had many more guns than civilians
My understanding is that the mobilisation for the Civil War is the only time in US history that military stockpiles of firearms have outnumbered civilian gun ownership (although possibly also at the height of WWII).
Though large standing militaries (versus recruiting large numbers of civilians into militias) is a fairly recent phenomenon, so the calculation is often not as cut and dried as one might expect.
1. Behavior or treatment in which physical force is exerted for the purpose of causing damage or injury.
In the case of the shooting examples the idea is to destroy the clay pots or damage the target. Baseball isn't quite on that level. I'm not sure what a gun can be aimed at without intent to damage it.
2. Intense force or great power, as in natural phenomena.
A gunshot definitely feels like an intense force. You could argue it for a strike from a baseball bat but it's quite relative and of course you can strike gently much more easily than you can shoot gently.
> In the case of the shooting examples the idea is to destroy the clay pots or damage the target. Baseball isn't quite on that level. I'm not sure what a gun can be aimed at without intent to damage it.
The point of clay target shooting isn't to destroy something, it's to build a skill and test yourself against an impartial system. That's what Duck Hunt captures and what made it popular. It's why shooting is a sport in the olympics.
Plenty of social reasons too, beyond hunting and self-defense, it can serve comradery and grounding. Some folks practice archery. Some folks fish. Some folks practice martial arts which they hope never to have to use in anger, but which they find calming, centering, and empowering.
> Plenty of social reasons too, beyond hunting and self-defense, it can serve comradery and grounding. Some folks practice archery. Some folks fish. Some folks practice martial arts which they hope never to have to use in anger, but which they find calming, centering, and empowering.
I'm not debating that. I have no moral issue with shooting a clay duck, I just see using explosives to shoot anything as an act of violence. I would say the same about fishing and archery. There seems to be some confusion here about the moral aspect of this, I'm not saying it's anti-social or anything like that, only that the use of guns is inherently violent.
All tools have potential use for violence. Hammers are as good at smashing heads as building houses. Even nuclear weapons have been used for constructive purposes. No tool is inherently good or evil, safe or violent. Those are properties of verbs. Everything is in the application and choices of the user.
Blaming a tool does seem like a convenient way to avoid personal responsibility.
Again I'm not making a moral argument here. I'm not talking about good and evil. I'm talking about violence and non-violence. A gun being used for "a good purpose" doesn't make it less violent.
So to you a flare gun is violent? It's a gun. Takes 12ga cartridges / shells. It can certainly be used to kill someone, but is designed and intended for saving lives. Is a knife violent? How about a letter opener? What about rope? Does it become violent only when certain knots are tied in it? How does this violent / non-violent object dichotomy work for you?
Violence, to me, is a verb someone can do to someone else, very specifically, with just about any object since the discovery of the rock and pointy stick.
> Violence, to me, is a verb someone can do to someone else, very specifically
That's fine, I already shared several dictionary definitions which differ from what it is "to you." To answer your questions above I would refer you again to those definitions.
I see no answer in your comments to my question about the knife / letter opener dichotomy, or about when a rope becomes violent or not. That's why I asked a direct question about your system of thought, your perceptions. They are common tools, they should be easy answers.
In the system of thought I've expressed, this is easy: all are tools, all have potential violent and non-violent uses. Depends on the intention and choices of the user.
In the system of thought you've expressed, I'm asking about these specific objects, because the words you've provided aren't sufficient for me to tell if they are violent objects or not. I'd like to know how it works for you. How you perceive it. If you're referencing a previous comment could you quote it? I'd like to understand what you're trying to say.
Sure. Would you usually describe a letter as having been "violently opened?" The regular magnet of using a letter opener doesn't involve violence, even while the object itself has the potential for a violent use.
But a loaded gun can only be fired violently. A clay duck can't explode non-violently when struck by a bullet. Nothing can be struck by a bullet without violence.
> The regular magnet of using a letter opener doesn't involve violence, even while the object itself has the potential for a violent use.
This sounds like you agree with my assessment, that violence is not inherent to the object, but a function of it's user's intent.
> But a loaded gun can only be fired violently. A clay duck can't explode non-violently when struck by a bullet. Nothing can be struck by a bullet without violence.
And yet you're back to assigning violence as an inherent property of an object here. Seems you are using two different and opposing systems of thought simultaneously.
Sometimes in my area of the US, people will fire guns into the air in reverie. Which most people would not describe as violent. Rather, celebratory. Rescue flares don't strike me as violent, but are fired from guns. Spin launch's projectile is another great example of something fired from a gun without violence.
On the other hand, if a person stood in the path of any of those while firing, the results could be quite gruesome, energetic even. But I wouldn't describe them as violent unless there was associated ill intent. Accidents are not typically described as violent.
You seem to be making some sort of qualitative argument about weapons (bullets, arrows... fishing rods?) vs non-weapons (baseballs), but I'm not seeing what makes archery categorically different from, say, playing darts, or shot-put (in all cases, a sport involving rapidly accelerating a projectile towards a goal of some kind)
No, not about weapons, about effects. Fishing is violent because it harms fish, not because a fishing rod is categorised as a weapon. I don't think archery is categorically different than darts. Shot-put is somewhat different in that nothing need be damaged in performing it but you're right that the launching of the projectile could be seen as violent. The former two meet both definitions of violence whereas the latter meets only one. The thing with a gun is that any use of them involves violence of multiple kinds.
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.
We know how to cure addiction though, and its really low tech. People (and rats) with adequate social lives and decent living conditions are able to consistently overcome addiction. In fact, addiction has come to be understood as a coping mechanism for living in an unpleasant environment. Imo the issue with phones is really a symptom of our lack of leisure time, pleasant outside settings, and affordable third places.
I think a lot of people turn to phonecrack instead of their social lives because they think phonecrack is their social lives. They've been told it's good, it's community, it's social.
And maybe it was at one point. But it's not anymore. There are no social media sites left, only media sites.
It actually is, but creating these kinds of environments and promoting healthy social lives is extremely not profitable. We'd have to dramatically lower the cost of living for everyone and make huge investments in infrastructure and subsidize the creation of third places.
Idk what part of "make society affordable for everyone and ensure that everyone has access to adequate care and social support" sounds like an easy or reductive fix.
Maybe my use of the world "simple" is causing some hangups. This is obviously a prerequisite for curing addiction worldwide. Lacking support, care, and social ties is a strong indicator that an addict will relapse in any case. You can't even start treating the really pathological cases without a comprehensive healthy environment for everyone.
The summation of the problem is reductive and your fix won’t fix it, although there’s no doubt it would help. No one is claiming your solution is bad, on the contrary it’s the best solution, but to claim it would completely eliminate addiction is preposterous.
There is a new book by Owen Flanagan ”What is it like to be an addict”[0] where he goes through the phenomenon of addiction from many different angles and argues that rat park type findings are true but only give partial view to the problem. His view is that it is very multifaceted subject and can’t be understood or tackled with any one easy fix.
Idk what part of "make society affordable for everyone and ensure that everyone has access to adequate care and social support" sounds like an easy fix.
That’s a good goal and I think we should aim for that regardless if it fixes addiction. I would not call it easy though. And would it be world without addicts? There are plenty of well connected rich social happy folks who can’t handle simple molecules. Environment is part of the usage pattern but it’s not the only thing. That’s the books point I gather.
You have taken the point someone else made and run somewhere else with it, so I will reiterate it.
> People (and rats) with adequate social lives and decent living conditions are able to consistently overcome addiction
I don't think it's about riches, or power, or having friends. It is purely about how many stressors you have to deal with, how often and with how much reprieve you have available. More money can give more reprieve, it usually means more stressors too.
The more subtle point I guess is that it is not how much you have, it is the shape of your life and how each day feels.
Use the example of far northern countries. People who live in dark countries drink more, and they drink even more the darker it gets. The modern era says that the answer should be more mindfulness, more cognitive behavioural therapy, I think GP is saying we should be giving them sunlight which is clearly what they actually need. Substitute sunlight for whatever thing your locale is currently not managing well.
I recommend the book and the new research. It reflects on the rat park study and makes what I think are good arguments that addiction is not a simple thing we can fix only by fixing the enviroment even though it is part of it. OP was asking for evidence so I thought I’d chip in with a modern source. There are no socities that have solved addiction. Obviously it is a gnarly problem.
It’s a nuanced issue not a simple issue. Mental health is often involved but I guess your simple cure works for mental health too?
People read some articles about a few studies and not only form but propagate reductive takes with absolute certainty… It’s baffling to see people operate this way.
Of course there is, even if it's not for everyone. You can abandon the profit-seeking duopoly and embrace GNU/Linux on smartphones. No tracking, no invasive apps or notifications. Works for me (except HN).
It is not like 'unlimited crack' because that is a chemically addictive substance that bypasses any need for stimuli enjoyment and directly increases wanting. Multi-media screens do not and cannot do this. Can we agree on that? Science does. At the very least they have to initially be intrinsically rewarding. They are a very different kind of stimuli and pretending they are chemical drugs that immediately bypass perception and directly cause wanting is dangerous misinformation. I am not saying people don't have problems. But this is not at all an addiction like chemical addictions. Applying chemical addiction paradigms will lead to the same calls for use of government violence in regulation. An outcome far more damaging than the situation.
Ok, it's not crack. Not chemical, just social. It's like a hyper-optimized version of gambling. Slot machines in everyone's pockets. Or am I not allowed to make that comparison either, because the government regulates that too? Wouldn't want to accidentally call for government violence.
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.
I've switched to a CAT S22 Android builder's flip phone, and my usage has dropped significantly. The screen is so small and fiddly that it makes me feel sick using it for extended periods - exactly what you want from an adictive substance like a smart phone. Having to physically open it to use it, and then waiting 5 seconds before it lights up, creates a psychic barrier to just 'quickly checking for updates'. The camera is like an early 2000s cheap digicam - just about good enough for documenting things but it hardly beckons you to want to photograph your life constantly for social media. It's a PITA to use and that's why it's perfect for everyday use.
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.
If this works for you, then great, do it as long as it works. But for me this will never work. What actually has worked though, is being in an enjoyable environment (surrounded by friends and family, lab / hobby equipment, quality books and poetry, or just spending a couple of hours outside) that can grab my attention better than those social media apps. Also, I regularly delete and recreate my social media accounts.
Additionally, a very effective way of becoming less attached to the phone is to occasionally "forget" to bring it out with you, but that only works if you for example don't need maps or aren't expected to take a phone call. The key-point here is the irregularity, because then over time you will get used to replacing smartphone usage with some other joyful (or idle) activities instead of just moving the dopamine rush hour around. Furthermore I believe that embracing boredom is a must, and I just accept that sometimes I will be bored with nothing to do for a couple of hours and that's when I get most creative.
Have you explored Focus modes on iPhone? You could place a button for a Shortcut on the lock screen to toggle Focus modes that change which apps show on the Home screen, and which notifications to show (while the others go to Notification center). Could use the Action button or Back Tap to change Focus mode before even seeing the lock screen.
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.
FairPhone Moments looks like a good idea. But why does it require a mechanical switch? I am not going to upgrade my FP4 just for that, but might be willing to install an app that does the same kind of thing
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.
the freedom to be able to choose to engorge yourself on twinkies is maybe a good thing, the fact that some folks are willing and able to indulge that impulse is probably less good
> the freedom to be able to choose to engorge yourself on twinkies is maybe a good thing
In isolation, freedom is wonderful. In practice, maybe not? If a member of the star trek crew abused twinkies to the extent that they were lethargic or unhealthy, it would negatively impact the mission.
There is some compromise between freedoms and social resposibility
Yes, and what if we saw what happened on Ferengi ships, with Ferengi replicators? Perhaps those are controlled by profit-seeking corporations, and have no such limits in the name of "personal freedom?" ;)
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.
> Changing individual human behavior to be more present and more self-aware
to what though? Id argue people prefer going on a website for something to do than dealing with the sad reality that is modern life. Dont blame a UI designer because your lifes empty
How does a child learn this if they are peer pressured to be on these platforms? The parents can say no up to a point. But eventually the environment demands a child to be on these platforms to participate in their social circles.
How do you enforce a rule to a large group of barely related individuals?
Slow, rhythmic speech pattern. Relaxing tones. Asking you to focus on your heart rate or breathing. Counting, or asking you to count mentally. Low lights or candle light. These are the things that come to mind.
There is a massive gap between "100k engineers have found a way to make most people in my demographic waste all their time by choosing to doomscroll" and "actually Nazis".
Both are bad, but as different as chronic fatigue and terminal cancer.
> 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.
Possibly the same episode, but some creep was trying to get a holodeck session with her likeness, and when Quark managed to get her likeness, the revenge was to corrupt the holodeck program to put Quark's head on the body: https://www.reddit.com/r/startrekgifs/comments/i8hilq/cant_d...
>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."
Ok but is the issue the information, or is the issue the presentation?
I am an outlier, but I used to cure insomnia with excessive reading. I reckon if I had no other outlet, I would probably choose information over sleep.
But we know that the 5 websites put a lot of energy into making them extremely desirable to cruise for hours, regardless of content. It feels like everyone has my unique problem, but its not really "information" they are after, its this one giant never ending pit of despair and bullying.
>"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."
But when they power the device on, instead of reading all the information ever published in the history of the world, they watch vacuous tiktok videos where losers talk in the most annoying voices possible TAP LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE.
This should be obvious, I suppose. Gluttons aren't eating pounds of filet mignon and bags of truffles, they're chowing down on pseudo-manufactured crunchythings that are only distantly related to food.
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
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.
Fun facts, and/or actual knowledge you might even use one day. This said, I've definitely never had a use for knowing about CORONA spy satellites dropping film cartridges on the Earth (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CORONA_(satellite)) or about bell-mouth spillways...
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.
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.
So, do you remember the Wolf of Wall Street? AKA Jordan Belfort. Huge fraudster, did shittons of financial crime. People on Prodigy and Compuserve forums were talking about it, and so Jordan Belfort decided to sue the shit out of the companies in order to take the speech down and censor the users talking about him.
The resulting caselaw we got out of this mess was that Prodigy's moderated servers were treated as publisher and assigned defamation liability; while Compuserve, being unmoderated, had no such liability. CDA 230 was written specifically to overturn the Prodigy verdict. So repealing it would put us in a place where Internet forums are either totally censored and sanitized, or completely unregulated messes of spam and garbage. No middle ground.
> 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
They are not tired enough if they choose to use their smartphone, that's an education issue.
Children are taught the value of a good night of sleep, they are taught by having fulfilling daily lives and exhausting. If you let them be like a plant, yeah they will be just as dumb as a plant.
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.
To me, smartphones are a godsent. I use mine to communicate, get public transport information, have text read to me, describe pictures, get a GPS fix and help me navigate the city as a pedestrian, use devices where I wouldn't be able to read the displays, and so many other things I can't even list right now. I even met my partner of 14 years via Messenger. I occasionally scroll through facebook to find events I might go to, and amuse myself over comments on various divisive and not so diviseve posts. I am blind. My life would be clearly less fun without them. Tools are just that, tools. What you make of them is your call.
I don't understand how having faceid, a touchscreen, vibration, gps would manipulate my emotions.
Makes no sense.
Developers using these features to build app that makes you addicted ? Yes. But these features in itself are not manipulatives or triggering reflexes.
I just don't understand the author reasoning...
I don't use addictive social media on my phone and when I receive notification, my phone makes a sound, it vibrates and yet I don't feel urged to look at it.
I actively dislike my phone. It's an entirely to expensive platform that I "need" to own, to interact with certain parts of society. The screen is to small to be useful for media consumption, without making me sick. It's also to small to be useful as a web browser, except in an emergency.
It is great to have GPS and mobile payments, and Uber if you're in the US as it's pretty much impossible to locate a regular taxi. Other than that it's ... for making phone calls, texting is done better view a desktop app, though I need the smartphone to activate the account (Signal).
Claiming that the phone is manipulating is a bit of a stretch. One roundabout why I can see the phone manufacturers being complicit is in pushing what a phone can and should do. If you remove the manipulating apps, then you end up with people replacing their phone way less frequently. E.g. the iPhone 7 is still a good phone, it has texting (and iMessage or Signal), calling, security updates, notes and updated maps. It probably sucks at running Instagram and TikTok (though I'd assume it plays videos just fine). Apple just isn't really going to make a ton of that original sale anymore.
> I don't use addictive social media on my phone and when I receive notification, my phone makes a sound, it vibrates and yet I don't feel urged to look at it.
the hysterical mob has decided it is literal crack rocks and EVERYONE ELSE cannot be trusted to not get hopelessly addicted to it, however they can use social media to of course decry its evils
"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.
Some say it's not the phone, it's the app a company makes.
So is it the company that is bad?
Company products and services are a result of the system of regulations. The market is a playground where companies survive, thrive, and die, always trying to maximize total future profit, which is dictated by the shape of what is allowed and what things humans will pay for.
The cause of "bad stuff" like "addiction" to a legal product/service is human nature. If a human will pay for something that is legal, there will be a market for it.
In other words: it's not the company, it's the system.
That's like saying we should ban knife because it could kill people. Please. Every adult can make an informed choice on what "manipulates" them. If they can't, if they prefer convenience over critical thinking, then you don't stand a chance and will be exploited by the capitalistic overlords.
> also an issue of privacy
Welcome to the age of obsessive and relentless mass surveillance. Want privacy? Impossible unless you have discipline and patience to not give in to the digital overlords
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?
> Sometimes I wonder if I’m using my phone, or if it’s using me.
It's always both. The phone is a doorway. On one side is you trying to exploit the resources on the other side. On the other side is the rest of the world, trying to exploit you.
Yes and my comment is just relaying what professionals have to say about the phenomenon:
Bottom line up front: the way out is to set aside some time for a menial task that isn't mentally taxing.
Screens are a particularly effective means of avoiding processing one's emotions. Those, of course, don't go away by themselves so if you don't take time to deal with them, you create a dependency.
The moment before going to sleep is typically when piled up emotions and intrusive thoughts return, so that's also when the temptation to set them aside is the greatest.
Resisting that temptation, but giving in to it eventually is dangerous, because next time the signal is stronger.
> sharing biometric data through pre-loaded health and wellness apps.
I've been thinking about finally getting a smartwatch to keep tabs on my sleep and encourage me to do more exercise, like jogging for a certain amount of time or something. Suggestions for privacy respecting, ideally FOSS solutions?
> I've been thinking about finally getting a smartwatch to keep tabs on my sleep and encourage me to do more exercise, like jogging for a certain amount of time or something.
Do people really need watches to able to sleep normally or get some exercise?
Techy people enjoy stats and metrics you can review. It's fun to pull up my sleep data and compare averages between last 7 days/31 days/12 months. It's interesting to see my heart rate at different points during exercise or other activities. Sometimes I can recall what I was doing on a particular day just looking at the amount of steps.
One thing to keep in mind is that studies that evaluate the sleep tracking of smartwatches and smartphones typically show them to be wildly inaccurate, to the point of being useless
For iPhone there's Out-Run [0] which is a great open source running app with no vendor tracking (it optionally tracks your runs locally).
For exercise, I would kindly suggest you don't make things over complicated. There's no tech solution that prevents you from putting on a pair of running shoes, getting outside and finding out what does and doesn't work yourself.
Everything we interact with has an emotional impact. And smart phones trigger our reflexes because they are literally tools for communication.
> Most of these features were developed decades ago for other uses. GPS was created by the U.S. military in the early 1970s, then was adopted by hikers and sailors to both navigate and to allow others to locate them if necessary.
> Vibration alerts were created for pagers in the late 1970s for professionals — from hospital staff to travelling salespeople — to notify them of an important phone call.
> Sound alerts became more widespread with Tamagotchi and other 1990s digital pets. Those toys are especially significant when discussing today’s psychological dependency on portable devices.
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.
They don't really want to get rid of their smartphone and get for example a dumb phone.
I can't speak on behalf of others but whilst I do spend a little too much time scrolling, I would like it taken away from me too. But that doesn't fix anything, before endless scrolling we simply had more and more pages of information.
Smartphones were not always as addictive as they once were, the tiktok, reels, shorts have really tapped into something we haven't had before, which is essentially TV or breaking news on steroids.
Its another avenue which is addictive like gaming, gambling, alcoholism etc and we need to treat it carefully and be able to pull ourselves out of it. I have had smartphones for over a decade and I no doubt use mine way more in the past say 5 years.
> They don't really want to get rid of their smartphone
> Its another avenue which is addictive like gaming, gambling, alcoholism etc
So people can't moderate themselves due to the addiction, which is completely different from "don't really want". This is not at all surprising given that a huge industry is dedicated to make the addiction stronger. The latter is the actual problem, not people or smartphones.
I find it helps to leave the phone at home when I'm running errands. It helps that I work from home so I can mostly just leave it in my bedroom all day.
Let's be clear. It is not the actual smartphones that do this; machines are designed and programmed by humans. Companies can choose to use technology to manipulate our emotions and trigger our reflexes, and many do choose just that, often for financial gain.
The purpose of a system is what it does.
My smartphone doesn't manipulate or track me. There are no invasive push notifications or ads. Sent from my Librem 5.
Some mild whataboutery: is the purpose of a cancer ward to fail to cure a large fraction of its patients[0]?
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpo...
“what it does” describes the actions taken - cancer wards work to treat cancer (which is their purpose). Outcomes of what they do isn’t relevant to the point.
The purpose of most social media companies is to manipulate people for financial and political gain which is what they do.
I think that "manipulate people for financial and political gain" is an outcome of what social media companies actually do - I was under the belief that in a general sense, they want to maximise the time people spend on their apps so that they can sell this attention to advertisers, independent of whether or not a given ad buyer wants to manipulate people.
> they want to maximise the time people spend on their apps so that they can sell this attention to advertisers
This is where they manipulate in my mind. They maximize that time by exploiting human psychology, manipulating people into scrolling their feeds endlessly eh?
The algorithms are getting kinda scary now — they probably know me better than I know myself.
Indeed. Delete everything that doesn't respect your time and attention and a funny thing happens: your phone becomes a tool again.
It’s the apps, specifically algorithmic social media and addictive games. The latter now also includes addictive gambling apps.
"Guns don't kill people..."
Not sure if you’re being coy or pushing the trope but you’re right guns don’t actually kill people. The bullets and blood loss tend to do that.
That said, denying people access to guns does result in fewer gun related fatalities.
But note that this is deeply unethical and amounts to denying people the right to self-defense, and by extension, denying people the right to freedom.
The only thing that happens when guns are denied is the rise of corrupt and totalitarian politicians, and that the common man is either oppressed by them or by criminal gangs. Enter guns, and the common man can defend himself against both, which is a blessing.
Thankfully it is now possible to print your own guns and build one easily, so this will become less of an issue in the future, when everyone, if they want, can carry concealed guns.
> the rise of corrupt and totalitarian politicians
Doesn't seem to track in the US
Could you provide some examples of these things actually happening? Many of the most stable, most free, least corrupt countries have strict gun laws.
I live in a country with an aggressive gun lobby, and a ludicrously corrupt government that wants to create a fascist ethnostate. The gun nuts are largely on the side of the fascist ethnostate. I don’t think guns are the perfect defenders of freedom you think they are.
The fall didn’t kill him, it was the landing.
The landing didn't kill him, it was the impact.
The impact didn’t kill him, it was the organ failure and blood loss.
Blood loss didn’t kill him, ischemia did?
Kitchen knives do
[flagged]
"rappers do ..."
I like this response to poke a hole in the parent comment, but it is worth noting that smartphones and guns are different in a pretty massive way:
Smartphones can be useful and valuable in many ways separate from the ways they can be used harmfully. Guns exist only for physical violence (or to threaten physical violence).
This is a fairly recent transition in gun use - it's not that long ago that their primary use was in feeding people (both through hunting, and through keeping predators away from livestock/crops)
> it's not that long ago that their primary use was in feeding people
To where and when are you referring? In most times and places, I'd guess the military had many more guns than civilians.
> In most times and places, I'd guess the military had many more guns than civilians
My understanding is that the mobilisation for the Civil War is the only time in US history that military stockpiles of firearms have outnumbered civilian gun ownership (although possibly also at the height of WWII).
Though large standing militaries (versus recruiting large numbers of civilians into militias) is a fairly recent phenomenon, so the calculation is often not as cut and dried as one might expect.
> Guns exist only for physical violence
Skeet shooting? Targets? Most gun owners never kill anything.
Those are both acts of physical violence, just not against living creatures.
That's a pretty extreme stance. If shooting inanimate clay pots is violence, wouldn't baseball also constitute violence?
When I search a definition I get three results:
1. Behavior or treatment in which physical force is exerted for the purpose of causing damage or injury.
In the case of the shooting examples the idea is to destroy the clay pots or damage the target. Baseball isn't quite on that level. I'm not sure what a gun can be aimed at without intent to damage it.
2. Intense force or great power, as in natural phenomena.
A gunshot definitely feels like an intense force. You could argue it for a strike from a baseball bat but it's quite relative and of course you can strike gently much more easily than you can shoot gently.
> In the case of the shooting examples the idea is to destroy the clay pots or damage the target. Baseball isn't quite on that level. I'm not sure what a gun can be aimed at without intent to damage it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_Hunt
1984.
The point of clay target shooting isn't to destroy something, it's to build a skill and test yourself against an impartial system. That's what Duck Hunt captures and what made it popular. It's why shooting is a sport in the olympics.
Plenty of social reasons too, beyond hunting and self-defense, it can serve comradery and grounding. Some folks practice archery. Some folks fish. Some folks practice martial arts which they hope never to have to use in anger, but which they find calming, centering, and empowering.
> Plenty of social reasons too, beyond hunting and self-defense, it can serve comradery and grounding. Some folks practice archery. Some folks fish. Some folks practice martial arts which they hope never to have to use in anger, but which they find calming, centering, and empowering.
I'm not debating that. I have no moral issue with shooting a clay duck, I just see using explosives to shoot anything as an act of violence. I would say the same about fishing and archery. There seems to be some confusion here about the moral aspect of this, I'm not saying it's anti-social or anything like that, only that the use of guns is inherently violent.
All tools have potential use for violence. Hammers are as good at smashing heads as building houses. Even nuclear weapons have been used for constructive purposes. No tool is inherently good or evil, safe or violent. Those are properties of verbs. Everything is in the application and choices of the user.
Blaming a tool does seem like a convenient way to avoid personal responsibility.
Again I'm not making a moral argument here. I'm not talking about good and evil. I'm talking about violence and non-violence. A gun being used for "a good purpose" doesn't make it less violent.
So to you a flare gun is violent? It's a gun. Takes 12ga cartridges / shells. It can certainly be used to kill someone, but is designed and intended for saving lives. Is a knife violent? How about a letter opener? What about rope? Does it become violent only when certain knots are tied in it? How does this violent / non-violent object dichotomy work for you?
Violence, to me, is a verb someone can do to someone else, very specifically, with just about any object since the discovery of the rock and pointy stick.
> Violence, to me, is a verb someone can do to someone else, very specifically
That's fine, I already shared several dictionary definitions which differ from what it is "to you." To answer your questions above I would refer you again to those definitions.
I see no answer in your comments to my question about the knife / letter opener dichotomy, or about when a rope becomes violent or not. That's why I asked a direct question about your system of thought, your perceptions. They are common tools, they should be easy answers.
In the system of thought I've expressed, this is easy: all are tools, all have potential violent and non-violent uses. Depends on the intention and choices of the user.
In the system of thought you've expressed, I'm asking about these specific objects, because the words you've provided aren't sufficient for me to tell if they are violent objects or not. I'd like to know how it works for you. How you perceive it. If you're referencing a previous comment could you quote it? I'd like to understand what you're trying to say.
Sure. Would you usually describe a letter as having been "violently opened?" The regular magnet of using a letter opener doesn't involve violence, even while the object itself has the potential for a violent use.
But a loaded gun can only be fired violently. A clay duck can't explode non-violently when struck by a bullet. Nothing can be struck by a bullet without violence.
> The regular magnet of using a letter opener doesn't involve violence, even while the object itself has the potential for a violent use.
This sounds like you agree with my assessment, that violence is not inherent to the object, but a function of it's user's intent.
> But a loaded gun can only be fired violently. A clay duck can't explode non-violently when struck by a bullet. Nothing can be struck by a bullet without violence.
And yet you're back to assigning violence as an inherent property of an object here. Seems you are using two different and opposing systems of thought simultaneously.
Sometimes in my area of the US, people will fire guns into the air in reverie. Which most people would not describe as violent. Rather, celebratory. Rescue flares don't strike me as violent, but are fired from guns. Spin launch's projectile is another great example of something fired from a gun without violence.
On the other hand, if a person stood in the path of any of those while firing, the results could be quite gruesome, energetic even. But I wouldn't describe them as violent unless there was associated ill intent. Accidents are not typically described as violent.
You seem to be making some sort of qualitative argument about weapons (bullets, arrows... fishing rods?) vs non-weapons (baseballs), but I'm not seeing what makes archery categorically different from, say, playing darts, or shot-put (in all cases, a sport involving rapidly accelerating a projectile towards a goal of some kind)
No, not about weapons, about effects. Fishing is violent because it harms fish, not because a fishing rod is categorised as a weapon. I don't think archery is categorically different than darts. Shot-put is somewhat different in that nothing need be damaged in performing it but you're right that the launching of the projectile could be seen as violent. The former two meet both definitions of violence whereas the latter meets only one. The thing with a gun is that any use of them involves violence of multiple kinds.
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.
We know how to cure addiction though, and its really low tech. People (and rats) with adequate social lives and decent living conditions are able to consistently overcome addiction. In fact, addiction has come to be understood as a coping mechanism for living in an unpleasant environment. Imo the issue with phones is really a symptom of our lack of leisure time, pleasant outside settings, and affordable third places.
It helps, but many prefer the phonecrack despite having access to all that.
IMO it could be a matter of perspective.
I think a lot of people turn to phonecrack instead of their social lives because they think phonecrack is their social lives. They've been told it's good, it's community, it's social.
And maybe it was at one point. But it's not anymore. There are no social media sites left, only media sites.
It’s very obviously not that simple.
It actually is, but creating these kinds of environments and promoting healthy social lives is extremely not profitable. We'd have to dramatically lower the cost of living for everyone and make huge investments in infrastructure and subsidize the creation of third places.
Ok I guess we’re hallucinating all the addicts who have/had those things. Mental health is never part of the problem either.
Claiming the problem of addiction has zero nuance is one of the silliest takes I’ve ever read on here.
Idk what part of "make society affordable for everyone and ensure that everyone has access to adequate care and social support" sounds like an easy or reductive fix.
Maybe my use of the world "simple" is causing some hangups. This is obviously a prerequisite for curing addiction worldwide. Lacking support, care, and social ties is a strong indicator that an addict will relapse in any case. You can't even start treating the really pathological cases without a comprehensive healthy environment for everyone.
The summation of the problem is reductive and your fix won’t fix it, although there’s no doubt it would help. No one is claiming your solution is bad, on the contrary it’s the best solution, but to claim it would completely eliminate addiction is preposterous.
It seems that simple to me.
Do you have a rationalisation for your disagreement, or is this a throw away comment you don't care about?
There is a new book by Owen Flanagan ”What is it like to be an addict”[0] where he goes through the phenomenon of addiction from many different angles and argues that rat park type findings are true but only give partial view to the problem. His view is that it is very multifaceted subject and can’t be understood or tackled with any one easy fix.
[0]https://academic.oup.com/book/59281
Idk what part of "make society affordable for everyone and ensure that everyone has access to adequate care and social support" sounds like an easy fix.
That’s a good goal and I think we should aim for that regardless if it fixes addiction. I would not call it easy though. And would it be world without addicts? There are plenty of well connected rich social happy folks who can’t handle simple molecules. Environment is part of the usage pattern but it’s not the only thing. That’s the books point I gather.
You have taken the point someone else made and run somewhere else with it, so I will reiterate it.
> People (and rats) with adequate social lives and decent living conditions are able to consistently overcome addiction
I don't think it's about riches, or power, or having friends. It is purely about how many stressors you have to deal with, how often and with how much reprieve you have available. More money can give more reprieve, it usually means more stressors too.
The more subtle point I guess is that it is not how much you have, it is the shape of your life and how each day feels.
Use the example of far northern countries. People who live in dark countries drink more, and they drink even more the darker it gets. The modern era says that the answer should be more mindfulness, more cognitive behavioural therapy, I think GP is saying we should be giving them sunlight which is clearly what they actually need. Substitute sunlight for whatever thing your locale is currently not managing well.
I recommend the book and the new research. It reflects on the rat park study and makes what I think are good arguments that addiction is not a simple thing we can fix only by fixing the enviroment even though it is part of it. OP was asking for evidence so I thought I’d chip in with a modern source. There are no socities that have solved addiction. Obviously it is a gnarly problem.
The endless counter examples.
It’s a nuanced issue not a simple issue. Mental health is often involved but I guess your simple cure works for mental health too?
People read some articles about a few studies and not only form but propagate reductive takes with absolute certainty… It’s baffling to see people operate this way.
> There is no technological solution to this.
Of course there is, even if it's not for everyone. You can abandon the profit-seeking duopoly and embrace GNU/Linux on smartphones. No tracking, no invasive apps or notifications. Works for me (except HN).
Government mandated rehab
> We have the equivalent of unlimited crack in everyone’s pocket 24/7
i think you might be slightly overreacting there bud. and smartphones dont connect to a different internet, youre on social media right now.
It is not like 'unlimited crack' because that is a chemically addictive substance that bypasses any need for stimuli enjoyment and directly increases wanting. Multi-media screens do not and cannot do this. Can we agree on that? Science does. At the very least they have to initially be intrinsically rewarding. They are a very different kind of stimuli and pretending they are chemical drugs that immediately bypass perception and directly cause wanting is dangerous misinformation. I am not saying people don't have problems. But this is not at all an addiction like chemical addictions. Applying chemical addiction paradigms will lead to the same calls for use of government violence in regulation. An outcome far more damaging than the situation.
Ok, it's not crack. Not chemical, just social. It's like a hyper-optimized version of gambling. Slot machines in everyone's pockets. Or am I not allowed to make that comparison either, because the government regulates that too? Wouldn't want to accidentally call for government violence.
You can compare it to gambling disorder, certainly. Just stop comparing it to chemical drugs. That's dangerous misinformation.
> That's dangerous misinformation.
Can you elaborate?
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.
We are lighting ourselves on fire.
> We are lighting ourselves on fire.
And the majority celebrate because they feel warm.
I've switched to a CAT S22 Android builder's flip phone, and my usage has dropped significantly. The screen is so small and fiddly that it makes me feel sick using it for extended periods - exactly what you want from an adictive substance like a smart phone. Having to physically open it to use it, and then waiting 5 seconds before it lights up, creates a psychic barrier to just 'quickly checking for updates'. The camera is like an early 2000s cheap digicam - just about good enough for documenting things but it hardly beckons you to want to photograph your life constantly for social media. It's a PITA to use and that's why it's perfect for everyday use.
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.
If this works for you, then great, do it as long as it works. But for me this will never work. What actually has worked though, is being in an enjoyable environment (surrounded by friends and family, lab / hobby equipment, quality books and poetry, or just spending a couple of hours outside) that can grab my attention better than those social media apps. Also, I regularly delete and recreate my social media accounts.
Additionally, a very effective way of becoming less attached to the phone is to occasionally "forget" to bring it out with you, but that only works if you for example don't need maps or aren't expected to take a phone call. The key-point here is the irregularity, because then over time you will get used to replacing smartphone usage with some other joyful (or idle) activities instead of just moving the dopamine rush hour around. Furthermore I believe that embracing boredom is a must, and I just accept that sometimes I will be bored with nothing to do for a couple of hours and that's when I get most creative.
I've been dreaming for years of some kind of "two ways to unlock your phone" mode.
Mode 1: I'm bored, show me something interesting, all notifications are available
Mode 2: I want to do something specific, don't show me anything but a tool for selecting an app / task (list of apps, search box, whatever).
I think that's basically the concept of Fairphone's "Moments" mode, which it even has a physical switch for: https://shop.fairphone.com/the-fairphone-gen-6#moments
Have you explored Focus modes on iPhone? You could place a button for a Shortcut on the lock screen to toggle Focus modes that change which apps show on the Home screen, and which notifications to show (while the others go to Notification center). Could use the Action button or Back Tap to change Focus mode before even seeing the lock screen.
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.
[1] https://support.fairphone.com/hc/en-us/articles/268869393266...
[2] https://www.thelightphone.com
FairPhone Moments looks like a good idea. But why does it require a mechanical switch? I am not going to upgrade my FP4 just for that, but might be willing to install an app that does the same kind of thing
Why on earth are you using crapbook, whatscrap and linkedshit?
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.
In 1980s Star Trek it was used for porn. (TNG: The Perfect Mate, Hollow Pursuits)
And the Replicator was locked out from producing mass amounts of unhealthy food (unless you told it not to).
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.
the freedom to be able to choose to engorge yourself on twinkies is maybe a good thing, the fact that some folks are willing and able to indulge that impulse is probably less good
> the freedom to be able to choose to engorge yourself on twinkies is maybe a good thing
In isolation, freedom is wonderful. In practice, maybe not? If a member of the star trek crew abused twinkies to the extent that they were lethargic or unhealthy, it would negatively impact the mission.
There is some compromise between freedoms and social resposibility
Yes, and what if we saw what happened on Ferengi ships, with Ferengi replicators? Perhaps those are controlled by profit-seeking corporations, and have no such limits in the name of "personal freedom?" ;)
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.
> Changing individual human behavior to be more present and more self-aware
to what though? Id argue people prefer going on a website for something to do than dealing with the sad reality that is modern life. Dont blame a UI designer because your lifes empty
How does a child learn this if they are peer pressured to be on these platforms? The parents can say no up to a point. But eventually the environment demands a child to be on these platforms to participate in their social circles.
How do you enforce a rule to a large group of barely related individuals?
How to tell you're being hypnotized?
Slow, rhythmic speech pattern. Relaxing tones. Asking you to focus on your heart rate or breathing. Counting, or asking you to count mentally. Low lights or candle light. These are the things that come to mind.
thats not true though is it. youre talking about a UI designer being some king of evil nazi... get real
Straw man.
There is a massive gap between "100k engineers have found a way to make most people in my demographic waste all their time by choosing to doomscroll" and "actually Nazis".
Both are bad, but as different as chronic fatigue and terminal cancer.
> 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.
Hogwash. Give people smart phones that haven't been fine-tuned to be addictive and see what happens then.
>In real Star Trek the holo deck would be used for porn
This is lampshaded in Lower Decks
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.
Possibly the same episode, but some creep was trying to get a holodeck session with her likeness, and when Quark managed to get her likeness, the revenge was to corrupt the holodeck program to put Quark's head on the body: https://www.reddit.com/r/startrekgifs/comments/i8hilq/cant_d...
As long as you're scheduling use of the holodeck it's not going to be the same kind of impulse problem.
We want tools that aren't designed to trigger our impulses.
You don't consider an application that is designed specifically to siphon all the attention it can to be a perverted implementation?
Surprise, it's harder for people to self-govern when they are surrounded by mechanisms designed deliberately to subvert their capacity to self-govern.
[dead]
With a smartphone you do not only give the internet to a kid, you are also giving the kid to the internet.
>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."
Ok but is the issue the information, or is the issue the presentation?
I am an outlier, but I used to cure insomnia with excessive reading. I reckon if I had no other outlet, I would probably choose information over sleep.
But we know that the 5 websites put a lot of energy into making them extremely desirable to cruise for hours, regardless of content. It feels like everyone has my unique problem, but its not really "information" they are after, its this one giant never ending pit of despair and bullying.
>"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."
But when they power the device on, instead of reading all the information ever published in the history of the world, they watch vacuous tiktok videos where losers talk in the most annoying voices possible TAP LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE.
This should be obvious, I suppose. Gluttons aren't eating pounds of filet mignon and bags of truffles, they're chowing down on pseudo-manufactured crunchythings that are only distantly related to food.
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
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.
That's infinitely preferable to scrolling your short form video platform of choice. At least you get some fun facts to use in conversation out of it.
Fun facts, and/or actual knowledge you might even use one day. This said, I've definitely never had a use for knowing about CORONA spy satellites dropping film cartridges on the Earth (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CORONA_(satellite)) or about bell-mouth spillways...
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.
> misalligned with society's
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.
> Any fundamentalist religious community
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.
Your mention of Wikipedia reminded me of WikiTok: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42936723
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.
I don't buy it. The internet existed before the carve out and was in fact less centralized and less shitty
So, do you remember the Wolf of Wall Street? AKA Jordan Belfort. Huge fraudster, did shittons of financial crime. People on Prodigy and Compuserve forums were talking about it, and so Jordan Belfort decided to sue the shit out of the companies in order to take the speech down and censor the users talking about him.
The resulting caselaw we got out of this mess was that Prodigy's moderated servers were treated as publisher and assigned defamation liability; while Compuserve, being unmoderated, had no such liability. CDA 230 was written specifically to overturn the Prodigy verdict. So repealing it would put us in a place where Internet forums are either totally censored and sanitized, or completely unregulated messes of spam and garbage. No middle ground.
> 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
They are not tired enough if they choose to use their smartphone, that's an education issue.
Children are taught the value of a good night of sleep, they are taught by having fulfilling daily lives and exhausting. If you let them be like a plant, yeah they will be just as dumb as a plant.
> all of the information ever published in the history of the world
Why read that when you could watch 10 solid hours of clickbait?
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.
Do you have to be worried being killed by a driver all the time?
To me, smartphones are a godsent. I use mine to communicate, get public transport information, have text read to me, describe pictures, get a GPS fix and help me navigate the city as a pedestrian, use devices where I wouldn't be able to read the displays, and so many other things I can't even list right now. I even met my partner of 14 years via Messenger. I occasionally scroll through facebook to find events I might go to, and amuse myself over comments on various divisive and not so diviseve posts. I am blind. My life would be clearly less fun without them. Tools are just that, tools. What you make of them is your call.
I don't understand how having faceid, a touchscreen, vibration, gps would manipulate my emotions.
Makes no sense.
Developers using these features to build app that makes you addicted ? Yes. But these features in itself are not manipulatives or triggering reflexes.
I just don't understand the author reasoning...
I don't use addictive social media on my phone and when I receive notification, my phone makes a sound, it vibrates and yet I don't feel urged to look at it.
I actively dislike my phone. It's an entirely to expensive platform that I "need" to own, to interact with certain parts of society. The screen is to small to be useful for media consumption, without making me sick. It's also to small to be useful as a web browser, except in an emergency.
It is great to have GPS and mobile payments, and Uber if you're in the US as it's pretty much impossible to locate a regular taxi. Other than that it's ... for making phone calls, texting is done better view a desktop app, though I need the smartphone to activate the account (Signal).
Claiming that the phone is manipulating is a bit of a stretch. One roundabout why I can see the phone manufacturers being complicit is in pushing what a phone can and should do. If you remove the manipulating apps, then you end up with people replacing their phone way less frequently. E.g. the iPhone 7 is still a good phone, it has texting (and iMessage or Signal), calling, security updates, notes and updated maps. It probably sucks at running Instagram and TikTok (though I'd assume it plays videos just fine). Apple just isn't really going to make a ton of that original sale anymore.
> I don't use addictive social media on my phone and when I receive notification, my phone makes a sound, it vibrates and yet I don't feel urged to look at it.
the hysterical mob has decided it is literal crack rocks and EVERYONE ELSE cannot be trusted to not get hopelessly addicted to it, however they can use social media to of course decry its evils
This title feels so 2015.
We now know the causes are instagram/tiktok or may be even the new llms even though less likely. Why not just say that?
"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.
Some say it's not the phone, it's the app a company makes.
So is it the company that is bad?
Company products and services are a result of the system of regulations. The market is a playground where companies survive, thrive, and die, always trying to maximize total future profit, which is dictated by the shape of what is allowed and what things humans will pay for.
The cause of "bad stuff" like "addiction" to a legal product/service is human nature. If a human will pay for something that is legal, there will be a market for it.
In other words: it's not the company, it's the system.
Well thankfully the market is privately owned by a single entity via the app store, so we can just regulate the company.
Or they can just open their fucking platform and clean their hands of their curation of shitty apps, which has clearly failed.
That's like saying we should ban knife because it could kill people. Please. Every adult can make an informed choice on what "manipulates" them. If they can't, if they prefer convenience over critical thinking, then you don't stand a chance and will be exploited by the capitalistic overlords.
> also an issue of privacy
Welcome to the age of obsessive and relentless mass surveillance. Want privacy? Impossible unless you have discipline and patience to not give in to the digital overlords
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?
> Sometimes I wonder if I’m using my phone, or if it’s using me.
It's always both. The phone is a doorway. On one side is you trying to exploit the resources on the other side. On the other side is the rest of the world, trying to exploit you.
Yes and my comment is just relaying what professionals have to say about the phenomenon:
Bottom line up front: the way out is to set aside some time for a menial task that isn't mentally taxing.
Screens are a particularly effective means of avoiding processing one's emotions. Those, of course, don't go away by themselves so if you don't take time to deal with them, you create a dependency.
The moment before going to sleep is typically when piled up emotions and intrusive thoughts return, so that's also when the temptation to set them aside is the greatest.
Resisting that temptation, but giving in to it eventually is dangerous, because next time the signal is stronger.
> sharing biometric data through pre-loaded health and wellness apps.
I've been thinking about finally getting a smartwatch to keep tabs on my sleep and encourage me to do more exercise, like jogging for a certain amount of time or something. Suggestions for privacy respecting, ideally FOSS solutions?
> I've been thinking about finally getting a smartwatch to keep tabs on my sleep and encourage me to do more exercise, like jogging for a certain amount of time or something.
Do people really need watches to able to sleep normally or get some exercise?
Techy people enjoy stats and metrics you can review. It's fun to pull up my sleep data and compare averages between last 7 days/31 days/12 months. It's interesting to see my heart rate at different points during exercise or other activities. Sometimes I can recall what I was doing on a particular day just looking at the amount of steps.
One thing to keep in mind is that studies that evaluate the sleep tracking of smartwatches and smartphones typically show them to be wildly inaccurate, to the point of being useless
https://pine64.org/devices/pinetime/
This was a really helpful answer, thank you. I'm not sure why you've been downvoted.
For iPhone there's Out-Run [0] which is a great open source running app with no vendor tracking (it optionally tracks your runs locally).
For exercise, I would kindly suggest you don't make things over complicated. There's no tech solution that prevents you from putting on a pair of running shoes, getting outside and finding out what does and doesn't work yourself.
[0] https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/out-run/id1477511092
This is getting ridiculous
Everything we interact with has an emotional impact. And smart phones trigger our reflexes because they are literally tools for communication.
> Most of these features were developed decades ago for other uses. GPS was created by the U.S. military in the early 1970s, then was adopted by hikers and sailors to both navigate and to allow others to locate them if necessary.
> Vibration alerts were created for pagers in the late 1970s for professionals — from hospital staff to travelling salespeople — to notify them of an important phone call.
> Sound alerts became more widespread with Tamagotchi and other 1990s digital pets. Those toys are especially significant when discussing today’s psychological dependency on portable devices.
Seriously???
It's almost as if smartphones and cars are sentient beings controlling humans in ways they don't understand!
> Smartphones manipulate our emotions and trigger our reflexes
Lol. What a way to steer understanding from the cause of this phenomenon.
Smartphone is merely a tool used by organisations for achieving own most often financial goals.
It's like to say "TV manipulate people's emotions" while talking about tv advertisement industry.
what doesn't, at some point?
They do it very very frequently.
Oh absolutely, The intent and magnitude of a lot of dark patterns do make them quite bad.
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.
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.
Its possible, but the point is that people don't really want it.
People don't want what? To get rid of their smartphone? To be tracked? To have the problem solved?
There's too many ways to interpret your sentence, you need to be more specific
They don't really want to get rid of their smartphone and get for example a dumb phone.
I can't speak on behalf of others but whilst I do spend a little too much time scrolling, I would like it taken away from me too. But that doesn't fix anything, before endless scrolling we simply had more and more pages of information.
Smartphones were not always as addictive as they once were, the tiktok, reels, shorts have really tapped into something we haven't had before, which is essentially TV or breaking news on steroids.
Its another avenue which is addictive like gaming, gambling, alcoholism etc and we need to treat it carefully and be able to pull ourselves out of it. I have had smartphones for over a decade and I no doubt use mine way more in the past say 5 years.
> They don't really want to get rid of their smartphone
> Its another avenue which is addictive like gaming, gambling, alcoholism etc
So people can't moderate themselves due to the addiction, which is completely different from "don't really want". This is not at all surprising given that a huge industry is dedicated to make the addiction stronger. The latter is the actual problem, not people or smartphones.
Honestly, it seems like you agree with me...
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> Short of powering off or walking away ...
We could all stop any time we want, but we don't. :(
I find it helps to leave the phone at home when I'm running errands. It helps that I work from home so I can mostly just leave it in my bedroom all day.