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'Our minds can be hijacked': tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia

• JepZ 9y ago
  $ grep facebook /etc/hosts 127.0.0.1 facebook.com
• keeptrying 9y ago
  If this is true Then it also presents a unique opportunity. I.e. There should be a very real and observable productivity boost from being able to ignore your phone and working on career building/family-relationship projects. If you can tear yourself from your phone for 3 Hours a day and work on career building projects, you should be able to get far ahead of others in your social circles who can't break the addiction. You no longer have to wake up early to beat the world, just wake up and not Touch the phone!
  • someonewhocar3s 9y ago
    Sazzy response. Way to ignore the problem.
  • crypt1d 9y ago
    Last year I went on a 2 week long entrepreneur-ish conference on a cruise ship. Due to satellite internet limitations, my phone/laptop usage was limited to 1-2hrs per day, usually in the evenings. Rest of the time I spent mingling, joining workshops, talks, or just having fun on the boat. Now mind you, I'm not a particularly social person. Being around people so much was very much out of my comfort zone, but it still felt great! I felt productive and relaxed at the same time, probably because I was able to focus on a single thing at the time, and wasn't being constantly distracted by notifications on my phone or emails and Slack conversations on my laptop. It was sort of a detox from the constant information bombardment of the digital age. I really need to do that again.
    • mgkimsal 9y ago
      and... you were on a cruise ship. had a similar experience on a cruise ship a few years back, and I don't think the feelings were entirely just 'info detox'. You're in a physically different space, probably exposed to the elements more than you normally are day to day (more sunshine, etc). You're around a whole other set of people, many of whom are more relaxed than the normally are (because many are on 'vacation' of some sort). Normal issues of food shopping, housework, etc are taken care of for you (well, those concerns are replaced with other concerns, at minimum). So... agreed that the 'info detox' aspect is not bad, but I suspect that just doing an info detox in your 'regular life' wouldn't give you the same boost you experienced.
  • peterhartree 9y ago
    > If this is true Then it also presents a unique opportunity. I.e. There should be a very real and observable productivity boost from being able to ignore B J Fogg, who gets brief mention in this article, teaches his students to cause behaviour by making the behaviour easy and then delivering timely triggers [1]. If you find yourself behaving in ways you don't reflectively endorse, your basic approach should be to flip the Fogg model upside down – avoid triggers and make it harder. In my own case, that's meant disabling notifications and blocking websites and apps. I also hacked a Chrome extension which applies the "avoid triggers and make it harder" idea to Gmail [2]. The extension has several thousand users, many of whom reclaim 30-60 minutes of focussed work each week which would otherwise be lost to compulsive inbox processing. [1] http://www.behaviormodel.org/ http://www.behaviormodel.org/ [2] https://inboxwhenready.org https://inboxwhenready.org
    • danohu 9y ago
      Easier than avoiding triggers -- and almost as effective -- is just to delay the response. Let yourself check your phone, but only 10 minutes after you feel the urge to do so. This is much easier than complete abstinence, but breaks down the habit-forming link between trigger and instant gratification. And just as you say, it's something I started doing after reading about training [1] and inverting the priciples [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31052.Don_t_Shoot_the_Dog_ https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31052.Don_t_Shoot_the_Do...
  • afarrell 9y ago
    This is the reason why https://freedom.to/ https://freedom.to/ exists
  • achompas 9y ago
    This is the thesis of Cal Newport’s “Deep Work.” It’s an interesting book, I recommend reading it.
  • dtornabene 9y ago
    love that the take away to an article like this is "well this presents me with an opportunity!! I can use others weakness to my benefit!"
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• pavelromashkin 9y ago
  I agree with him that social media could be very distracting, especially in the family settings, but, I get a ton of useful information and stay up-to-date with the latest research through Twitter, Reddit and HN. Cutting those out would mean putting an iron curtain on the latest insight and recent developments, and, essentially, quitting the front line.
  • evanlivingston 9y ago
    That's the problem I faced as well, and I ultimately decided to quit a line of work that required being constantly connected to the latest developments. I realized I wanted to pursue a line of work with a bit more permanence and, for lack of a better word, timelessness.
    • teddyh 9y ago
      “Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things.” — Donald Knuth (http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html)
      • Fnoord 9y ago
        (You might wanna remove the <> they screw up the link.) Email seems to be an analogy for communication or perceiving information, or at least a predecessor of more fast-paced forms of that. Could it be these new forms are so efficient and fast-paced, they overload our brain? Before the TV (which had limitations at start as well), there was telephone and radio. Both were limited. Telephone was expensive (monopoly yada yada), and radio informative (before the ~60s). What Knuth did is enforce snail mail. This creates an artificial barrier, increasing signal to noise ratio.
        • dredmorbius 9y ago
          "Bad roads act as filters... bad roads bring good people, good roads bring bad people" -- Joseph Wood Krutch
• jgibson 9y ago
  Does anyone see an analogy with highly processed, sugary foods? Highly addictive, thought to be miracles of convenience, but ultimately detrimental when consumed in excess, and now we are starting to realise that and demand better. I wonder if society will go through the same rejection phase with attention-seeking media consumption. Or maybe those who grow up with it will be better able to control themselves.
  • aaron-lebo 9y ago
    David Foster Wallace had the same belief about TV 20 years ago. He seemed more addicted to it than the average bear, more along the lines of how you see people tethered to smartphones today. He very much saw TV as candy - sweet, addictive, not sustaining, and unhealthy without moderation. He talked about it in multiple places, but Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself (an interview) discusses it a lot. https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/7144014-although-of-course-you-end-up-becoming-yourself-a-road-trip-with-david https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/7144014-although-of-co...
    • the_cat_kittles 9y ago
      also the central theme of infinite jest... right? that book was confusing.
      • Arubis 9y ago
        Very much so, at least one of them. “The Entertainment” was sufficiently addicting to effectively zombify characters, now fulfilled by the stereotype of people that float across busy streets without raising their eyes from their phones. The repeated parallels to drug use and escape therefrom were none-too-subtly interspersed with The Entertainment for a reason. Also, the literary broken narrative effected by story-length footnotes that had story-length endnotes imitates the short/shattered attention span experience of living that DFW was already able to feel and express—and Infinite Jest was published over twenty years ago. I escaped into Infinite Jest to survive a period of deep depression, denial, and directionlessness, so that shattered consciousness was pretty easy to relate to at the time.
• vwakesahi 9y ago
  This is a very critical discussion that designers, technologists, PMs, founders & maybe everyone needs. Few reasons I find it to be critical: 1. Digital's impact footprint is far more than 10 years back. 2. As we move towards using more complex Algorithms, its highly important what metrics will be deemed relevant while analyzing success. 3. Technology is becoming more people centric as we speak with Blockchain & other tech on the rise, however the way their applications are designed is still the same as 10/20 years old.
• imjustsaying 9y ago
  >smartphone dystopia that's been here for at least a couple years and even normies are talking about it. edit: thanks for the downvotes, appmakers
• jasode 9y ago
  There's the well-known anecdote that Steve Jobs didn't let his own kids use the iPad.[1] If there was a tech equivalent of "don't get high on your own supply", that was it. [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=steve+jobs+doesn%27t+let+kids+use+ipad https://www.google.com/search?q=steve+jobs+doesn%27t+let+kid...
  • konschubert 9y ago
    Well, was he suggesting that other parents should give iPads to their kids?
  • sneak 9y ago
    The same Steve Jobs who thought you could cure cancer by eating carrots, right? Just because he was smart and did some things right doesn’t mean he has some secret wisdom in unrelated fields, here.
    • jerf 9y ago
      I don't think "the Apple iPad" is an "unrelated field" for Steve Jobs. It seems like you're the one bringing in unrelated fields....
      • sneak 9y ago
        Child development?
    • hbk1966 9y ago
      You missed a chance to say eating apples.
  • skizm 9y ago
    I mean Steve Jobs tried to treat his completely curable pancreatic cancer, which was caught early, with alternative medicine and diet changes. The guy was a genius at some things, but not everything.
    • 9y ago
• everdev 9y ago
  Tldr; Good things can also be bad
  • chrisco255 9y ago
    "Too much of a good thing..."
• tfha 9y ago
  I have become afraid of my feeds. YouTube has started to shape my hobbies and interests, my political leanings, my dietary patterns. If Google is getting paid to steer me towards certain products, I probably have no idea and it's probably working very well. YouTube can make overnight superstars just through the recommendation system.
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
• 40acres 9y ago
  It seems like the root cause of all this is advertising. Social media companies need attention grabbing features to draw eyes on ads, makes you wonder if we'd still be facing this dilemma of social media was sites were a paid service.
  • baq 9y ago
    And advertising is needed mostly to sell stuff. If there wasn't any need to sell, there wouldn't be much advertising. I don't see non-free social media of current scale possible, unless you count the telephone network and the whole Internet as one. You already pay for that.
  • prostoalex 9y ago
    But people justify paid services by the amount of attention they dedicate to it. If you barely read the magazine, you'll likely not renew the subscription.
  • dredmorbius 9y ago
    Paid services diminish circulation / market / network size. For mass consumer products, advertisers seek higher readership. That's a conflict which dates to the Penny Press of the 1830s. A great little book on the conflict inherent in advertising-driven media, from 1909: https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft
• chrisco255 9y ago
  Does anyone think that Hacker News fits the bill of addictiveness? Or is HN different than Facebook/Reddit/Twitter for some reason?
  • jonahx 9y ago
    Absolutely it does. The quality of discussion is higher, but the feedback cycle of addiction is precisely the same.
    • cholantesh 9y ago
      As are the rationalizations.
  • dwaltrip 9y ago
    Two big differences: 1) HN has less content, so it is much easier to run out of things to look at. 2) Its content is less digestible on average, so you don't get nearly as deep into "mindless info consumption" mode. That being said, it definitely has those characteristics to an extent.
  • tritium 9y ago
    HN is different because, if you play your cards right, there will be no obligation to additional, subsequent behavior modification based on your actions, and minimal (if any) real life social consequences related to your participation. Facebook and Twitter are notorious for producing disastrous results among individuals careless with their identity. Reddit permits the free creation of pseudonyms, but the material is less engaging and currated with less rigor. I wouldn’t rate HN as “addictive” since there aren’t any real barriers to ignoring the site, and it lacks the kind of reach other sites have in “finding you.” This is to say that the usage patterns of the other sites you mention, saturate social circles so thoroughly, that it’s hard to not hear them mentioned in daily conversation. You may prefer HN, and it may fill certain gaps in regular daily activity, alleviating boredom to an extent, but if you find it infectous, that’s merely a reflection of the intellectual personas that get moderated into your attention based on merit. Is stimulating conversation addictive? Is reading material deleterious? At some point the buck has to stop with the individual’s own judgement.
• gt_ 9y ago
  A short (8 minutes) and poignant Marshall McLuhan lecture on this topic from 1977: http://www.marshallmcluhanspeaks.com/lecture/1977-man-and-media/ http://www.marshallmcluhanspeaks.com/lecture/1977-man-and-me...
  • dredmorbius 9y ago
    Excellent. There were a few exceptionally aware and pertinant commentators in the early-, and even pre-computer age. Alvin Toffler's Future Shock also has several quite striking observations.
• notaboutdave 9y ago
  Ever see that photo of Mark Zuckerberg surrounded by hundreds of people in VR headsets? The backstory of the original Matrix movie doesn't seem as far fetched anymore. http://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-virtual-reality-vr-headsets-photo-sea-mwc-spain-internet-2016-2 http://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-virtual-reali...
  • dreamfactored 9y ago
    creepy AF
  • chiefalchemist 9y ago
    Not only that but I believe the look on his face was one of joy or at least accomplishment. The media parroted that spin. That said, metaphorically we're already in The Matrix. Humans were just fuel for the system. When I see so many over-weight/obese "consumers" I can't help but think how happy the system is to have them; how well they're fulfilling their role. VR glasses will simply close the loop.
    • dualogy 9y ago
      > That said, metaphorically we're already in The Matrix. Humans were just fuel for the system. When I see so many over-weight/obese "consumers" Well, if we go with The Matrix, then these battery specimens so far have only been storing energy, not releasing it.. =)
      • chiefalchemist 9y ago
        Nope. Let me explain :) Consuming (i.e., food, clothing,fuel,etc.) is the "energy" that drives The Matrix. Humans are mere consumers. That's how they're refered to. That's how we refer to ourselves. The fact that we're choosing ro over-consume to the point of killing ourselves and killing to planet is about as dystopian as it gets. Sadly VR goggles might be our only hope.
      • chiefalchemist 9y ago
        Not to get too off topic but I want to add this. What was one of the first things POTUS GWB told the USA public after 9.11? "Keeping shopping." And no one even notice. So perhaps there's some 1984 going on as well?
• vonnik 9y ago
  This excellent article fails to mention artificial intelligence. Facebook has recruited one of the world’s top AI teams, led by Yann LeCun. Their work and Google's are the equivalent of tobacco companies engineering cigarettes to ensure that nicotine hits a smoker's brain more quickly. Facebook and other social networks are the cigarette companies of the mind. Cigarettes blackened our lungs with tar, and social media blacken our brains with distraction, alienation, envy, and loneliness. Social media networks will become ever more addictive, and by using AI to increase the click-through rate on the ads, they will squeeze ever more money out of their addicts. AI will be essential to the "capture and sale of attention," as Tim Wu puts it, walking users from curiosity to the cash register more and more efficiently.[0] Lewis is right to focus on addiction. Especially because behavioral addictions are easier to ignore than addictions to substances slung on street corners. But they amount to the same thing: you want something, but you don't want to want it, and being unable to resist it, you sabotage your own life. Addictions turn our brains against us. In a prescient 2010 essay, PG warned of the acceleration of online addictions, and the lag between the introduction of an addictive product and society's response to it.[1] Capitalism is an accelerant for addictive behavior, and we are only just realizing how unhappy people become as a result of the marketplace’s newest and most insidious products. What's worse, the necessary functions performed by our phones and the Internet are fatefully tangled with the apps that addict us. They put the heroin next to the tap water. For anyone interested in a fictional account of American society as a tapestry of addictions, Infinite Jest will change the way you think. It's all about that buzz.[2] Full disclosure: I prompted Paul Lewis to write this piece. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Attention-Merchants-Scramble-Inside-Heads/dp/0385352018 https://www.amazon.com/Attention-Merchants-Scramble-Inside-H... [1]http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html [2] https://www.amazon.com/Infinite-Jest-David-Foster-Wallace-ebook/dp/B00FOR2BF6/ref=sr_1_1 https://www.amazon.com/Infinite-Jest-David-Foster-Wallace-eb...
  • muninn_ 9y ago
    This was great besides the pot-shot at “capitalism”.
  • ericgj 9y ago
    Thanks for your part in getting this story published! If you have not seen it, the BBC series "The Century of the Self" details the pre-history of these tendencies in the creation of the public relations industry by Freud's nephew Edward Bernays [0]. It is truly fascinating and horrific -- all 4 or 5 hours of it! Social media/big data has also made the consumer a (not fully willing or conscious) _producer_ of mass addiction, through the exploitation of their social graph data. There is a fictive "work contract": give me your data and we'll give you your buzz. This relationship is based on unwaged work. What if this work, the value of it to BigTech, were recognized? It leaves open the possibility of mass refusal. And in some sense how people use social media now is already composed of many types of refusal, some more and some less effective. To state one obvious way -- Facebook is used around the world as a tool for political organizing. The fact that this makes it an even more valuable commodity for repressive governments, starting with the US government, does not stop us from using it and finding it effective, does not stop us from getting together "in real life". More needs to be said about the social basis of addiction. It's not only ad scientists pushing well-studied biological buttons. It's the trauma of living a society that locks up an insane number of people, puts its children on psychotropic drugs, poisons them with toxic environments and toxic fast food, separates poor children from their mothers, criminalizes their survival, abandons entire communities after natural disasters, bulldozes neighborhoods to make way for hi-rise condos no one can afford, etc. Or the even bigger trauma of living in a world that has the guns & money of this toxic society pointed at them, literally or potentially, every day, forcing migrations and threatening survival of entire populations. All of these things come into play when we look at why virtual realities are more attractive than real ones, and lead us to have some sympathy for those who use them for networking with others and temporary escape. If you have not seen it, I recommend reading some of Gabor Mate's work on addiction, for instance "In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts".[1] [0] https://youtu.be/DnPmg0R1M04 https://youtu.be/DnPmg0R1M04 [1] Interview with him: https://www.democracynow.org/2010/2/3/addiction https://www.democracynow.org/2010/2/3/addiction
• bit_logic 9y ago
  Something that helps a lot is to be ruthless with notifications on a smartphone. I basically have it set to only bother me for calls, SMS, and chat apps. Everything else is turned off. And whenever I get a new phone, it surprising how bad the defaults are. Basically every apps default is to spam notifications.
  • callmeed 9y ago
    This. Aside from quitting FB, this has been the biggest win for me. I only have notifications on for sms/iMessage. Email is pull only. And, if you can get away with it, don’t install work “productivity” apps like Slack and Asana on your personal phone. Laptops seem just as bad now so I usually don not disturb my MBP as soon as I start my day.
  • lsmarigo 9y ago
    Twitter on ios mobile has given me such a headache with those highlights notifications. No way to disable them, infuriating.
    • limeblack 9y ago
      I'm assuming you mean without disabling twitter notifications entirely. I have the entire twitter app's notifications disabled just fine on iOS 10.
    • matwood 9y ago
      You can turn highlight notifications off in the Twitter iOS app settings.
      • pimlottc 9y ago
        I tried that before. Twitter still thought it was vitally important to notify me that Beyonce was pregnant. That was the last straw that made me delete it.
  • KGIII 9y ago
    I consider it a luxury to not need to carry a phone. I only know where my phone currently is because I made the effort to find it. I have a couple of dollars and can afford lots of luxuries. Yet, it's the things I don't do that seem the most luxurious. I spent years tethered to my phone. I was on call, at all hours of the day and in pretty much any location. To not be beholden to a cell phone is true luxury.
• dehef 9y ago
  I made exactly the same move. I can recommend K9 as the best self-control app. I use it with recommended settings + any social media. I thinking about adding linkedin to the list. Maybe one day Hacker news also :) I now use a basic phone after years using a iphone. You know why? I had some jobs interviews 2 years ago, and I had many problem to answer basic questions. I felt a so powerfull programmer.. But my memory was not as strong that I though. I remember how it was before, when I was in my university. I used to know how to learn new things. And at 34 I cant think its just age. I think that google already hi jack a part of my learning process... I can't work without google or searching SO time to time but I will for sure stop using social media, and I will try more and more to learn like I used to. Like watching video and taking note on a real paper. But for next generations that is a real problem I think
  • rpeden 9y ago
    I recommend reading The Shallows, by Nicholas Carr. I found it to be a pretty well researched look into the way heavy internet use can change our brains. Although the book was good on its own, I also found its references section helpful as a launching point to discover other interesting books and academic papers on related topics.
  • johndevor 9y ago
    I recently went basic phone too and it's amazing. Much more present and clear and happy.
• ndr 9y ago
  This reminded me of https://www.timewellspent.io https://www.timewellspent.io
  • markdog12 9y ago
    It's mentioned in the article.
• j05huaNathaniel 9y ago
  lol Okay, Freud. Tell us something every marketing student in community college doesn't already know. People can be persuaded. People have addictions. Cool story, bro.
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
• rubinelli 9y ago
  Can we hijack this loop to create or reinforce good habits instead of selling ad space? Can we use the skinner box to dole out intangible rewards for activities with real, long-term benefits like exercising and eating better? This looks like an obvious opportunity to me, so what work is being done in this area?
  • 0xcde4c3db 9y ago
    I think that was pretty close to the basic premise behind a lot of public broadcasting 30+ years ago (the bits I've seen lately strike me as more commercialized, but I'm not sure whether that's a change in the shows or in my perspective). There's a lot of contention underneath that topic, but the fundamentals of shows like Sesame Street or Mister Rogers' Neighborhood are much closer to what you describe than to modern television and gaming material.
  • prostoalex 9y ago
    A bunch of companies are using this primarily for learning via spaced repetition. I use Memrise and Drops for foreign languages. The problem is training your brain to capture and monopolize that brief moment of boredom and inactivity.
  • floatrock 9y ago
    For all its downsides and astroturfing, reddit actually does some pretty good things in that regard. Some of the best posts on there are when people go out of their way to be, you know, human towards other humans. There are subreddits out there dedicated towards exercising and eating better... the orange you-got-a-new-response seratonin-bump envelop icon appears when people give social acknowledgements towards someone's exercise progress or meal prep. It most definitely gets co-opted... karma whoring, reposting, marketing campaigns posing as that goodwill to the kid in the children's hospital with cancer amateur picture... but that's exactly what this article is about: the forces of maximizing shareholder value find what works and wiggle their way in. The resistant subreddits appear to be the ones that look at it as a human problem, not something needing a technical fix. That is, they create community rules around what is acceptable content and what isn't welcome, they encourage the content that furthers the subreddit's mission, they moderate away content that seems to break the rules, etc. Some communities are even organized around recognizing these things (eg r/hailcorporate) Again, all of that can be (and does get!) co-opted for evil, but there are methods that can make groups in social media more resistant. Problem is at the end of the day, those things don't pay the bills. Ultimately you need to find a way to align profits with good habits. Until we find that, go hit the donate link on the Guardian article. And I think Wikipedia was doing a fundraising campaign recently too. If you're not paying for it, you're the product.
• juhanima 9y ago
  Responsive and sensitive to human sentiments AI seems to be the modern Frankenstein monster. Right now it's about attention grabbing and using machine learning to connect content to consumers in the most addictive way in order to show advertisements on the side. How long will it take until the content itself is artificially generated on demand to fit the mental state of each and every recipient individually? What are the unintended consequences of the ever advancing technology of automatic manipulation? I think the most frightening part of this excellent article was, "how do we know it has not already happened?"
• achou 9y ago
  Is it not obvious that a search algorithm for maximizing a revenue function, devoid of ethics, eventually becomes a search algorithm for identifying and exploiting human weaknesses? AI/machine learning is just a way to optimize this function further.
• seanlinmt 9y ago
  One thing UN's declaration of Human Rights doesn't seem to cover is the right to free will. http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/ http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/ Perhaps it should?
  • craftyguy 9y ago
    Gosh, if only the existing ones were even remotely enforceable.. There's a lot of good stuff there, but the phrase "talking to a wall" comes to mind when I read it.
  • krapp 9y ago
    There's evidence that the self-awareness and intent commonly believed to be "free will" could be be a post-hoc illusion generated by the brain after decision making occurs[0]. How can something which may not even exist, or which doesn't even have an objective definition, be a right? [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will
• metahost 9y ago
  Reading too much of Dan Brown, are we ?
• ezal 9y ago
  Internet is full of Information, good and bad. So is social media. But we should take purpose driven approach whenever we are online. Instead of getting ourselves trapped into psychologically designed products, we should remain focus on our purpose.
  • dredmorbius 9y ago
    Self-discipline scales poorly, particularly against a highly capitalised and motivated enemy.
• romo9 9y ago
  The counters (like/retweet/views/upvotes) that produce the feedback loop have to be looked at. There is no reason for realtime feedback. Delay the feedback and lot of behaviour will return to "normal".
• bmurphy1976 9y ago
  I recently installed Android Oreo on my 6P sans browser. No Google search app, no browser, no Facebook, no Twitter. I still have Slack, email, calendar and SMS for work, maps, Lyft, spothero, Spotify, and podcasts for travel. So far the phone is working great, only had to install aosp browser component to keep apps like Gmail functional. Elevator rides are very different. I'm curious to see how this will work out in the long run. I figure if it's worth opening up a browser, it's also worth opening up laptop.
• vinceguidry 9y ago
  These guys clearly weren't around for the introduction of television. If ever there was a technology tailor-made to hijack our minds with, it was TV. It wasn't the end of the world.
  • pls2halp 9y ago
    There’s a very solid argument for TV as stunting people’s development. There’s lack of reading, albeit not necessarily due to television (https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/01/the-decline-of-the-american-book-lover/283222/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/01/the-dec...) There’s a direct link between television and obesity (http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/75/5/807 http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/75/5/807) And more general health dangers (http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/newsplus/prolonged-television-viewing-linked-to-increased-health-risks/ http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/newsplus/prolonged-tel...) Etcetera
    • hydrox24 9y ago
      One substantial benefit of Television was that everyone was simultaneously watching the same thing. This increased political homogeneity by providing a shared belief system, or at least some more common ground. Such homogeneity is correlated strongly with stability and prosperity on a nation-state level. This was particularly true from 1950 until 1970 or so, before cable television exploded (it remained true for longer in smaller nations without wide cable TV adoption). I think it matches up with a comparatively bi-partisan period in (mainstream) politics around the western world. Of course, there are disadvantages too, but homogeneity is looking increasingly valuable as legislatures around the Western world succumb to polarisation.
      • pls2halp 9y ago
        But you can also argue that that polarisation is just a step away from homogeneity.
        • hydrox24 9y ago
• bahmboo 9y ago
  You children are afraid of monsters. All the problems you describe are the ones of your own choice.
• dreeves 9y ago
  This seems like a good excuse to plug Beeminder but I'll try to be at least slightly less self-promotional and point to our collection of all our competitors who offer commitment device apps of various kinds: http://blog.beeminder.com/competitors http://blog.beeminder.com/competitors We call this the granddaddy of first-world problems.
  • jmcgough 9y ago
    looks like aherk on your list might be dead?
    • dreeves 9y ago
      Correct. We have them listed in the graveyard section. (Thanks for pointing out that it looked like a dead link. I shall edit the post more carefully to make that clearer!)
  • kyledrake 9y ago
    > We call this the granddaddy of first-world problems. I think you're right, Dan. It seems like a pretty existential problem at this point. What is the alternative here? Is there such a thing as an ethical "news feed", and how would I make one ethical? (PS: HN: Beeminder is awesome and you should try it).
    • apatters 9y ago
      Why not just: - A subscription requires explicit opt-in (not "oh, yeah, I met that dude once in college," or, "oh, yeah, I eat Cheerios and 'Like' them") - A subscription is easy to cancel - The filtering/sorting algorithm is "show the newest items first" That seems like an ethical news feed to me, and it's basically what you get with any RSS reader, right?
      • jessaustin 9y ago
        So shocking that these services make no effort to incorporate that standard....
• dorfsmay 9y ago
  I, ironically, ready this article from a post on twitter, and proceeded, after having read it, proceeded to retweet and post on FB!
• amigoingtodie 9y ago
  Duh.
• hodgesrm 9y ago
  I don't buy the idea that smartphones are extinguishing the life of the mind. Sure, smartphones provide access to almost unlimited trash. But they also provide access to Wikipedia, perhaps the most successful encyclopedia ever developed by humans. They can show you newspapers from across the planet. They let you read Latin histories of the Norman conquest of Southern Italy in the middle ages. [0] C'mon folks, this is stuff you might otherwise seek for years in bookstores or never even hear of. Thanks to the Internet and powerful phones you can pop up the link below and read it in bed. The information is within reach of anyone with a decent cell phone. The effects of the Internet on human society have been profound but the ultimate outcome is not foreordained. Humans have survived some pretty nasty stuff over the millennia and we'll no doubt get through this as well. It's time to stop the hand-wringing and focus on making the Internet help humans in the way many of its original founders conceived. [1] [0] Gaufredus Malaterra, http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/malaterra.html http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/malaterra.html [1] https://webfoundation.org/2014/12/recognise-the-internet-as-a-human-right-says-sir-tim-berners-lee-as-he-launches-annual-web-index/ https://webfoundation.org/2014/12/recognise-the-internet-as-...
  • eradicatethots 9y ago
    The human species has survived, but not all of us are among the lucky.
  • apatters 9y ago
    Well, it's not the smartphone that's the problem. The smartphone is just the delivery system. It's remarkable how well some of Richard Stallman's quotes have aged. "With software, either the users control the program, or the program controls the users..." The idea of a program controlling its users must have seemed very esoteric when that quote was first penned in 1985, at a time when home PCs (let alone ones with GUIs) were exotic: the first Mac had launched only a year ago. By the time I first heard of Stallman's ideas in the '90s, I was surrounded by PCs with GUIs, but still didn't get it. Now here we are, 30 years later. The first thing most of us do when we wake up is roll over, grab our phone, and look at some software. The existential costs of the non-free software are so high that we read new stories about them in the media every week, and the tech revolution's architects are banning the products they built from their own homes. For the less frequently cited ending to Stallman's quote is this: "...If the program controls the users, and the developer controls the program, then the program is an instrument of unjust power."
• Animats 9y ago
  They're an improvement over television. Well, maybe. See this article in the Atlantic.[1] More hard info, less speculation. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/has-the-smartphone-destroyed-a-generation/534198/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/has-the...
• aszantu 9y ago
  our minds can be hijacked by all kinds of things... for some it's tv, for others it's alcohol. Louis CK and someone else, Simon Sinek talked about smartphones and hiss few words instantly got me unhooked when I'm in the presence of other people. I believe that can be done for everyone.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• kwhitefoot 9y ago
  > Rosenstein, Pearlman and most of the tech insiders questioning today’s attention economy are in their 30s, members of the last generation that can remember a world in which telephones were plugged into walls. Umm. Yoohoo! We're still here, you remember us, those who created the hardware and the computing concepts you all use now? Well maybe not me personally but I was there using and developing computing hardware and software starting in 1970. I remember when telephones were plugged in to wall too! And we've been questioning the direction that it's all going in since before Rosenstein, etc., were in kindergarten.
  • Freak_NL 9y ago
    The author probably means that people in their 30s will be the last generation to have witnessed telephones plugged into walls — i.e., the generations after them, people in their 20s and younger, won't have. That anyone in their 40s, 50s, 60s, etc. has witnessed and used telephones plugged into walls is implied.
    • kwhitefoot 9y ago
      I know, but I was taking issue with the implication that his generation were the only ones to notice the problem.
• zby 9y ago
  I have a rule to keep all my personal life off the internet and use it only for intellectual and public life. It is impossible to follow it strictly - but I manage to do it most of the time. I think it alleviates much of the problems described in the article. In particular I don't often feel like I have lost time following what the computer offers (be it facebook stream, Hacker News, wikipedia links or whatever). And maybe I am mistaken but also 'likes' and '++s', or upvotes on anything also do have some more meaning in this arrangement. I also don't use Facebook on my phone - only on a desktop. I still don't use the smartphone much - only on pull bases.
• quickthrower2 9y ago
  Yep just deactivated my FB account and they tried to guilt trip me with "people who will miss me" (mainly kids) and whatnot. Also it asks why you are deactivating and shows a response for each reason.
  • sonthonax 9y ago
    As someone who had quite a few websites which I had foolishly signed up with Facebook for, I began the pattern of reactivating and then deactivating Facebook in order to log in. I must say that emotional blackmail lost whatever power it had rather quickly.
• jonloldrup 9y ago
  The article makes a few ill considered assumptions: That USA is a democracy (and that it thus makes sense to start influencing the election process). It isn't. Not in the sense that the opinions of the people influence the policies that are caried out. http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/princeton-experts-say-us-no-longer-democracy http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/princeton-experts-say-... The other assumption is that Russia somehow interfered with the American election. There's no solid evidence such a thing has happened. https://consortiumnews.com/2017/09/29/russia-gates-shaky-foundation/ https://consortiumnews.com/2017/09/29/russia-gates-shaky-fou... Third, he sort of assumes that our minds haven't already been "hijacked", by other means than addictive social media and apps. We'll, how can we explain, that those that are really good at affecting our countrys political decisions (the Saudi and the Israeli lobby) gets no scolding for this, while our chosen nemesis (Russia) gets lot's of scolding for something there's no evidence they've done? Couldn't this oddity be explained by old school "brain washing": propaganda. ?. http://russia-insider.com/en/politics/americas-jews-are-driving-americas-wars/ri20965 http://russia-insider.com/en/politics/americas-jews-are-driv...
  • nkjoep 9y ago
    The article is very long and doesn't say anything interesting, IMHO.
  • Synaesthesia 9y ago
    It's an ongoing process and it's been happening for decades (propoganda, brain-washing). The population is always learning and always presents with threats to be countered. The internet was one such potential threat. It was potentially a democratic, free and open source of information. Now it's controlled by a few companies.
• mindgam3 9y ago
  This is an astoundingly naive article on an extremely important topic. The core fallacy is that we’re all “good people” with “the best of intentions” and that we’re all shocked, simply shocked, at the “unintended, negative consequences” of the systems we deliberately designed to be as addictive as possible. i.e.: - “It is very common,” Rosenstein says, “for humans to develop things with the best of intentions and for them to have unintended, negative consequences.” - McNamee: “The people who run Facebook and Google are good people, whose well-intentioned strategies have led to horrific unintended consequences” - “Harris believes that tech companies never deliberately set out to make their products addictive. The last quote is especially ludicrous. With all due respect to Tristan Harris, if he isn’t being misquoted then he has absolutely no idea what he is talking about. I was an engineer/PM/exec at Bebo in the early days, before the $850M AOL exit and the complete catastrophe that followed. We absolutely 100% “deliberately set out to make our products addictive”. Bebo only existed as a serious venture-backed company at all due to extremely aggressive viral flows which were, yes, deliberately designed to get the unsuspecting user to email invite links to every single person in their address book. All of the top social startups were doing the same thing. The ends (better UX + higher valuation thanks to network effects) justified the means (deliberate hijacking of our users’ minds at scale). But don’t take my word for it. The article’s author proves my point by immediately contradicting himself. Here’s the full quote in context: Harris believes that tech companies never deliberately set out to make their products addictive. They were responding to the incentives of an advertising economy, experimenting with techniques that might capture people’s attention, even stumbling across highly effective design by accident. A friend at Facebook told Harris that designers initially decided the notification icon, which alerts people to new activity such as “friend requests” or “likes”, should be blue. It fit Facebook’s style and, the thinking went, would appear “subtle and innocuous”. “But no one used it,” Harris says. “Then they switched it to red and of course everyone used it.” Okay. So to recap: they decided to use a red button because nobody used the blue one. It was not an unintentional accident. It was based on careful reflection after testing different versions. This is what I call “deliberate”. Why does this matter? Because if we aren’t honest with ourselves about the problem, we’re not going to fix it. How many times are people going to fall for the “oops, I did it again?” excuse from the titans of social tech? Does anyone else remember Facebook platform? The original F8 conference outlined a vision of an open-access social technology platform that would make the world a better place. Instead, we got FarmVille. The problem isn’t the technology. The problem is that the vision for this technology was always about money and power. To pretend otherwise is disingenuous and ultimately counterproductive if the goal is to fix the system. I don’t want to come across as overly negative to the author or to the people cited in it. We need more critical discussion of these issues, not less. But fundamentally this problem is due to a lack of integrity in people, not technology. And we’ll never fix the lack of integrity at the heart of the tech world if we keep pretending that none of us knew what we were doing.
• c646deeb640da30 9y ago
  I'm not sure what I feel more, amusement or hopelessness, when I read yet another article on this topic, get to the bottom and see those icons lined up across the screen: facebook, twitter, google, pinterest, etc, etc, etc
• peterhartree 9y ago
  If you enjoyed the article and want a more detailed discussion, James Williams gave a talk on this topic at the RSA in May [1], and did an interview with David Runciman in July [2]. [1] https://soundcloud.com/the_rsa/are-digital-technologies-making-politics-impossible https://soundcloud.com/the_rsa/are-digital-technologies-maki... [2] https://www.talkingpoliticspodcast.com/blog/2017/53-the-nine-dots-winner https://www.talkingpoliticspodcast.com/blog/2017/53-the-nine...
• ronenlh 9y ago
  I'm an observant jew. I can't express how healthy it is for me not having any screens around for 24 hours once every week.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• archiepeach 9y ago
  As noted multiple times in the article, the unethical design we’re seeing in popular apps and services today is largely a result of the widespread use of advertising as a revenue model. This is an appropriate time to show appreciation and support for the companies who are trying to demonstrate successful revenue models which are NOT based on advertising: Medium - the replacement of “Recommends” with “Claps” was to allow Medium to better understand how much authors should be paid (with the money coming from the paid “Medium Member” plan). [1] Patreon - probably the most popular service for paying independent content creators today. If you are a regular consumer of a content channel who’s creator is on Patreon and you haven’t already set up micro payments, then please part with a few pennies and help show the industry that an advertising revenue model isn’t the only option. Wikipedia - Ad-free since its inception, and the web’s most popular encyclopaedia which is completely free to use for all. If you feel like you have the resources to part with a few dollars per month to support Wikipedia, and haven’t already done so, then please do. [2] Please let me know if there are any others I’ve missed out. [1] https://blog.medium.com/expanding-the-medium-partner-program-3be09dd146e4 https://blog.medium.com/expanding-the-medium-partner-program... [2] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Ways_to_Give https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Ways_to_Give
  • ironic_ali 9y ago
    After 18 years as a (mainly contract) BA with some PM work on govt and big Corp business and/or software solution contracts, I'd had enough and did a diploma in enology and viticulture (wine making and growing). In one of my first assignments I referenced Wikipedia on malolactic fermentation and sent it in for marking. The lecturer gave me a b+ and went on to berate me for using Wikipedia as a source that was not to be trusted. I was 42 (older than than the lecturer) at the time and had innumerable experiences of people questioning facts during my previous life because they didn't fit their narrative, and politely asked him to point me to where in the Wikipedia entry the political manipulation strayed from the science and process... He couldn't and after a phone call to confirm, my mark was bumped up. Utter academic bs and cognitive bias clouded all judgement on his part. I was pretty pissed off he'd dismiss something before reading it, and the rest of the diploma was spent playing to what they would accept as sources. Two years later my Pinot noir got 95/100, ironically marked (in part) by our other (more experienced and realistic) lecturer in a blind tasting. Fuck academia and their fucking higher than thou bullshit based on nothing other than their own ego. And don't get me started on that other clusterfuck Turnitin. /rant
• peterhartree 9y ago
  In 2015, the European Commission published a report which included the following [1]: > We believe that societies must protect, cherish and nurture humans’ attentional capabilities. This does not mean giving up searching for improvements: that shall always be useful. Rather, we assert that attentional capabilities are a finite, precious and rare asset. In the digital economy, attention is approached as a commodity to be exchanged on the market place, or to be channelled in work processes. But this instrumental approach to attention neglects the social and political dimensions of it, i.e., the fact that the ability and the right to focus our own attention is a critical and necessary condition for autonomy, responsibility, reflexivity, plurality, engaged presence, and a sense of meaning. To the same extent that organs should not be exchanged on the market place, our attentional capabilities deserve protective treatment. Respect for attention should be linked to fundamental rights such as privacy and bodily integrity, as attentional capability is an inherent element of the relational self for the role it plays in the development of language, empathy, and collaboration. We believe that, in addition to offering informed choices, the default settings and other designed aspects of our technologies should respect and protect attentional capabilities. (The report was co-authored by Luciano Floridi, who is supervising James Williams' PhD at Oxford.) [1] https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/sites/digital-agenda/files/Manifesto.pdf https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/sites/digital-age...
• stevenleeg 9y ago
  Years ago I wrote a blog post[1] talking about this at a higher level, essentially vetting my frustration about people being addicted to their phones all day rather than living their real lives. Here we are, 4 years later, and while I think I saw a surface level societal change at that point, I completely missed the bigger picture of society being actively manipulated by companies, governments, etc. through tech for their own gain. Crazy times we live in. [1] https://www.stevegattuso.me/2013/11/30/a-society-of-phone-zombies.html https://www.stevegattuso.me/2013/11/30/a-society-of-phone-zo...
• kingkawn 9y ago
  All this implies that the rediscovery of life of mind will be the next big cultural shift
• ihaveahadron 9y ago
  "continuous partial attention" "Joe in 1401 was worried that the invention of books would cause "semi-continuous-patial-attention" because it would disrupt the oral stories being conversated about" This article explains the historical trope of people being unable to cope with technological progress perfectly.
• mrhappyunhappy 9y ago
  This article makes me question my purpose as a designer. I spend my days looking at the screen and figuring out ways to get people to spend more of their money on junk they don't need. The sad part is that I work with incredibly good people who think they are somehow contributing to our society by helping companies grow their revenue. I guess on one hand companies are selling more and perhaps hiring more people which in turn supports their family but the sinister half of my mind thinks "who am I kidding, only a handful of people are profiting at the cost of many". I don't know where I'm going with this thought as HN has hijacked my attention yet again on this late Sunday night. Have mercy techno-gods.
  • intended 9y ago
    I think your position is important - because I think this battle may be lost. Regulation is the only solution, but that’s just tossing the ball to another team and hoping for a magic win. Even should regulation manage to handle this - it’s only the first step between this and what worse comes next. We’re moving directly to the worst options of mine control and people are only useful for the neurological reactions you can reliably induce in them.
    • jessaustin 9y ago
      Improvement of society starts with improvement of self. If we each refuse to cooperate, by curtailing our "use" of various horrible online services, we can be the inspiration for our families and communities to do the same. I like to think that, but I have not-so-distant family who, after learning I would not join FaceBook just to help them with a problem they claimed was quite important to them but would be very responsive over plain old-fashioned email, haven't sent a single email.
      • intended 9y ago
        Send an email yourself I guess. Perhaps there’s a set of minimally laborious actions on our part, that re-trigger the growth of old habits and mental connections. But now that I write that I’m worried someone is figuring out a model/way to do the opposite.
• throw2016 9y ago
  This seems like a classic cop out. It's like companies ruining the environment and the media and others trying to make people feel guilty about their consumption. It's gives a false sense of power, sets the responsibility in the wrong place, muddies the water and basically gives those actually doing the destruction a free pass. The Internet is simply a source of information, its Google, Facebook and others who have completely lost any restraints in harvesting personal information, building surveillance infrastructure and creepily following people around without any sense of ethical constraints. And this forum itself is full of people desperate to work for such companies. You would not necessarily expect any ethical dimension from a self absorbed profit driven corporate but at least the individuals working in it. It seems there is no moral compass and anything goes. The problem is not technology but the people within it and a troubling 'disconnection' with relation to the concept of 'other people' and society at large.
• splittingTimes 9y ago
  There is an interesting article where a Google design ethicist explains how technology hijacks your mind [1]. TL;DR: Hijack 1: If You Control the Menu, You Control the Choices. Ask yourself: What’s not on the menu?, Why am I being given these options and not others? Do I know the menu provider’s goals? Is this menu empowering for my original need, or are the choices actually a distraction? Hijack 2: Make apps behave like Slot Machines - give a variable reward. If you want to maximize addictiveness, link a user’s action (like pulling a lever) with a variable reward. You pull a lever and immediately receive either an enticing reward (a match, a prize!) or nothing. Addictiveness is maximized when the rate of reward is most variable. Hijack 3: Fear of Missing Something Important (FOMSI). If I convince you that I’m a channel for important information, messages, friendships, or potential sexual opportunities — it will be hard for you to turn me off, unsubscribe, or remove your account — because there is a 1% chance you could be missing something important. Hijack 4: Social Approval. When you get tagged by my friend, you think s/he made a conscious choice to tag you, when actually s/he just responds to Facebook’s suggestion, not making an independent choice. Thus Facebook controls the multiplier for how often millions of people experience their social approval on the line. Hijack 5: Social Reciprocity (Tit-for-tat). You follow me — it’s rude not to follow you back. When you receive an invitation from someone to connect, you imagine that person making a conscious choice to invite you, when in reality, they likely unconsciously responded to LinkedIn’s list of suggested c ontacts. Hijack 6: Bottomless bowls, Infinite Feeds, and Autoplay Hijack 7: Instant Interruption vs. “Respectful” Delivery. Messages that interrupt people immediately are more persuasive at getting people to respond than messages delivered asynchronously. Hijack 8: Bundling Your Reasons with Their Reasons. When you you want to look up a Facebook event happening tonight (your reason) the Facebook app doesn’t allow you to access it without first landing on the news feed (their reasons), so Facebook converts every reason you have for using it, into their reason which is to maximize the time you spend consuming things. In an ideal world, apps would always give you a direct way to get what you want separately from what they want. Hijack 9: Inconvenient Choices. Businesses naturally want to make the choices they want you to make easier, and the choices they don’t want you to make harder. NYTimes.com claims to give you “a free choice” to cancel your digital subscription. But instead of just doing it when you hit “Cancel Subscription,” they force you to call a phone number that’s only open at certain times. Hijack 10: Forecasting Errors, “Foot in the Door” strategies. People don’t intuitively forecast the true time cost of a click when it’s presented to them. Sales people use “foot in the door” techniques by asking for a small innocuous request to begin with (“just one click”), and escalating from there (“why don’t you stay awhile?”). Virtually all engagement websites use this trick. === [1] http://www.tristanharris.com/2016/05/how-technology-hijacks-peoples-minds%E2%80%8A-%E2%80%8Afrom-a-magician-and-googles-design-ethicist/ http://www.tristanharris.com/2016/05/how-technology-hijacks-...
• ForHackernews 9y ago
  Curious why HN didn't detect this as a duplicate of my submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15423287 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15423287
• keenmaster 9y ago
  I blocked Facebook as an adult website on my phone. It’s kind of a hack, there’s no other way to restrict FB use in iOS aside from deleting the app. Good riddance though. Now I can’t plop down on the couch, open FB, and get lost in that chaotic algo haze of 45 second cooking videos, paywalled articles, and trite, discordant political screams.
• creatrixcordis 9y ago
  the smartphone is just a tool, how you use it is up to you! nobody is making you use it, but companies spend millions to figure out better ways to psychologically mindfuck you since you have been conceived. to get you to buy things or behave a certain away which leads to them capitalizing on your behavior. this is not new, one movie which describes this is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self the smartphone is simply the delivery mechanism because it is with you at all times, just like social pressure and environment, they all carry messages, but it is up to you to choose to respond and how to respond, one could argue that if you are conditioned like this since birth because of media, by the time you are an "adult" <-- whatever the fuck that means... and high on the legal stimulants and running on the hamster wheel which turns into profit, i doubt you will even notice. but the irony of all this is that it is all optional if you understand it so...
• ahoskins 9y ago
  Built a little chrome extension to block distracting sections of Twitter and Facebook: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/quieter-twitter-facebook/lmhjdnbnfcielbcincajlppehcbglpof?authuser=2 https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/quieter-twitter-fa...
• thisrod 9y ago
  I remember a quote from some Unix book around 1990: "IRC is a simple tool that allows two users to type ASCII messages to each other's terminals. Oh, did we mention that it's more addictive than crack cocaine?"
• keypress 9y ago
  I'm scared of owning a smartphone, precisely as my self -control is poor. Currently I have a dumb phone and check that a couple of times a day. I'm a member of a Facebook forum - the content of which is interesting. That is the only use I have for Facebook. The notifications are handy as they indicate new and active threads. I follow only a small number of people on Twitter. I'd love to bulk that number up if I could manage it, but scrolling through my current feed is already quite a time waster. The web still sucks me in without the reward trinkets mentioned in the article, and it has done for hours a day since I discovered it. I will say I am an addict. It prevents and impedes me from doing things that I really should be doing. It's very useful but mostly a distraction, but I always assume that's my problem.
• feelin_googley 9y ago
  "As noted multiple times in the article, the unethical design we're seeing in popular apps and services today is largely a result of the widespread use of advertising as a revenue model." The simple question that I never see addressed in any of these discussions of the ad revenue model is whether the websites or the software could earn revenue without using this model. If not, then what does that say about the inherent value of the websites or software? No one would pay for it? (Who believes that?) It appears to me that in recent years the value has been in acquiring an "audience" which can be bought or sold as a "product" (or perhaps access to the audience as a "service"). This is the ad revenue model. As such, in an increasing number of cases, the product of web or software development, i.e. software itself, is not sold (but is made available for "free" or a nominal cost). Instead, audiences are sold. The result is an overabundance of websites and software that (from a commercial perspective) serve no other purpose than to try to construct audiences. Including databases of personal information. Other goals of website or software development are consequently neglected. The thought I keep having is that developing websites and software solely to acquire audiences in some way presumes web and software development is "worthless" except for this limited purpose. Some VC once said "Software is eating the world" and it became a meme. What if the media business is eating the world of software? When software developers are focused only on ad sales or publicity, the software industry begins to resemble the media business. (Has software been subsumed by media?) Ad sales becomes the lifeline. And like the media, software developers will do or say anything to sell ads. Anything.
• TimesOldRoman 9y ago
  So many ways to share this on social media.
• vectorEQ 9y ago
  smartphones are modern version of zombie apocalypse if people keep using them in such unaware way. From start the aim has been to implement game theory learnt from gambling industry into the phones to make people hooked. All of these kind of techniques only work however, on an unaware subject. Solution is not to expect people to become good and ethical salesmen, but to educate unaware people of the dangers of such media. Like with television , internet technology, smartphones can have a very bad effect on people if handled without any care or further thought. If you are 'against' this kind of effects, the best solution, in my mind, is to educate your fellow man, and try to help them become aware if they seem not to notice these kind of things. change starts with yourself, not with expecting things of otheres. Not talking about conspiracy mind control things, just basic psychology of the human mind which is exploited by marketeers en designers to make a profit. As this practice is not illegal, and even encouraged for these people through education and results, it's unrealistic to expect them to change. If the effect on people changes however due to a raise in awareness of the general population, then they will need to seek other means of getting their products out there. More awareness of these tactics will lead to them becomming uneffective, and will force the market to switch to a more 'ethical' or human way of doing buisiness.