6 ms·

Does anyone see an analogy with highly processed, sugary foods? Highly addictive, thought to be miracles of convenience, but ultimately detrimental when consume

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.
- cma 9y ago
  Lots on the topic by Neil Postman too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death
  - seltzered_ 9y ago
    In one of his talks, he actually wished that newer information mediums came with a warning label. (This miight be the one - “informing ourselves to death”: https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&t=1487&v=fuRVxWSO8UA https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&t=1487&v=fuRVxW... )
- chrisco255 9y ago
  I was going to make this comment about TV. Social media has merely supplanted other forms of entertainment that Americans indulged on previously. I guess the main difference is that smart phones are with us 24/7.
  - jonahx 9y ago
    I'd just add that it's a non-trivial difference. Its interactive nature is another difference of kind not shared with books or television and likely to increase its addictiveness.
- pdkl95 9y ago
  In Pat Cadigan's anthology of short works "Patterns", she included this introduction to her short story[1] with the same name: > Television will achieve its apotheosis when it is interactive. > Of course, some people think they have that now. For some people, TV reality is as much of a reality as what they move through most of the day. I remember listening to two people I used to work with discussing the horrible burden a character on a TV series would have to bear for causing someone's death in a fire. These were not uneducated or isolated people; they had simply been drawn in so far, they were projecting the characters well beyond the end of the show -- indeed, beyond the life of the series itself. And we've all heard amusing stories about actors who play soap opera villains suddenly attacked by irate viewers who cannot separate actor and character, Maybe more people can't than can -- the host of Death Valley Days was President of the United States for eight years. > Does TV encourage, or even induce, schizophrenia? Or does it create a separate reality in conjunction with our minds, something that is neither totally our inner life nor totally TV. The networks might call that programming. Marshall McLuhan explained how humans see tools - such as media - as an "extension of ourselves". It's important to keep this in mind when creating tools or types of media: you're also defining part of the human that uses the tool. [1] The short story "Patterns" was originally published in the August 1987 issue of Omni.
  - gt_ 9y ago
    Here he addresses the topic in the article directly: http://www.marshallmcluhanspeaks.com/lecture/1977-man-and-media/ http://www.marshallmcluhanspeaks.com/lecture/1977-man-and-me...
- amsilprotag 9y ago
  I think his definitive piece on the subject is E unibus pluram: television and U.S. fiction (1993) [0], definitely worth a read if you have the time. Wallace's "six hours a day" refrain is an interesting contrast to our now dominant usage pattern of dozens of 10 minutes chunks of daily social media consumption. What explains the pointlessness of most published TV criticism is that television has become immune to charges that it lacks any meaningful connection to the world outside it. It's not that charges of nonconnection have become untrue. It's that any such connection has become otiose. Television used to point beyond itself. Those of us born in like the sixties were trained to look where it pointed, usually at versions of "real life" made prettier, sweeter, better by succumbing to a product or temptation. Today's Audience is way better trained, and TV has discarded what's not needed. A dog, if you point at something, will look only at your finger. [0] https://www.thefreelibrary.com/E+unibus+pluram:+television+and+U.S.+fiction.-a013952319 https://www.thefreelibrary.com/E+unibus+pluram:+television+a...
- wmeredith 9y ago
  J.K. Rowling had a pretty fantastic facsimile of this in the Harry Potter series: "The Mirror of Erised is an ancient, ornate mirror. It has clawed feet and a gold frame... The mirror shows the most desperate desire of a person's heart, a vision that has been known to drive men mad." "Men have wasted away before it, not knowing if what they have seen is real, or even possible." —Albus Dumbledore explaining the danger of the mirror to Harry Potter http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/Mirror_of_Erised http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/Mirror_of_Erised
dugditches 9y ago
>Or maybe those who grow up with it will be better able to control themselves. Get hooked at young ages, and their tastes develop around the overly sweet/salty foods. Thus becoming adults still addicted to them. Especially with marketing to young children(Animals, Colorful packaging, etc). Combined with the both parents working, 'busier' modern lifestyle lots of families don't have time to cook 'real' food or dinners. So quick and easy food with low nutritional value is substituted.
- ShabbosGoy 9y ago
  > Get hooked at young ages, and their tastes develop around the overly sweet/salty foods. Thus becoming adults still addicted to them. Anecdotal, but I've noticed that higher caliber restaurants have very subtle flavors. As opposed to mass produced/fast food that tend have very strong flavors.
  - gnaritas 9y ago
    Subtle aka bland.
    - wutbrodo 9y ago
      I'm not sure these are quite the same things. Take a North Indian curry for example: even it's detractors wouldn't call it particularly bland, but the flavors are obviously way more subtle than, say, pixie stix. This isn't particularly surprising given that you put half a teaspoon of a dozen different spices into a curry while the pixie stix are literally just sugar and maybe a single flavor, wired directly to a part of our brain that likes sugar.
      - gnaritas 9y ago
        > I'm not sure these are quite the same things. People who enjoy bland things always say this. :) Those words mean the same thing "to me", does mean it does to you, wasn't an insult, subtle just isn't a word I use for food. I like what I like and I've tasted things people use that word for, I call them bland.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
droopybuns 9y ago
Yes. I’ve been running with this model too. I also think about distractions (pop ups, bullshit social media, etc) as interrupts that disrupt program execution. The mindfulness movement has organic parallels. Is mainstream news nourishing to my brain? The biggest story of the week (year?) has no leakers and limited facts. The media have made virtually no progress on explaining who this person was in Las Vegas. We do have 12 sources that prove some DC douche called another douche a moron. I am not letting the media run code on my cpu anymore. Their code doesn’t nourish.
- clumsysmurf 9y ago
  > I also think about distractions There is a book on this idea "Infinite Distraction" https://www.amazon.com/Infinite-Distraction-Theory-Dominic-Pettman/dp/1509502270 https://www.amazon.com/Infinite-Distraction-Theory-Dominic-P... The idea being that our media experience is modulated in a way that people can't individually or collectively focus indignation.
whytaka 9y ago
Our phones, their glitziness, and the way they captivate definitely hijack the mind's operations when it's saturated by them. It's a rough solution but simply dampening the strength of the signal is one way to manage our minds. That's why I'm moving towards a smartwatch with cellular. I know I need to be connected, but to specific people, not to the information highway. (More information cul de sacs.) I'm excited about the kind of lifestyle patterns we can design that would be more kind to ourselves but not any less performant.
- intended 9y ago
  This is amused cynicism to your happy optimism. I look forward to making more addictive programs that make me and shareholders more money. I am eager to see the next evolution of UI/experience and code, where we manage to get ever stronger feedback loops in place. The end goal is to make money and have a good exit. To find a way to part people from their money, for the minimum effort on our our part and the best competitive release of value from our product for their time. There’s of course diminishing returns to product quality - I mean after all, who wants to be craigslist and just do the one job good enough? No no. We will buy out the competition or interesting startups and then expand our reach and label beyond the core product which must plateau out eventually. Then we leverage this cross platform ability to gain more market share and dominate multiple verticals which lets us disrupt other industries. Because if we don’t do it, someone else will. And this also has such amazing RoI! And look at the amazing value we unlock, surfacing relevant ads all over our network. But hey, you know not enough people are clicking on ads, so let’s push them Harder, we could model ourselves like those old companies we removed. Let’s hire some tv execs for their insight. As For the big picture - well I’m sure there’s someone else whose job it is to worry about that. If there is a problem we will solve it ourselves, us being the duty minded, un-incentivized corporations. Yup. The future is shiny and usefulness is incidental.
nemo44x 9y ago
Good analogy. The one I use is to compare our modern use of the internet and social media as our eras cigarette. We know that it isn’t good for us but we don’t realky have any idea just how destructive it is to not only the user but to society. My analogy breaks down in that cigarettes have very little to 0 use where as the internet is in fact useful and can be safely used - much like sugar.
nether 9y ago
Not too long ago, we had this story, "Social Media is the New Smoking" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14851057 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14851057. The mathematician Ted Kaczynski said decades ago, "humans with technology is like an alcoholic with a barrel of wine."
- MoBattah 9y ago
  The same Ted that's the Unabomber?
- vanattab 9y ago
  For those that don't get the reference Ted Kaczynski aka the Unabomber.
- fortani 9y ago
  Interesting, while I have known about it, I haven't really read Ted Kaczynski (aka Unabomber) essay "Industrial Society and Its Future" [1] (aka The Unabomber Manifesto) before until your comment. I absolutely abhor his actions and what he had done, but the essay is a brilliant read. Especially interesting is paragraph 171, as it pertains to the recent concerns about AI and our increasing technological dependence. Note that he wrote this essay way back in 1995: "What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and as machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more and more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide." [1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unabomber/manifesto.text.htm http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unabo...
  - toomuchtodo 9y ago
chubot 9y ago
There is another part to the analogy: we've all woken up to the fact that corporations re-engineered the food supply after World War II. They were hacking the human body. I think I didn't get this say in the year 2000, but I really get it now. Think about what your grandparents ate vs. what your parents ate (assuming you grew up in the U.S. and are in the 20's-30's age range. Anecdotally the effect seems to have been particularly strong in the midwest.). It's like night and day. It's not a coincidence that the food was remade by large corporations during that time. And likewise it seems obvious to me that we will look back on this time in 20 years and see that big corporations were hacking the human brain, like they were hacking the human body 50 years ago. Now I don't think it is a matter of evil people in dark boardrooms. But if you believe in capitalism, and you believe in biology, then this effect is almost inevitable. It would be surprising if it did NOT happen.
- hi5eyes 9y ago
  guess what tobacco companies bought after the public started seeing dramatic health complications? you guessed it!
  - alexbx1988 9y ago
    I didn't. What did they buy?
- burnte 9y ago
  Could you expand on what you feel the goal of their hacking was/is?
  - prostoalex 9y ago
    Competitive pressure. Gary Taubes in his books "The Case Against Sugar" and "Good Calories, Bad Calories" mentioned the competition between Kellogg's, Post and other cereal brands. While it's hard to believe today, Kellogg's was founded by a health nut who was eager on bringing healthy grains to Americans. Once his descendants took over, they noticed how enriching their product with sugar increased sales. Kids specifically don't have necessary mental controls to recognize addictive behavior (which is why we have restrictions on sales of cigarettes and alcohol). So bit by bit American breakfast table and grocery store cereal isle turned into varieties of concentrated sugar instead of the muesli, oats, granola and nuts mixes it was way back in the days.
SimbaOnSteroids 9y ago
Yes and no, on one hand there is definitely a potential for misuse, on the other I use mine to constantly be learning something, it's like I'm a book worm except I'm reading what ever I find relevant to the thing I'm currently interested in.
bksenior 9y ago
The invention of TV dinners and the preservative revolution is the best parallel ive seen compared to the invention of the internet from a regulation and unintended consequence perspective.
curun1r 9y ago
The other analogy that I've used is to asbestos and lead paint. Both of those products were very good at accomplishing their immediate purpose but had pretty devastating health consequences that were only discovered after they'd become ubiquitous. I think in a decade or two, we'll look back at smartphones in the same way.
- erikpukinskis 9y ago
  I think the "lead" in this case is nonprogrammability. We in the professional tech world design our development tools for other professional programmers. Very few of us take the time to make those tools consumable by a first week coder. And we all have a good excuse: there are great tools and best practices for publishing a development tool to other professionals. If you want to design something for a first week coder you have a lot more work to do, few examples to follow, and no obvious personal benefit. Except the end result of that is that we sell computers to people which are useless for actual computing. All they give the average consumer is the opportunity to follow a path worn by someone like you or me. We barely notice this, because we do have the ability to do real computation. We forget that it's something we are hoarding for ourselves.
fortani 9y ago
I am just an average tech worker with zero political inclinations. Just saw a comment on this article [1] that referenced a line from Ted Kaczynski's (aka Unabomber) essay, "Industrial Society and Its Future" [2]. I have heard about it, but this is the first time I read this essay. I absolutely abhor and condemn his actions and what he had done, but his essay is absolutely brilliant, and is prescient, taking into account it was written way back in 1995. He is wrong on many counts, but some paragraphs are interesting: * You can’t get rid of the “bad” parts of technology and retain only the “good” parts. * Technology is a more powerful social force than the aspiration for freedom. * A technological advance that appears not to threaten freedom often turns out to threaten it very seriously later on. * While technological progress AS A WHOLE continually narrows our sphere of freedom, each new technical advance CONSIDERED BY ITSELF appears to be desirable. * Another reason why technology is such a powerful social force is that, within the context of a given society, technological progress marches in only one direction; it can never be reversed. Once a technical innovation has been introduced, people usually become dependent on it, so that they can never again do without it, unless it is replaced by some still more advanced innovation. * Technicians tend to be so involved in their work (their surrogate activity) that when a conflict arises between their technical work and freedom, they almost always decide in favor of their technical work. * In paragraph 127 we pointed out that if the use of a new item of technology is INITIALLY optional, it does not necessarily REMAIN optional, because the new technology tends to change society in such a way that it becomes difficult or impossible for an individual to function without using that technology. * Will public resistance prevent the introduction of technological control of human behavior? It certainly would if an attempt were made to introduce such control all at once. But since technological control will be introduced through a long sequence of small advances, there will be no rational and effective public resistance. (See paragraphs 127, 132, 153.) * What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and as machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more and more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide. * On the other hand it is possible that human control over the machines may be retained. In that case the average man may have control over certain private machines of his own, such as his car or his personal computer, but control over large systems of machines will be in the hands of a tiny elite—just as it is today, but with two differences. Due to improved techniques the elite will have greater control over the masses; and because human work will no longer be necessary the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system. I hate his actions and his strategy, but it's a chilling read. [1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unabomber/manifesto.text.htm http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unabo...
tammytypes 9y ago
The realization that processed, sugary foods are not good for you dates back to at least the 1950s when the term "junk food" appeared. Even so, the problem got much much worse over time and it's still not at all clear that people are rejecting such foods.
jakeogh 9y ago
The one comment on the earlier thread[1] links to a compelling podcast[2] on the biology of social media addiction, and it's parallels with sugar. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15423287 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15423287 [2]: https://overcast.fm/+FaTQX2SRE https://overcast.fm/+FaTQX2SRE

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.
cma 9y ago
Lots on the topic by Neil Postman too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death
- seltzered_ 9y ago
  In one of his talks, he actually wished that newer information mediums came with a warning label. (This miight be the one - “informing ourselves to death”: https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&t=1487&v=fuRVxWSO8UA https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&t=1487&v=fuRVxW... )
chrisco255 9y ago
I was going to make this comment about TV. Social media has merely supplanted other forms of entertainment that Americans indulged on previously. I guess the main difference is that smart phones are with us 24/7.
- jonahx 9y ago
  I'd just add that it's a non-trivial difference. Its interactive nature is another difference of kind not shared with books or television and likely to increase its addictiveness.
pdkl95 9y ago
In Pat Cadigan's anthology of short works "Patterns", she included this introduction to her short story[1] with the same name: > Television will achieve its apotheosis when it is interactive. > Of course, some people think they have that now. For some people, TV reality is as much of a reality as what they move through most of the day. I remember listening to two people I used to work with discussing the horrible burden a character on a TV series would have to bear for causing someone's death in a fire. These were not uneducated or isolated people; they had simply been drawn in so far, they were projecting the characters well beyond the end of the show -- indeed, beyond the life of the series itself. And we've all heard amusing stories about actors who play soap opera villains suddenly attacked by irate viewers who cannot separate actor and character, Maybe more people can't than can -- the host of Death Valley Days was President of the United States for eight years. > Does TV encourage, or even induce, schizophrenia? Or does it create a separate reality in conjunction with our minds, something that is neither totally our inner life nor totally TV. The networks might call that programming. Marshall McLuhan explained how humans see tools - such as media - as an "extension of ourselves". It's important to keep this in mind when creating tools or types of media: you're also defining part of the human that uses the tool. [1] The short story "Patterns" was originally published in the August 1987 issue of Omni.
- gt_ 9y ago
  Here he addresses the topic in the article directly: http://www.marshallmcluhanspeaks.com/lecture/1977-man-and-media/ http://www.marshallmcluhanspeaks.com/lecture/1977-man-and-me...
amsilprotag 9y ago
I think his definitive piece on the subject is E unibus pluram: television and U.S. fiction (1993) [0], definitely worth a read if you have the time. Wallace's "six hours a day" refrain is an interesting contrast to our now dominant usage pattern of dozens of 10 minutes chunks of daily social media consumption. What explains the pointlessness of most published TV criticism is that television has become immune to charges that it lacks any meaningful connection to the world outside it. It's not that charges of nonconnection have become untrue. It's that any such connection has become otiose. Television used to point beyond itself. Those of us born in like the sixties were trained to look where it pointed, usually at versions of "real life" made prettier, sweeter, better by succumbing to a product or temptation. Today's Audience is way better trained, and TV has discarded what's not needed. A dog, if you point at something, will look only at your finger. [0] https://www.thefreelibrary.com/E+unibus+pluram:+television+and+U.S.+fiction.-a013952319 https://www.thefreelibrary.com/E+unibus+pluram:+television+a...
wmeredith 9y ago
J.K. Rowling had a pretty fantastic facsimile of this in the Harry Potter series: "The Mirror of Erised is an ancient, ornate mirror. It has clawed feet and a gold frame... The mirror shows the most desperate desire of a person's heart, a vision that has been known to drive men mad." "Men have wasted away before it, not knowing if what they have seen is real, or even possible." —Albus Dumbledore explaining the danger of the mirror to Harry Potter http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/Mirror_of_Erised http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/Mirror_of_Erised

dugditches 9y ago

>Or maybe those who grow up with it will be better able to control themselves. Get hooked at young ages, and their tastes develop around the overly sweet/salty foods. Thus becoming adults still addicted to them. Especially with marketing to young children(Animals, Colorful packaging, etc). Combined with the both parents working, 'busier' modern lifestyle lots of families don't have time to cook 'real' food or dinners. So quick and easy food with low nutritional value is substituted.

ShabbosGoy 9y ago
> Get hooked at young ages, and their tastes develop around the overly sweet/salty foods. Thus becoming adults still addicted to them. Anecdotal, but I've noticed that higher caliber restaurants have very subtle flavors. As opposed to mass produced/fast food that tend have very strong flavors.
- gnaritas 9y ago
  Subtle aka bland.
  - wutbrodo 9y ago
    I'm not sure these are quite the same things. Take a North Indian curry for example: even it's detractors wouldn't call it particularly bland, but the flavors are obviously way more subtle than, say, pixie stix. This isn't particularly surprising given that you put half a teaspoon of a dozen different spices into a curry while the pixie stix are literally just sugar and maybe a single flavor, wired directly to a part of our brain that likes sugar.
    - gnaritas 9y ago
      > I'm not sure these are quite the same things. People who enjoy bland things always say this. :) Those words mean the same thing "to me", does mean it does to you, wasn't an insult, subtle just isn't a word I use for food. I like what I like and I've tasted things people use that word for, I call them bland.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

droopybuns 9y ago

Yes. I’ve been running with this model too. I also think about distractions (pop ups, bullshit social media, etc) as interrupts that disrupt program execution. The mindfulness movement has organic parallels. Is mainstream news nourishing to my brain? The biggest story of the week (year?) has no leakers and limited facts. The media have made virtually no progress on explaining who this person was in Las Vegas. We do have 12 sources that prove some DC douche called another douche a moron. I am not letting the media run code on my cpu anymore. Their code doesn’t nourish.

clumsysmurf 9y ago
> I also think about distractions There is a book on this idea "Infinite Distraction" https://www.amazon.com/Infinite-Distraction-Theory-Dominic-Pettman/dp/1509502270 https://www.amazon.com/Infinite-Distraction-Theory-Dominic-P... The idea being that our media experience is modulated in a way that people can't individually or collectively focus indignation.

whytaka 9y ago

Our phones, their glitziness, and the way they captivate definitely hijack the mind's operations when it's saturated by them. It's a rough solution but simply dampening the strength of the signal is one way to manage our minds. That's why I'm moving towards a smartwatch with cellular. I know I need to be connected, but to specific people, not to the information highway. (More information cul de sacs.) I'm excited about the kind of lifestyle patterns we can design that would be more kind to ourselves but not any less performant.

intended 9y ago
This is amused cynicism to your happy optimism. I look forward to making more addictive programs that make me and shareholders more money. I am eager to see the next evolution of UI/experience and code, where we manage to get ever stronger feedback loops in place. The end goal is to make money and have a good exit. To find a way to part people from their money, for the minimum effort on our our part and the best competitive release of value from our product for their time. There’s of course diminishing returns to product quality - I mean after all, who wants to be craigslist and just do the one job good enough? No no. We will buy out the competition or interesting startups and then expand our reach and label beyond the core product which must plateau out eventually. Then we leverage this cross platform ability to gain more market share and dominate multiple verticals which lets us disrupt other industries. Because if we don’t do it, someone else will. And this also has such amazing RoI! And look at the amazing value we unlock, surfacing relevant ads all over our network. But hey, you know not enough people are clicking on ads, so let’s push them Harder, we could model ourselves like those old companies we removed. Let’s hire some tv execs for their insight. As For the big picture - well I’m sure there’s someone else whose job it is to worry about that. If there is a problem we will solve it ourselves, us being the duty minded, un-incentivized corporations. Yup. The future is shiny and usefulness is incidental.

nemo44x 9y ago

Good analogy. The one I use is to compare our modern use of the internet and social media as our eras cigarette. We know that it isn’t good for us but we don’t realky have any idea just how destructive it is to not only the user but to society. My analogy breaks down in that cigarettes have very little to 0 use where as the internet is in fact useful and can be safely used - much like sugar.

nether 9y ago

Not too long ago, we had this story, "Social Media is the New Smoking" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14851057 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14851057. The mathematician Ted Kaczynski said decades ago, "humans with technology is like an alcoholic with a barrel of wine."

MoBattah 9y ago
The same Ted that's the Unabomber?
vanattab 9y ago
For those that don't get the reference Ted Kaczynski aka the Unabomber.
fortani 9y ago
Interesting, while I have known about it, I haven't really read Ted Kaczynski (aka Unabomber) essay "Industrial Society and Its Future" [1] (aka The Unabomber Manifesto) before until your comment. I absolutely abhor his actions and what he had done, but the essay is a brilliant read. Especially interesting is paragraph 171, as it pertains to the recent concerns about AI and our increasing technological dependence. Note that he wrote this essay way back in 1995: "What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and as machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more and more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide." [1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unabomber/manifesto.text.htm http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unabo...
- toomuchtodo 9y ago

chubot 9y ago

There is another part to the analogy: we've all woken up to the fact that corporations re-engineered the food supply after World War II. They were hacking the human body. I think I didn't get this say in the year 2000, but I really get it now. Think about what your grandparents ate vs. what your parents ate (assuming you grew up in the U.S. and are in the 20's-30's age range. Anecdotally the effect seems to have been particularly strong in the midwest.). It's like night and day. It's not a coincidence that the food was remade by large corporations during that time. And likewise it seems obvious to me that we will look back on this time in 20 years and see that big corporations were hacking the human brain, like they were hacking the human body 50 years ago. Now I don't think it is a matter of evil people in dark boardrooms. But if you believe in capitalism, and you believe in biology, then this effect is almost inevitable. It would be surprising if it did NOT happen.

hi5eyes 9y ago
guess what tobacco companies bought after the public started seeing dramatic health complications? you guessed it!
- alexbx1988 9y ago
  I didn't. What did they buy?
burnte 9y ago
Could you expand on what you feel the goal of their hacking was/is?
- prostoalex 9y ago
  Competitive pressure. Gary Taubes in his books "The Case Against Sugar" and "Good Calories, Bad Calories" mentioned the competition between Kellogg's, Post and other cereal brands. While it's hard to believe today, Kellogg's was founded by a health nut who was eager on bringing healthy grains to Americans. Once his descendants took over, they noticed how enriching their product with sugar increased sales. Kids specifically don't have necessary mental controls to recognize addictive behavior (which is why we have restrictions on sales of cigarettes and alcohol). So bit by bit American breakfast table and grocery store cereal isle turned into varieties of concentrated sugar instead of the muesli, oats, granola and nuts mixes it was way back in the days.

SimbaOnSteroids 9y ago

Yes and no, on one hand there is definitely a potential for misuse, on the other I use mine to constantly be learning something, it's like I'm a book worm except I'm reading what ever I find relevant to the thing I'm currently interested in.

bksenior 9y ago

The invention of TV dinners and the preservative revolution is the best parallel ive seen compared to the invention of the internet from a regulation and unintended consequence perspective.

curun1r 9y ago

The other analogy that I've used is to asbestos and lead paint. Both of those products were very good at accomplishing their immediate purpose but had pretty devastating health consequences that were only discovered after they'd become ubiquitous. I think in a decade or two, we'll look back at smartphones in the same way.

erikpukinskis 9y ago
I think the "lead" in this case is nonprogrammability. We in the professional tech world design our development tools for other professional programmers. Very few of us take the time to make those tools consumable by a first week coder. And we all have a good excuse: there are great tools and best practices for publishing a development tool to other professionals. If you want to design something for a first week coder you have a lot more work to do, few examples to follow, and no obvious personal benefit. Except the end result of that is that we sell computers to people which are useless for actual computing. All they give the average consumer is the opportunity to follow a path worn by someone like you or me. We barely notice this, because we do have the ability to do real computation. We forget that it's something we are hoarding for ourselves.

fortani 9y ago

I am just an average tech worker with zero political inclinations. Just saw a comment on this article [1] that referenced a line from Ted Kaczynski's (aka Unabomber) essay, "Industrial Society and Its Future" [2]. I have heard about it, but this is the first time I read this essay. I absolutely abhor and condemn his actions and what he had done, but his essay is absolutely brilliant, and is prescient, taking into account it was written way back in 1995. He is wrong on many counts, but some paragraphs are interesting: * You can’t get rid of the “bad” parts of technology and retain only the “good” parts. * Technology is a more powerful social force than the aspiration for freedom. * A technological advance that appears not to threaten freedom often turns out to threaten it very seriously later on. * While technological progress AS A WHOLE continually narrows our sphere of freedom, each new technical advance CONSIDERED BY ITSELF appears to be desirable. * Another reason why technology is such a powerful social force is that, within the context of a given society, technological progress marches in only one direction; it can never be reversed. Once a technical innovation has been introduced, people usually become dependent on it, so that they can never again do without it, unless it is replaced by some still more advanced innovation. * Technicians tend to be so involved in their work (their surrogate activity) that when a conflict arises between their technical work and freedom, they almost always decide in favor of their technical work. * In paragraph 127 we pointed out that if the use of a new item of technology is INITIALLY optional, it does not necessarily REMAIN optional, because the new technology tends to change society in such a way that it becomes difficult or impossible for an individual to function without using that technology. * Will public resistance prevent the introduction of technological control of human behavior? It certainly would if an attempt were made to introduce such control all at once. But since technological control will be introduced through a long sequence of small advances, there will be no rational and effective public resistance. (See paragraphs 127, 132, 153.) * What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and as machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more and more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide. * On the other hand it is possible that human control over the machines may be retained. In that case the average man may have control over certain private machines of his own, such as his car or his personal computer, but control over large systems of machines will be in the hands of a tiny elite—just as it is today, but with two differences. Due to improved techniques the elite will have greater control over the masses; and because human work will no longer be necessary the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system. I hate his actions and his strategy, but it's a chilling read. [1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unabomber/manifesto.text.htm http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unabo...

tammytypes 9y ago

The realization that processed, sugary foods are not good for you dates back to at least the 1950s when the term "junk food" appeared. Even so, the problem got much much worse over time and it's still not at all clear that people are rejecting such foods.

jakeogh 9y ago

The one comment on the earlier thread[1] links to a compelling podcast[2] on the biology of social media addiction, and it's parallels with sugar. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15423287 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15423287 [2]: https://overcast.fm/+FaTQX2SRE https://overcast.fm/+FaTQX2SRE