3 ms·
I think you’re fundamentally failing to interact with the scale of the problems arising from the attention economy, basically handwaving with the word “just”.
by amazingman 9y ago
I think you’re fundamentally failing to interact with the scale of the problems arising from the attention economy, basically handwaving with the word “just”.
Even if I were to grant—though I don’t—your claim that addiction isn’t necessarily bad, it wouldn’t follow that it’s perfectly fine for businesses to boundlessly seek more effective ways to capture more human attention more of the time. ”Just” run the simulation in your head, and gradually turn up parameters such as:
- amount/quality of information about how the human brain works
- % of humans addicted to addicting-by-design software experiences
- number of unethical people who realize the financial and political opportunity a pathologically distracted electorate presents
And then maybe take another look at what’s happening in our world today.
- deepGem 9y agoTrue, but I don't think social media addiction is as bad as addiction to tobacco, heroin etc.I will look into specific data points about the points that you have raised.
- amazingman 9y agoI think you’re drawing a very poor analogy, and missing the forest for the trees because of it. Addiction is a useful term here, but comparisons to drug addictions aren’t very instructive. Addictions to ingested substances have natural gating factors that simply do not exist in what we’re calling “the attention economy”. If you want to draw the drug comparison, you’ll need to include an assumption that the most addictive, most destructive drugs are freely/cheaply available in effectively infinite supply to everyone all the time. Which is a fundamentally different conversation.