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The whole situation with attention economics is very illustrative of the neglected power of small things. Facebook can't really hack your dopaminergic pathways,
by textor 9y ago
The whole situation with attention economics is very illustrative of the neglected power of small things. Facebook can't really hack your dopaminergic pathways, however much they improve their feed AI. AdSense doesn't brainwash you to be a consumerist drone. Smartphones aren't exactly subtle with notifications, and it's easy to disable them. There's no violent, obvious infingement of one's agency, so the opinion that you still make your free choices is not without reason. But more often than not, people don't actively counteract these influences. They go with the flow, they allow the scales to be tipped a little. The more they do so, the more suspectible to distractions they become: that is, less prone to consciously deciding if the next stimulus is worth responding do. So even the tiniest starting amount of influence, as long as it isn't annoying and doesn't raise any internal alarm, is a seed of a serious behavioral change. This is how vulnerabilities work: it's not always intuitive that some small hole can compromise an entire system which is otherwise robust and adaptive. But you don't argue that this is pathetic, you go and patch it before the damage is done.
Hard to do with humans.
On a more practical (if unrelated) note, I think all browsers should block website notifications by default, i.e. when you get a prompt about push notifications, Deny button has to be highlighted. And it shouldn't be ever shown on mobile.
- waytogo 9y ago> And [website notifications] shouldn't be ever shown on mobile. They are not shown on iOS.
- munificent 9y agoIt's about economy of scale, which modern corporations have demonstrated that they are incredibly effective at. Bank fees that are a small fraction of each user's transaction but add up to billions for the bank. "First month free" subscriptions that only require you to remember to unsubscribe before they start charging. When you have a billion users, than harnessing even a tiny fraction of their resources — financial, labor, cognitive, whatever — is a huge amount. If our phones and social media apps take 2% of our attention away, that's next to nothing, but when you scale it up to millions of users, you're talking thousands of person-minds completely hijacked. It's like our brains are all running low priority threads bitcoining mining for these companies and getting next to nothing in return.
- textor 9y agoThere's also another, intrapersonal scale at play: if you get 20 "free" subscriptions, in 3-4 cases you'll definitely forget to unsubscribe before it starts charging, since it becomes impossible to track and optimize every process. Attentional impact of each one is miniscule, so many people don't notice going way above 2% or any other hard limit they could probably deal with semi-efficiently.