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By now the concept of competing for attention, for the limited 3-4 hours of free time you have a day is well known. To maximize engagement and clicks you just h

By now the concept of competing for attention, for the limited 3-4 hours of free time you have a day is well known. To maximize engagement and clicks you just have to appeal to the shittiest parts of human nature - anger, fear, low attention spans. A few people figured out how to make the equivalent of cocaine (e.g outrage porn news, gamified social media) and now there is no going back - you compete with cocaine whether you like it or not. The more technical phrasing is that "intermittent variable rewards" are highly addictive - and this basically explains the entire design of social media or the shitty mobile games you see now. You can read statements/watch videos by Chamath Palihapitiya or Sean Parker admitting to this being an explicit strategy at Facebook. "Digital Minimalism" by Cal Newport is also a nice book that covers some of the same ground. If you ask me, our current way of managing society is a failure. You have large, well-coordinated organizations basically selling cocaine (fast food, youtube, social media, cigarettes) on end, but the other end (consumers) are necessarily less coordinated and informed because they don't operate within an organizational hierarchy with centralized decision making, shared knowledge and people dedicating 8 hours a day to maintaining those systems. Theoretically, companies live and die by how much value they create for their their customers. Practically, many companies resemble organized militia waging asymmetric warfare on unorganized masses in an increasingly zero-sum world. I think we need to focus a lot on organizing as people outside of the structure of a for-profit corporation. Theoretically the government plays this role but it's not enough. (inb4 omg you hate capitalism stupid commie)

honzzz 5y ago
>> in an increasingly zero-sum world I don't understand this part - what do you mean by that? Why would the world be increasingly zero-sum?
- zaptheimpaler 5y ago
  Most of the developed economies of the world have seen lower productivity growth since the booms after WW2 and have never recovered to previous levels. There are some arguments to be made that much of our current economic growth is artificial as well. The IT revolution has also not made much of a dent in overall productivity growth, at least as of yet - I don't know whether this is an artifact of how its measured, or the growth is yet to come, or perhaps there really isn't any growth. The bigger point is that our economies are simply not designed to work in a world where there is low growth [1]. In a zero growth world, the only way to make money is to take it from someone else, so you get more zero-sum behavior. The slow growth is also in line with what folks from the WEF are saying [2] [1] https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme [2] https://investmentmonitor.ai/global/the-urgent-case-for-stakeholder-capitalism https://investmentmonitor.ai/global/the-urgent-case-for-stak...

honzzz 5y ago

>> in an increasingly zero-sum world I don't understand this part - what do you mean by that? Why would the world be increasingly zero-sum?

zaptheimpaler 5y ago
Most of the developed economies of the world have seen lower productivity growth since the booms after WW2 and have never recovered to previous levels. There are some arguments to be made that much of our current economic growth is artificial as well. The IT revolution has also not made much of a dent in overall productivity growth, at least as of yet - I don't know whether this is an artifact of how its measured, or the growth is yet to come, or perhaps there really isn't any growth. The bigger point is that our economies are simply not designed to work in a world where there is low growth [1]. In a zero growth world, the only way to make money is to take it from someone else, so you get more zero-sum behavior. The slow growth is also in line with what folks from the WEF are saying [2] [1] https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme [2] https://investmentmonitor.ai/global/the-urgent-case-for-stakeholder-capitalism https://investmentmonitor.ai/global/the-urgent-case-for-stak...