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The mental drain of the world exerted by social media is completely enormous. It explains so much about the dystopia we find ourselves in. What happened to th

The mental drain of the world exerted by social media is completely enormous. It explains so much about the dystopia we find ourselves in. What happened to the talks of breaking up Big Tech? It seems to have disappeared.

uselesscynicism 5y ago
A dystopia with fewer people in poverty than ever, and the ability to communicate instantly with people around the globe, while we wander to the supermarket and buy plentiful food sourced from all over the world at prices normal people can afford, to go home and sit in climate controlled homes and entertain ourselves with endless games and have our housework eased by machines that wash our clothes and dishes with water that flows freely into our homes and doesn't need to be fetched, and we choose when our next child will be born Yes what a dystopia we live in
- streamofdigits 5y ago
  your framing is wrong at multiple levels. i) facebook has not contributed an iota to the consumerist utopia you seem to cherish. it is the result of a long period of scientific / technological development. communicating instantly with people around the globe can be done perfectly well with, e.g. Signal. you do not need the apparatus of surveillance capitalism to deliver it. ii) said consumerist utopia is neither available to large fractions of humanity, nor is it environmentally sustainable for those who currently enjoy it beyond a few more decades More fundamentally, if we do not develop "social media" that are trully social: actually promote global mutual understanding, support fact based consensus, promote the genuine empowerment of individuals instead of exploiting and aggravating their ignorance etc. many of the real gains and progress (<ref>Hans Rosling</ref>) achieved in the past century will be squandered, never to return
  - kishinmanglani 5y ago
    Facebook hasn't contributed one iota? Facebook has contributed an immense amount to the developer community, small businesses and literally everyone else. Free communication with almost any human on the planet: check. Advertise alongside industry incumbents with any ad budget: check. Oh yeah and React, React Native, GraphQL, pyTorch, and a whole lot more.
    - streamofdigits 5y ago
      "Free communication" in... exchange for personal data. But thats a price that is invisible to fanboys. Exploiting those who either can't understand or who can't afford the tiny cost of communicating with data privacy. As for small businesses, its walled garden simply cannibalized their earlier websites and made every small trader dependent upon opaque and arbitrary discovery algorithms that can wipe them out without warning. The open source projects you mention have multiple alternatives, many from genuine community projects that will sustain irrespective of a corporate sponsor.
- prirai 5y ago
  You mentioned the pros.
- Mistletoe 5y ago
  A dystopia where the White House was stormed and 703,000 Americans are dead from Covid while 56% of the population is fully vaccinated. A dystopia where the world seems more divided than ever, and I attribute a very large portion of the blame on the tech giants that are profiting from human misery.
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    The world is more connected than ever before. White house getting stormed by unarmed protestors is much better world then presidents getting shot (and dying) like what happened in the 80s, 60s. Global warning may feel hopeless but compare that to the threat of ozone layer disappearing or acid rain or.. Covid has kill 700+ h1n1 killed 575+. wwi+ii millions People are so much safer and less likely to die but we have so much more media so we invent things to be scared of because people want you to pay attention to their ads.
Barrin92 5y ago
I've always thought when I see one of these numbers about how people are collectively dumping millions of hours into Youtube or WoW or whatever else every day, imagine if that'd be spent on something genuinely social instead, learning, creating something, contributing something to the commons, volunteer an hour at the soup kitchen, clean the local park, however trivial. A billion hours of that every day instead of reading garbage on facebook or tiktok and I'd like to think things would look very different goes well beyond breaking up big tech though, needs an entire reversal of culture at this point
- throwaways885 5y ago
  It's not going to happen. People want to veg out after a hard day of work, most are not going to volunteer even if all video games and social media ended tonight.
- dotancohen 5y ago
  This has been lamented for seven decades at least. Back then it was the Idiot Box wasting people's time.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- yunohn 5y ago
  You say this, but here you are wasting time on HN. Please stop with this appeal to get others to be constantly productive; it is not helpful advice, and being unproductive is crucial to helping the brain relax. I’m not endorsing toxic social media, but I’m debating your overall gist nonetheless.
  - Barrin92 5y ago
    read carefully, I suggested people ought to be more social in a genuine sense of the term and not more 'productive' in some superficial corporate sense, the examples i gave should have made that clear. Secondly I surely do waste too much time on social media, I don't see how that should stop me from appealing to others as well as myself though, consider me included in the criticism, I'm not a saint. However this holier than thou silencing tactic of thinking we can't criticize culture just because we're also part of perpetuating it has always been silly.
Factorium 5y ago
Big Tech's reward for censoring and deplatforming the 'losing side' of the 2020 election is safety from antitrust.
aierou 5y ago
Okay, let's break up big tech. Now what? Do you really think people will stop using social media?
Karawebnetwork 5y ago
Most of my friends moved away from Facebook to Discord. At first, it was small private chats but now everyone is on 10+ big servers with thousands of members and enough channels to drown in. Everyone is spending their times on it, staring at the screen waiting for a precious message, scrolling the channel list in the hope that one of them contain a good conversation. At work, Discord was used so much that the company had to ban it from the computers. How far do we have to go in order to fulfil the end goal that comes from wanting to delete Facebook? HN has no marketing, the simplest of design and the most basic of features. Yet, any still refresh it hourly, to the point where the site implemented features to keep you away from it. Facebook is a problem but it is not the problem.
stronglikedan 5y ago
> What happened to the talks of breaking up Big Tech? The reason is as old as time - the administration changed.

uselesscynicism 5y ago

A dystopia with fewer people in poverty than ever, and the ability to communicate instantly with people around the globe, while we wander to the supermarket and buy plentiful food sourced from all over the world at prices normal people can afford, to go home and sit in climate controlled homes and entertain ourselves with endless games and have our housework eased by machines that wash our clothes and dishes with water that flows freely into our homes and doesn't need to be fetched, and we choose when our next child will be born Yes what a dystopia we live in

streamofdigits 5y ago
your framing is wrong at multiple levels. i) facebook has not contributed an iota to the consumerist utopia you seem to cherish. it is the result of a long period of scientific / technological development. communicating instantly with people around the globe can be done perfectly well with, e.g. Signal. you do not need the apparatus of surveillance capitalism to deliver it. ii) said consumerist utopia is neither available to large fractions of humanity, nor is it environmentally sustainable for those who currently enjoy it beyond a few more decades More fundamentally, if we do not develop "social media" that are trully social: actually promote global mutual understanding, support fact based consensus, promote the genuine empowerment of individuals instead of exploiting and aggravating their ignorance etc. many of the real gains and progress (<ref>Hans Rosling</ref>) achieved in the past century will be squandered, never to return
- kishinmanglani 5y ago
  Facebook hasn't contributed one iota? Facebook has contributed an immense amount to the developer community, small businesses and literally everyone else. Free communication with almost any human on the planet: check. Advertise alongside industry incumbents with any ad budget: check. Oh yeah and React, React Native, GraphQL, pyTorch, and a whole lot more.
  - streamofdigits 5y ago
    "Free communication" in... exchange for personal data. But thats a price that is invisible to fanboys. Exploiting those who either can't understand or who can't afford the tiny cost of communicating with data privacy. As for small businesses, its walled garden simply cannibalized their earlier websites and made every small trader dependent upon opaque and arbitrary discovery algorithms that can wipe them out without warning. The open source projects you mention have multiple alternatives, many from genuine community projects that will sustain irrespective of a corporate sponsor.
prirai 5y ago
You mentioned the pros.
Mistletoe 5y ago
A dystopia where the White House was stormed and 703,000 Americans are dead from Covid while 56% of the population is fully vaccinated. A dystopia where the world seems more divided than ever, and I attribute a very large portion of the blame on the tech giants that are profiting from human misery.
- ipaddr 5y ago
  The world is more connected than ever before. White house getting stormed by unarmed protestors is much better world then presidents getting shot (and dying) like what happened in the 80s, 60s. Global warning may feel hopeless but compare that to the threat of ozone layer disappearing or acid rain or.. Covid has kill 700+ h1n1 killed 575+. wwi+ii millions People are so much safer and less likely to die but we have so much more media so we invent things to be scared of because people want you to pay attention to their ads.

Barrin92 5y ago

I've always thought when I see one of these numbers about how people are collectively dumping millions of hours into Youtube or WoW or whatever else every day, imagine if that'd be spent on something genuinely social instead, learning, creating something, contributing something to the commons, volunteer an hour at the soup kitchen, clean the local park, however trivial. A billion hours of that every day instead of reading garbage on facebook or tiktok and I'd like to think things would look very different goes well beyond breaking up big tech though, needs an entire reversal of culture at this point

throwaways885 5y ago
It's not going to happen. People want to veg out after a hard day of work, most are not going to volunteer even if all video games and social media ended tonight.
dotancohen 5y ago
This has been lamented for seven decades at least. Back then it was the Idiot Box wasting people's time.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
yunohn 5y ago
You say this, but here you are wasting time on HN. Please stop with this appeal to get others to be constantly productive; it is not helpful advice, and being unproductive is crucial to helping the brain relax. I’m not endorsing toxic social media, but I’m debating your overall gist nonetheless.
- Barrin92 5y ago
  read carefully, I suggested people ought to be more social in a genuine sense of the term and not more 'productive' in some superficial corporate sense, the examples i gave should have made that clear. Secondly I surely do waste too much time on social media, I don't see how that should stop me from appealing to others as well as myself though, consider me included in the criticism, I'm not a saint. However this holier than thou silencing tactic of thinking we can't criticize culture just because we're also part of perpetuating it has always been silly.

Factorium 5y ago

Big Tech's reward for censoring and deplatforming the 'losing side' of the 2020 election is safety from antitrust.

aierou 5y ago

Okay, let's break up big tech. Now what? Do you really think people will stop using social media?

Karawebnetwork 5y ago

Most of my friends moved away from Facebook to Discord. At first, it was small private chats but now everyone is on 10+ big servers with thousands of members and enough channels to drown in. Everyone is spending their times on it, staring at the screen waiting for a precious message, scrolling the channel list in the hope that one of them contain a good conversation. At work, Discord was used so much that the company had to ban it from the computers. How far do we have to go in order to fulfil the end goal that comes from wanting to delete Facebook? HN has no marketing, the simplest of design and the most basic of features. Yet, any still refresh it hourly, to the point where the site implemented features to keep you away from it. Facebook is a problem but it is not the problem.

stronglikedan 5y ago

> What happened to the talks of breaking up Big Tech? The reason is as old as time - the administration changed.