4 ms·

Digital drugs? Either you are unserious or you have fallen victim to hysteria. That very notion makes no goddamned sense. Do we call decks of cards paper drugs?

• haswell 3y ago
  Not the parent, but quite serious. Social media apps have been carefully engineered to hijack evolutionary reward systems and quickly lead to addiction in most users. This is not idle speculation, and it’s been known for quite some time that these companies employ researchers and experts who maximize the addictive pull of these products through an understanding of human psychology. I’d argue that the analogy to drugs here is really an analogy to addiction, and there’s no magic involved in addiction: just exploitation of reward pathways leading to maladaptive behaviors. And we don’t see an increasing percentage of people walking across busy and dangerous intersections, driving on highways at high speed, walking through dangerous neighborhoods, etc. while looking down at a deck of cards, oblivious to the world around them.