3 ms·

This article was a tough read because of the meandering prose and weird personalization narrative they shoe-horned in. > We could, for example, force social me

by wand3r 3y ago

This article was a tough read because of the meandering prose and weird personalization narrative they shoe-horned in. > We could, for example, force social media companies to abandon their current business model Cool that the Guardian flew this person to like 3 different locations for the story. Great conclusion. We could also solve poverty by giving everyone high paying jobs... Tristan Harris is referenced in the article and I find his work on social media/attention to be very interesting.

karaterobot 3y ago
> The above is an edited extract from Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention by Johann Hari, published by Bloomsbury on 6 January.
stevage 3y ago
That's not a good analogy. We actually could do this, in the same way that society has banned various other categories of harmful products. The business model of slave plantation is another one that society got rid of.
- wand3r 3y ago
  Point ceded on the analogy. The point I was trying to make is that the only solution was a flippant suggestion that we just "ask social media companies to change their business model". Leaving aside how difficult of a proposition that is, it would have extremely negative knock-on effects. These companies are roughly 50% of the S&P 500 top 10. > The business model of slave plantation is another one that society got rid of. Ya I mean 655K people died fixing that issue[1] I admit I am being unfair here, but the trend of "identifying" an obvious and well known problem and writing an article about it, really frustrates me. We KNOW climate change[2] is a problem, we KNOW social media is bad, we KNOW that housing/living costs in much of the world are unaffordable for generations of people. I would appreciate at least exploring the surface area of what a real solution could be. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualties_of_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualt... [2] Those that do not accept climate change still recognize that our key fuel inputs are finite resources. Thus we still need to make changes to prevent foreign wars, increased pricing and maintaining global progress.

by wand3r 3y ago

karaterobot 3y ago

> The above is an edited extract from Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention by Johann Hari, published by Bloomsbury on 6 January.

stevage 3y ago

That's not a good analogy. We actually could do this, in the same way that society has banned various other categories of harmful products. The business model of slave plantation is another one that society got rid of.

wand3r 3y ago
Point ceded on the analogy. The point I was trying to make is that the only solution was a flippant suggestion that we just "ask social media companies to change their business model". Leaving aside how difficult of a proposition that is, it would have extremely negative knock-on effects. These companies are roughly 50% of the S&P 500 top 10. > The business model of slave plantation is another one that society got rid of. Ya I mean 655K people died fixing that issue[1] I admit I am being unfair here, but the trend of "identifying" an obvious and well known problem and writing an article about it, really frustrates me. We KNOW climate change[2] is a problem, we KNOW social media is bad, we KNOW that housing/living costs in much of the world are unaffordable for generations of people. I would appreciate at least exploring the surface area of what a real solution could be. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualties_of_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualt... [2] Those that do not accept climate change still recognize that our key fuel inputs are finite resources. Thus we still need to make changes to prevent foreign wars, increased pricing and maintaining global progress.