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I read this, and I'm not sure what concrete steps Newport wants us to take. Sure, social media sucks, and if Facebook and TikTok disappeared we'd all be better
by bediger4000 3y ago
I read this, and I'm not sure what concrete steps Newport wants us to take. Sure, social media sucks, and if Facebook and TikTok disappeared we'd all be better off. But what should we do? Declare Meta a monopoly and bust it up? This just seems like verbal flailing about.
- nvy 3y ago>Declare Meta a monopoly and bust it up? Sounds great! Let's unfuck the situation with Google/Apple having a chokehold on phones and app stores while we're at it.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- antonvs 3y agoWith problems like this, the path from identifying the problem to identifying concrete steps to address it is not necessarily trivial. It also ideally involves society as a whole. As such, discussion of the nature of the problem and broad-strokes ideas about how it might be addressed - e.g. "techno-selectionism" - can be an important part of the process of improving the situation. As for your proposed solution, breakups of companies like Meta, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and probably quite a few more, is certainly one potentially promising possibility.
- ParseItAgainSam 3y agoEven short of breaking them up, I would love to see more scrutiny of acquisitions. The buy all your disruptors to kill them would be good for everyone, except maybe VCs
- floxy 3y agoNewport is the "Deep Work" guy whose first step was "off-load your trivial tasks to your secretary". He lost me at that, since I need the 5 steps before that where I get a secretary.
- webmaven 3y agoIt will be interesting times if/when AI assistants progress to the point where they can (safely) operate as autonomously and competently as a human secretary.