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Bo Burnham put it succinctly, although he was talking about children on apps: "When they go to sleep at night, they have to choose between all of the informatio

Bo Burnham put it succinctly, although he was talking about children on apps: "When they go to sleep at night, they have to choose between all of the information ever published in the history of the world, or the back of their eyelids." The smartphone is a perverted implementation of the goal that people use to fantasize about back in the early days of the computer revolution: a personal terminal to the world of audio, text, and video information stored in databases across all of humanity. It's of course worth talking about how they compel us to certain behaviors via push notifications, dark patterns, nasty design, etc. but also--obviously we'd be addicted to personal terminals that let us access all the publicly available digitized information in the history of the world.

samrus 1y ago
I think the access to so much information itself isnt bad. Cuz access to all of wikipedia wouldnt do this. People would get bored because its still work to digest that information I think this access gave opportunities to bad actors whose incentives are misalligned with society's. Social media companies. They use this opportunity to serve us easily digestible garbage thats going to get us hooked. Its a not some grand and malicious conspiracy or anything. Greed is just a part of capitalism. Before, people loved getting others hooked on drugs because it made them so much money. People who like capitalism know this is a bug in the system that needs to be patched with regulations. We stopped putting cocaine in coca cola. We just need to stop putting brainrot garbage in our kids information feeds. We need to penalize companies for these greed driven addiction algorithms. Itll be hard, but its what needs to be done and we can do it if we have enough societal willpower
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago
  I agree but it's too entwined with "freedom of speech" and section 230. Many here make too much money addicting children and don't want to turn off the fire hose of money.
  - hooverd 1y ago
    That just makes it So the big boys who are making all this money can continue to operate while small platforms can no longer afford to comply with the new regulatory environment.
    - 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago
      I don't buy it. The internet existed before the carve out and was in fact less centralized and less shitty
      - kmeisthax 11mo ago
        So, do you remember the Wolf of Wall Street? AKA Jordan Belfort. Huge fraudster, did shittons of financial crime. People on Prodigy and Compuserve forums were talking about it, and so Jordan Belfort decided to sue the shit out of the companies in order to take the speech down and censor the users talking about him. The resulting caselaw we got out of this mess was that Prodigy's moderated servers were treated as publisher and assigned defamation liability; while Compuserve, being unmoderated, had no such liability. CDA 230 was written specifically to overturn the Prodigy verdict. So repealing it would put us in a place where Internet forums are either totally censored and sanitized, or completely unregulated messes of spam and garbage. No middle ground.
- tayo42 1y ago
  Idk I've gotten high and just wasted whole nights going down Wikipedia rabbit holes. I think eventually turned to stronger time wasters though. The Wikipedia thing is real though.
  - andy99 1y ago
    We didn’t have internet when I was an early teen and I would read physical encyclopedias before bed. If academic study is on one end of a spectrum, lots of Wikipedia is maybe in the middle, pretty accessible and simple enough to keep clicking through links for someone interested, but still at least requiring active participation. Something like TikTok (which admittedly I’ve never used) along with AI conversations which I have, can basically take place without the brain ever even engaging other than the reward pathways. If academic books or literature are fruits and vegetables, Wikipedia is maybe a restaurant meal and social media (+ AI chat) dominos pizza or Pringle’s or some other thing that’s been processed into oblivion and just diffuses though your stomach lining directly onto your blood as you mindless binge on it.
  - hooverd 1y ago
    That's infinitely preferable to scrolling your short form video platform of choice. At least you get some fun facts to use in conversation out of it.
    - ale42 1y ago
      Fun facts, and/or actual knowledge you might even use one day. This said, I've definitely never had a use for knowing about CORONA spy satellites dropping film cartridges on the Earth (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CORONA_(satellite) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CORONA_(satellite)) or about bell-mouth spillways...
- ants_everywhere 1y ago
  > misalligned with society's It's hard to think of a society where this is the right measure. A better measure would be the user's best interest. Arguably social media is significantly worse when it's aligned with the society's incentives AND those incentives are bad. For example, consider hypothetical always-on addictive social media in the following societies: - Ancient Egypt - Any fundamentalist religious community - The Congo Free State - Antebellum South in the United States - East Germany - Sparta - The Assyrian Empire Alignment with society isn’t a virtue when society is sick. And a society is almost always sick, or at least there's noticeable room for improvement.
  - Fnoord 1y ago
    > Any fundamentalist religious community For starters, wasn't the USA founded by, ehh.. how shall I say it tactically, very religious people? Considering the tech companies kissing Trump's ring start of Jan 2025, we might well be going that way. I mean, it is no secret if you read Project 2025 or a decent summary of it. Either way, if we ignore all that (too 'political'), it is being used today for amplification of (bogus) information and to influence our democratic processes. Social media is a propaganda tool in the hands of the wrong people. East Germany is an interesting example, as it is relatively recent. There was mass surveillance in such dictatorship. People's homes were tapped, informants, all the post was opened, read and closed. About one third of the East German population worked for the East German government. This is very inefficient if you think about it. If they had more surveillance tools at their disposal, they'd also need more automation/computers/ML to aid with said surveillance. In the same vein, something as simple as Bluetooth has been used for P2P messaging between smartphones in mass demonstrations. Think about the revolutions in countries such as Ukraine, Egypt, and many other in that region.
    - ants_everywhere 1y ago
      I agree by and large with the thrust of what you're saying, but > wasn't the USA founded by... very religious people? The USA was founded by a mix of people religiously, but many of them were essentially deists. That is, not outright atheists but the closest thing you could admit publicly at the time. It's true that some of them were Christians, like John Jay. Some of them, like Jefferson, retained some Christian belief but rejected many of the core Christian beliefs. Jefferson even literally cut much of Jesus out of the bible. Most of them were committed to religious freedom, and that freedom successfully became the very first enumerated right in the Bill of Rights of the Constitution. Relative to the standards of the time, I think the USA was founded by remarkably secular people. You may be thinking of the Puritans who founded an American colony a century before the founding of the USA. They still remained a powerful community locally during the founding, but the founders of the USA (as we normally consider them) were not Puritans. The secular roots of the country are written into the Constitution, but the country gradually Christianized over the years. For example, adding "In God We Trust" in the 1860s and adopting it as an official motto in the 1950s. But at any rate, I agree if your point is that (consistent with my point above) widespread social media in a Puritan colony or similar would have been unpleasant. In literature, the Scarlet Letter and the Crucible raise a similar point.
- noir_lord 1y ago
  Some people wouldn’t, we call it falling into the wiki hole for a reason. I’ve spent more hours than a sane person should just hopping from one topic to another and often end up reading about something I had no idea was a thing an hour earlier. But I also use YouTube only for documentaries and read a lot generally, my only social media is HN and Reddit (though not a lot). I’m just not wired for engagement the way most the people in my life seem to be. Other than Bank App, Kindle and Firefox I have nothing installed on my phone it didn’t come with, iOS is basically same on my iPad. I don’t find the modern web very engaging and use unhook/ublock origin to keep YT what I want it to be which is a no distraction source of documentaries.
- flobosg 1y ago
  Your mention of Wikipedia reminded me of WikiTok: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42936723 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42936723
ericmcer 1y ago
It isn't even a perverted implementation, we just overestimated ourselves. All our sci-fi futurism of the 70s/80s showed enlightened humans elevating themselves with technology. In real Star Trek the holo deck would be used for porn, the computer would be used to play shitty podcasts while they procrastinated work and the replicator would be churning out donuts and fried foods. It's philosophically a weird time, because we are more socially progressive than ever before, but we have a nonstop flow of evidence that people cannot self-govern. It feels paradoxical to demand freedom and protection from your own impulses at the same time.
- noduerme 1y ago
  I don't know that anyone's really asking for protection from their own impulses. Freedom requires protection from other people's impulses. That's where this is all going. A few truly free people, everyone else in a cage.
  - wlesieutre 1y ago
    Rather than framing it as "protection from my own impulses," I think it's more fair to frame it as "protection from teams of professional researchers and engineers and marketers whose entire life's work is fine tuning how to most effectively profit from my impulses"
    - noduerme 1y ago
      Well, yeah, but that type of protection isn't compatible with freedom. Neither the freedom to consume nor the freedom to iterate on a product. I don't blame companies for making their products addictive. I smoke cigarettes. I drink. Sometimes I crave a Big Mac. I don't blame them for selling me poison, as long as I recognize it as unhealthy. The best way to protect yourself is by educating yourself to recognize manipulative patterns, and by extension sharing that with other people. We know from drug addiction that simply banning something doesn't work. And an insight from some great druggies like Philip K Dick and Hunter Thompson and Burroughs is that the list of things that can be addictive is endless. If someone made an app that made people chew their nails, or lick an escalator banister, or shock themselves with electricity, people would get addicted to it. I was hypnotized a few times as a child by a professional hypnotist. When in college I was invited to a "seminar" which turned out to be a cult indoctrination session, I immediately recognized what I was seeing the group leader doing to the audience. We don't need external protection, we need herd immunity. It's like"give a man a fish" vs "teach a man to fish".
teekert 1y ago
With a smartphone you do not only give the internet to a kid, you are also giving the kid to the internet.
the_snooze 1y ago
It's not even just children in safe situations like bedtime. I regularly see adults crossing the street typing on their phones while having headphones on.
- tcfhgj 1y ago
  Do you have to be worried being killed by a driver all the time?
ChrisRR 1y ago
> all of the information ever published in the history of the world Why read that when you could watch 10 solid hours of clickbait?
protocolture 1y ago
>Bo Burnham put it succinctly, although he was talking about children on apps: "When they go to sleep at night, they have to choose between all of the information ever published in the history of the world, or the back of their eyelids." Ok but is the issue the information, or is the issue the presentation? I am an outlier, but I used to cure insomnia with excessive reading. I reckon if I had no other outlet, I would probably choose information over sleep. But we know that the 5 websites put a lot of energy into making them extremely desirable to cruise for hours, regardless of content. It feels like everyone has my unique problem, but its not really "information" they are after, its this one giant never ending pit of despair and bullying.
NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
>"When they go to sleep at night, they have to choose between all of the information ever published in the history of the world, or the back of their eyelids." But when they power the device on, instead of reading all the information ever published in the history of the world, they watch vacuous tiktok videos where losers talk in the most annoying voices possible TAP LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE. This should be obvious, I suppose. Gluttons aren't eating pounds of filet mignon and bags of truffles, they're chowing down on pseudo-manufactured crunchythings that are only distantly related to food.
aucisson_masque 1y ago
> When they go to sleep at night, they have to choose between all of the information ever published in the history of the world, or the back of their eyelids They are not tired enough if they choose to use their smartphone, that's an education issue. Children are taught the value of a good night of sleep, they are taught by having fulfilling daily lives and exhausting. If you let them be like a plant, yeah they will be just as dumb as a plant.

samrus 1y ago

I think the access to so much information itself isnt bad. Cuz access to all of wikipedia wouldnt do this. People would get bored because its still work to digest that information I think this access gave opportunities to bad actors whose incentives are misalligned with society's. Social media companies. They use this opportunity to serve us easily digestible garbage thats going to get us hooked. Its a not some grand and malicious conspiracy or anything. Greed is just a part of capitalism. Before, people loved getting others hooked on drugs because it made them so much money. People who like capitalism know this is a bug in the system that needs to be patched with regulations. We stopped putting cocaine in coca cola. We just need to stop putting brainrot garbage in our kids information feeds. We need to penalize companies for these greed driven addiction algorithms. Itll be hard, but its what needs to be done and we can do it if we have enough societal willpower

2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago
I agree but it's too entwined with "freedom of speech" and section 230. Many here make too much money addicting children and don't want to turn off the fire hose of money.
- hooverd 1y ago
  That just makes it So the big boys who are making all this money can continue to operate while small platforms can no longer afford to comply with the new regulatory environment.
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago
    I don't buy it. The internet existed before the carve out and was in fact less centralized and less shitty
    - kmeisthax 11mo ago
      So, do you remember the Wolf of Wall Street? AKA Jordan Belfort. Huge fraudster, did shittons of financial crime. People on Prodigy and Compuserve forums were talking about it, and so Jordan Belfort decided to sue the shit out of the companies in order to take the speech down and censor the users talking about him. The resulting caselaw we got out of this mess was that Prodigy's moderated servers were treated as publisher and assigned defamation liability; while Compuserve, being unmoderated, had no such liability. CDA 230 was written specifically to overturn the Prodigy verdict. So repealing it would put us in a place where Internet forums are either totally censored and sanitized, or completely unregulated messes of spam and garbage. No middle ground.
tayo42 1y ago
Idk I've gotten high and just wasted whole nights going down Wikipedia rabbit holes. I think eventually turned to stronger time wasters though. The Wikipedia thing is real though.
- andy99 1y ago
  We didn’t have internet when I was an early teen and I would read physical encyclopedias before bed. If academic study is on one end of a spectrum, lots of Wikipedia is maybe in the middle, pretty accessible and simple enough to keep clicking through links for someone interested, but still at least requiring active participation. Something like TikTok (which admittedly I’ve never used) along with AI conversations which I have, can basically take place without the brain ever even engaging other than the reward pathways. If academic books or literature are fruits and vegetables, Wikipedia is maybe a restaurant meal and social media (+ AI chat) dominos pizza or Pringle’s or some other thing that’s been processed into oblivion and just diffuses though your stomach lining directly onto your blood as you mindless binge on it.
- hooverd 1y ago
  That's infinitely preferable to scrolling your short form video platform of choice. At least you get some fun facts to use in conversation out of it.
  - ale42 1y ago
    Fun facts, and/or actual knowledge you might even use one day. This said, I've definitely never had a use for knowing about CORONA spy satellites dropping film cartridges on the Earth (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CORONA_(satellite) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CORONA_(satellite)) or about bell-mouth spillways...
ants_everywhere 1y ago
> misalligned with society's It's hard to think of a society where this is the right measure. A better measure would be the user's best interest. Arguably social media is significantly worse when it's aligned with the society's incentives AND those incentives are bad. For example, consider hypothetical always-on addictive social media in the following societies: - Ancient Egypt - Any fundamentalist religious community - The Congo Free State - Antebellum South in the United States - East Germany - Sparta - The Assyrian Empire Alignment with society isn’t a virtue when society is sick. And a society is almost always sick, or at least there's noticeable room for improvement.
- Fnoord 1y ago
  > Any fundamentalist religious community For starters, wasn't the USA founded by, ehh.. how shall I say it tactically, very religious people? Considering the tech companies kissing Trump's ring start of Jan 2025, we might well be going that way. I mean, it is no secret if you read Project 2025 or a decent summary of it. Either way, if we ignore all that (too 'political'), it is being used today for amplification of (bogus) information and to influence our democratic processes. Social media is a propaganda tool in the hands of the wrong people. East Germany is an interesting example, as it is relatively recent. There was mass surveillance in such dictatorship. People's homes were tapped, informants, all the post was opened, read and closed. About one third of the East German population worked for the East German government. This is very inefficient if you think about it. If they had more surveillance tools at their disposal, they'd also need more automation/computers/ML to aid with said surveillance. In the same vein, something as simple as Bluetooth has been used for P2P messaging between smartphones in mass demonstrations. Think about the revolutions in countries such as Ukraine, Egypt, and many other in that region.
  - ants_everywhere 1y ago
    I agree by and large with the thrust of what you're saying, but > wasn't the USA founded by... very religious people? The USA was founded by a mix of people religiously, but many of them were essentially deists. That is, not outright atheists but the closest thing you could admit publicly at the time. It's true that some of them were Christians, like John Jay. Some of them, like Jefferson, retained some Christian belief but rejected many of the core Christian beliefs. Jefferson even literally cut much of Jesus out of the bible. Most of them were committed to religious freedom, and that freedom successfully became the very first enumerated right in the Bill of Rights of the Constitution. Relative to the standards of the time, I think the USA was founded by remarkably secular people. You may be thinking of the Puritans who founded an American colony a century before the founding of the USA. They still remained a powerful community locally during the founding, but the founders of the USA (as we normally consider them) were not Puritans. The secular roots of the country are written into the Constitution, but the country gradually Christianized over the years. For example, adding "In God We Trust" in the 1860s and adopting it as an official motto in the 1950s. But at any rate, I agree if your point is that (consistent with my point above) widespread social media in a Puritan colony or similar would have been unpleasant. In literature, the Scarlet Letter and the Crucible raise a similar point.
noir_lord 1y ago
Some people wouldn’t, we call it falling into the wiki hole for a reason. I’ve spent more hours than a sane person should just hopping from one topic to another and often end up reading about something I had no idea was a thing an hour earlier. But I also use YouTube only for documentaries and read a lot generally, my only social media is HN and Reddit (though not a lot). I’m just not wired for engagement the way most the people in my life seem to be. Other than Bank App, Kindle and Firefox I have nothing installed on my phone it didn’t come with, iOS is basically same on my iPad. I don’t find the modern web very engaging and use unhook/ublock origin to keep YT what I want it to be which is a no distraction source of documentaries.
flobosg 1y ago
Your mention of Wikipedia reminded me of WikiTok: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42936723 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42936723

ericmcer 1y ago

It isn't even a perverted implementation, we just overestimated ourselves. All our sci-fi futurism of the 70s/80s showed enlightened humans elevating themselves with technology. In real Star Trek the holo deck would be used for porn, the computer would be used to play shitty podcasts while they procrastinated work and the replicator would be churning out donuts and fried foods. It's philosophically a weird time, because we are more socially progressive than ever before, but we have a nonstop flow of evidence that people cannot self-govern. It feels paradoxical to demand freedom and protection from your own impulses at the same time.

noduerme 1y ago
I don't know that anyone's really asking for protection from their own impulses. Freedom requires protection from other people's impulses. That's where this is all going. A few truly free people, everyone else in a cage.
- wlesieutre 1y ago
  Rather than framing it as "protection from my own impulses," I think it's more fair to frame it as "protection from teams of professional researchers and engineers and marketers whose entire life's work is fine tuning how to most effectively profit from my impulses"
  - noduerme 1y ago
    Well, yeah, but that type of protection isn't compatible with freedom. Neither the freedom to consume nor the freedom to iterate on a product. I don't blame companies for making their products addictive. I smoke cigarettes. I drink. Sometimes I crave a Big Mac. I don't blame them for selling me poison, as long as I recognize it as unhealthy. The best way to protect yourself is by educating yourself to recognize manipulative patterns, and by extension sharing that with other people. We know from drug addiction that simply banning something doesn't work. And an insight from some great druggies like Philip K Dick and Hunter Thompson and Burroughs is that the list of things that can be addictive is endless. If someone made an app that made people chew their nails, or lick an escalator banister, or shock themselves with electricity, people would get addicted to it. I was hypnotized a few times as a child by a professional hypnotist. When in college I was invited to a "seminar" which turned out to be a cult indoctrination session, I immediately recognized what I was seeing the group leader doing to the audience. We don't need external protection, we need herd immunity. It's like"give a man a fish" vs "teach a man to fish".

teekert 1y ago

With a smartphone you do not only give the internet to a kid, you are also giving the kid to the internet.

the_snooze 1y ago

It's not even just children in safe situations like bedtime. I regularly see adults crossing the street typing on their phones while having headphones on.

tcfhgj 1y ago
Do you have to be worried being killed by a driver all the time?

ChrisRR 1y ago

> all of the information ever published in the history of the world Why read that when you could watch 10 solid hours of clickbait?

protocolture 1y ago

>Bo Burnham put it succinctly, although he was talking about children on apps: "When they go to sleep at night, they have to choose between all of the information ever published in the history of the world, or the back of their eyelids." Ok but is the issue the information, or is the issue the presentation? I am an outlier, but I used to cure insomnia with excessive reading. I reckon if I had no other outlet, I would probably choose information over sleep. But we know that the 5 websites put a lot of energy into making them extremely desirable to cruise for hours, regardless of content. It feels like everyone has my unique problem, but its not really "information" they are after, its this one giant never ending pit of despair and bullying.

NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago

>"When they go to sleep at night, they have to choose between all of the information ever published in the history of the world, or the back of their eyelids." But when they power the device on, instead of reading all the information ever published in the history of the world, they watch vacuous tiktok videos where losers talk in the most annoying voices possible TAP LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE. This should be obvious, I suppose. Gluttons aren't eating pounds of filet mignon and bags of truffles, they're chowing down on pseudo-manufactured crunchythings that are only distantly related to food.

aucisson_masque 1y ago

> When they go to sleep at night, they have to choose between all of the information ever published in the history of the world, or the back of their eyelids They are not tired enough if they choose to use their smartphone, that's an education issue. Children are taught the value of a good night of sleep, they are taught by having fulfilling daily lives and exhausting. If you let them be like a plant, yeah they will be just as dumb as a plant.