5 ms·

It isn't even a perverted implementation, we just overestimated ourselves. All our sci-fi futurism of the 70s/80s showed enlightened humans elevating themselve

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".
    - savolai 1y ago
      I like your clarity about personal responsibility, but it might also help to remember that human capacity for self-regulation isn’t uniform. We all grow through developmental stages and carry traits that shape how we handle influence, impulse, and awareness. The idea that “we just need herd immunity” assumes we’re all equally capable of recognizing manipulation or addiction, but as ericmcer noted, the evidence all around us suggests most of us are not quite there. In many ways, that belief in our individual mastery is part of what Western culture keeps overestimating, as if understanding the trick is enough to undo the conditioning. There also seems to be a deeper resistance in our western cultures to actually pausing, turning inward, and staying present with what’s happening inside us. We intellectualize awareness instead of living it. Real freedom will begin not with more information or clever systems, but with learning to meet our own impulses directly. To listen, to stay with discomfort, to see what drives us without immediately trying to fix it. Until we're willing to practice that kind of contact with ourselves, we’ll keep playing defense against the surface symptoms.
      - noduerme 1y ago
        I agree, and I don't want what I wrote to be read as "people just need more self control." I lack self control, that's why I have addictions and bad habits. I know other people who have even less self control, and some who seem to be immaculate. I don't care to be judged or to judge anyone else. I guess that's why I framed it as herd immunity. Here's what I mean (from an addict's perspective). What makes me hesitate when I reach for a cigarette or another drink, and decide maybe I should call it a night, is not the knowledge that it's bad for me. It's thinking about friends who have died from lung cancer and cirrhosis. As a whole, as a society, we've become more aware of the effects of certain poisons because we've witnessed the results and drawn the conclusions. So with screen addiction, we're just starting to witness the results on a generational level. Yes - screen use is a little different because it can have good sides as well. The screens are magical devices that can educate us and improve us, too. Someone addicted to watching their diet and exercise with FitBit has a different psychological problem space from someone addicted to watching people put ants up their nose on TikTok. I agree with you wholeheartedly that all of these things prevent us from focusing and staying present and dealing with real problems. I'm really just saying that removing any or all of them doesn't address that underlying void which causes people to seek consciousness altering substances or mass distraction. There is no distraction or game the human mind won't latch onto to avoid reality - that's the curse of knowing you're going to die. We need immunity against the surface thing that's eating us alive right now. But of course we'll keep playing defense against the next thing, because we have no immunity from it. Changing human nature seems to me like a utopian vision, which has never worked in practice. Yeah, we can romanticize some cultures that seem to be better at managing it. But give them a cell phone, a credit card and an Amazon account and you'll see how long it takes for them to fuck themselves over too. Those that do survive the modern world with things like a Sabbath day of rest or avoiding technology completely, do so because they have very strong communal practices that ensure individuals have little agency or choice - and they also happen to believe in a divine plane of existence beyond the mortal coil, which changes their calculus when making bad decisions. I'm not advocating for either thing. I think changing human nature is impossible, and I think heaven is a placebo. Changing individual human behavior to be more present and more self-aware, I think, is possible. But it's an incremental process. First you have to train each individual to notice a new danger. Then they can develop defenses against it. I guess I just said something very classically Conservative and yet heretical, but this seems like the way the process has to work, as opposed to wish-casting us to all look inside ourselves and put down that cellphone or that cigarette. We are flawed. We as a species take advantage of each others' flaws in a climb to the top of the monkey barrel. There's no way out, even if Elon thinks there is on Mars, or Zuck thinks there is in Hawaii. Herd immunity amounts to enough of your friends and neighbors gently telling you to wake up and take care of yourself. That's probably how a communally sane society evolves in the end, too - once it reaches some kind of equilibrium with its technology, its drugs, and its environment.
  - skeezyjefferson 1y ago
    thats not true though is it. youre talking about a UI designer being some king of evil nazi... get real
    - ben_w 1y ago
      Straw man. There is a massive gap between "100k engineers have found a way to make most people in my demographic waste all their time by choosing to doomscroll" and "actually Nazis". Both are bad, but as different as chronic fatigue and terminal cancer.
jancsika 1y ago
[dead]
exe34 1y ago
We want tools that aren't designed to trigger our impulses.
ThrowawayTestr 1y ago
>In real Star Trek the holo deck would be used for porn This is lampshaded in Lower Decks
- noir_lord 1y ago
  DS9 had frequent if oblique references to it as well, Quark’s Bar had holodecks, I think Major Kira threatened to break his arm if she found out she featured as a character in one episode.
  - ben_w 1y ago
    Possibly the same episode, but some creep was trying to get a holodeck session with her likeness, and when Quark managed to get her likeness, the revenge was to corrupt the holodeck program to put Quark's head on the body: https://www.reddit.com/r/startrekgifs/comments/i8hilq/cant_do_a_ferengi_theme_week_with_out_at_least/ https://www.reddit.com/r/startrekgifs/comments/i8hilq/cant_d...
hugh-avherald 1y ago
In 1980s Star Trek it was used for porn. (TNG: The Perfect Mate, Hollow Pursuits)
- easton 1y ago
  And the Replicator was locked out from producing mass amounts of unhealthy food (unless you told it not to). Maybe the lesson we should learn is our hardware should come with built in limits on use to keep our brains intact? That sounds dystopian.
  - b00ty4breakfast 1y ago
    the freedom to be able to choose to engorge yourself on twinkies is maybe a good thing, the fact that some folks are willing and able to indulge that impulse is probably less good
    - jonfw 1y ago
      > the freedom to be able to choose to engorge yourself on twinkies is maybe a good thing In isolation, freedom is wonderful. In practice, maybe not? If a member of the star trek crew abused twinkies to the extent that they were lethargic or unhealthy, it would negatively impact the mission. There is some compromise between freedoms and social resposibility
      - Throaway152 1y ago
        Yes, and what if we saw what happened on Ferengi ships, with Ferengi replicators? Perhaps those are controlled by profit-seeking corporations, and have no such limits in the name of "personal freedom?" ;)
Dylan16807 1y ago
As long as you're scheduling use of the holodeck it's not going to be the same kind of impulse problem.
bmitc 1y ago
> It isn't even a perverted implementation, we just overestimated ourselves. I agree. The Internet implementers were too wide-eyed thinking the Internet would "save us" instead of realizing that it would "slave us". The human brain is highly unintelligent emotionally. Look at a toddler's emotional capacity. That all lives inside us just behing a thin facade. The Internet both taps into that and exposes us to untold amounts of emotional taps. Humans evolved to be in relatively small social groups. It's obvious why we are completely overwhelmed by literally everything these days, because everything pushes outside of those small social groups.
Throaway152 1y ago
Hogwash. Give people smart phones that haven't been fine-tuned to be addictive and see what happens then.
walleeee 1y ago
You don't consider an application that is designed specifically to siphon all the attention it can to be a perverted implementation? Surprise, it's harder for people to self-govern when they are surrounded by mechanisms designed deliberately to subvert their capacity to self-govern.

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".
  - savolai 1y ago
    I like your clarity about personal responsibility, but it might also help to remember that human capacity for self-regulation isn’t uniform. We all grow through developmental stages and carry traits that shape how we handle influence, impulse, and awareness. The idea that “we just need herd immunity” assumes we’re all equally capable of recognizing manipulation or addiction, but as ericmcer noted, the evidence all around us suggests most of us are not quite there. In many ways, that belief in our individual mastery is part of what Western culture keeps overestimating, as if understanding the trick is enough to undo the conditioning. There also seems to be a deeper resistance in our western cultures to actually pausing, turning inward, and staying present with what’s happening inside us. We intellectualize awareness instead of living it. Real freedom will begin not with more information or clever systems, but with learning to meet our own impulses directly. To listen, to stay with discomfort, to see what drives us without immediately trying to fix it. Until we're willing to practice that kind of contact with ourselves, we’ll keep playing defense against the surface symptoms.
    - noduerme 1y ago
      I agree, and I don't want what I wrote to be read as "people just need more self control." I lack self control, that's why I have addictions and bad habits. I know other people who have even less self control, and some who seem to be immaculate. I don't care to be judged or to judge anyone else. I guess that's why I framed it as herd immunity. Here's what I mean (from an addict's perspective). What makes me hesitate when I reach for a cigarette or another drink, and decide maybe I should call it a night, is not the knowledge that it's bad for me. It's thinking about friends who have died from lung cancer and cirrhosis. As a whole, as a society, we've become more aware of the effects of certain poisons because we've witnessed the results and drawn the conclusions. So with screen addiction, we're just starting to witness the results on a generational level. Yes - screen use is a little different because it can have good sides as well. The screens are magical devices that can educate us and improve us, too. Someone addicted to watching their diet and exercise with FitBit has a different psychological problem space from someone addicted to watching people put ants up their nose on TikTok. I agree with you wholeheartedly that all of these things prevent us from focusing and staying present and dealing with real problems. I'm really just saying that removing any or all of them doesn't address that underlying void which causes people to seek consciousness altering substances or mass distraction. There is no distraction or game the human mind won't latch onto to avoid reality - that's the curse of knowing you're going to die. We need immunity against the surface thing that's eating us alive right now. But of course we'll keep playing defense against the next thing, because we have no immunity from it. Changing human nature seems to me like a utopian vision, which has never worked in practice. Yeah, we can romanticize some cultures that seem to be better at managing it. But give them a cell phone, a credit card and an Amazon account and you'll see how long it takes for them to fuck themselves over too. Those that do survive the modern world with things like a Sabbath day of rest or avoiding technology completely, do so because they have very strong communal practices that ensure individuals have little agency or choice - and they also happen to believe in a divine plane of existence beyond the mortal coil, which changes their calculus when making bad decisions. I'm not advocating for either thing. I think changing human nature is impossible, and I think heaven is a placebo. Changing individual human behavior to be more present and more self-aware, I think, is possible. But it's an incremental process. First you have to train each individual to notice a new danger. Then they can develop defenses against it. I guess I just said something very classically Conservative and yet heretical, but this seems like the way the process has to work, as opposed to wish-casting us to all look inside ourselves and put down that cellphone or that cigarette. We are flawed. We as a species take advantage of each others' flaws in a climb to the top of the monkey barrel. There's no way out, even if Elon thinks there is on Mars, or Zuck thinks there is in Hawaii. Herd immunity amounts to enough of your friends and neighbors gently telling you to wake up and take care of yourself. That's probably how a communally sane society evolves in the end, too - once it reaches some kind of equilibrium with its technology, its drugs, and its environment.
- skeezyjefferson 1y ago
  thats not true though is it. youre talking about a UI designer being some king of evil nazi... get real
  - ben_w 1y ago
    Straw man. There is a massive gap between "100k engineers have found a way to make most people in my demographic waste all their time by choosing to doomscroll" and "actually Nazis". Both are bad, but as different as chronic fatigue and terminal cancer.

jancsika 1y ago

[dead]

exe34 1y ago

We want tools that aren't designed to trigger our impulses.

ThrowawayTestr 1y ago

>In real Star Trek the holo deck would be used for porn This is lampshaded in Lower Decks

noir_lord 1y ago
DS9 had frequent if oblique references to it as well, Quark’s Bar had holodecks, I think Major Kira threatened to break his arm if she found out she featured as a character in one episode.
- ben_w 1y ago
  Possibly the same episode, but some creep was trying to get a holodeck session with her likeness, and when Quark managed to get her likeness, the revenge was to corrupt the holodeck program to put Quark's head on the body: https://www.reddit.com/r/startrekgifs/comments/i8hilq/cant_do_a_ferengi_theme_week_with_out_at_least/ https://www.reddit.com/r/startrekgifs/comments/i8hilq/cant_d...

hugh-avherald 1y ago

In 1980s Star Trek it was used for porn. (TNG: The Perfect Mate, Hollow Pursuits)

easton 1y ago
And the Replicator was locked out from producing mass amounts of unhealthy food (unless you told it not to). Maybe the lesson we should learn is our hardware should come with built in limits on use to keep our brains intact? That sounds dystopian.
- b00ty4breakfast 1y ago
  the freedom to be able to choose to engorge yourself on twinkies is maybe a good thing, the fact that some folks are willing and able to indulge that impulse is probably less good
  - jonfw 1y ago
    > the freedom to be able to choose to engorge yourself on twinkies is maybe a good thing In isolation, freedom is wonderful. In practice, maybe not? If a member of the star trek crew abused twinkies to the extent that they were lethargic or unhealthy, it would negatively impact the mission. There is some compromise between freedoms and social resposibility
    - Throaway152 1y ago
      Yes, and what if we saw what happened on Ferengi ships, with Ferengi replicators? Perhaps those are controlled by profit-seeking corporations, and have no such limits in the name of "personal freedom?" ;)

Dylan16807 1y ago

As long as you're scheduling use of the holodeck it's not going to be the same kind of impulse problem.

bmitc 1y ago

> It isn't even a perverted implementation, we just overestimated ourselves. I agree. The Internet implementers were too wide-eyed thinking the Internet would "save us" instead of realizing that it would "slave us". The human brain is highly unintelligent emotionally. Look at a toddler's emotional capacity. That all lives inside us just behing a thin facade. The Internet both taps into that and exposes us to untold amounts of emotional taps. Humans evolved to be in relatively small social groups. It's obvious why we are completely overwhelmed by literally everything these days, because everything pushes outside of those small social groups.

Throaway152 1y ago

Hogwash. Give people smart phones that haven't been fine-tuned to be addictive and see what happens then.

walleeee 1y ago

You don't consider an application that is designed specifically to siphon all the attention it can to be a perverted implementation? Surprise, it's harder for people to self-govern when they are surrounded by mechanisms designed deliberately to subvert their capacity to self-govern.