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Let's be clear. It is not the actual smartphones that do this; machines are designed and programmed by humans. Companies can choose to use technology to manipul
by zahirbmirza 1y ago
Let's be clear. It is not the actual smartphones that do this; machines are designed and programmed by humans. Companies can choose to use technology to manipulate our emotions and trigger our reflexes, and many do choose just that, often for financial gain.
- coffeefirst 1y agoIndeed. Delete everything that doesn't respect your time and attention and a funny thing happens: your phone becomes a tool again.
- api 1y agoIt’s the apps, specifically algorithmic social media and addictive games. The latter now also includes addictive gambling apps.
- changadera 1y ago"Guns don't kill people..."
- Cthulhu_ 1y ago[flagged]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- vaylian 1y agoKitchen knives do
- bognition 1y agoNot sure if you’re being coy or pushing the trope but you’re right guns don’t actually kill people. The bullets and blood loss tend to do that. That said, denying people access to guns does result in fewer gun related fatalities.
- loloquwowndueo 1y agoThe fall didn’t kill him, it was the landing.
- abc123abc123 1y agoThe landing didn't kill him, it was the impact.
- latexr 1y agoThe impact didn’t kill him, it was the organ failure and blood loss.
- loloquwowndueo 1y agoBlood loss didn’t kill him, ischemia did?
- abc123abc123 1y agoBut note that this is deeply unethical and amounts to denying people the right to self-defense, and by extension, denying people the right to freedom. The only thing that happens when guns are denied is the rise of corrupt and totalitarian politicians, and that the common man is either oppressed by them or by criminal gangs. Enter guns, and the common man can defend himself against both, which is a blessing. Thankfully it is now possible to print your own guns and build one easily, so this will become less of an issue in the future, when everyone, if they want, can carry concealed guns.
- Rebuff5007 1y agoI like this response to poke a hole in the parent comment, but it is worth noting that smartphones and guns are different in a pretty massive way: Smartphones can be useful and valuable in many ways separate from the ways they can be used harmfully. Guns exist only for physical violence (or to threaten physical violence).
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago> Guns exist only for physical violence Skeet shooting? Targets? Most gun owners never kill anything.
- AlecSchueler 1y agoThose are both acts of physical violence, just not against living creatures.
- swiftcoder 1y agoThat's a pretty extreme stance. If shooting inanimate clay pots is violence, wouldn't baseball also constitute violence?
- AlecSchueler 1y agoWhen I search a definition I get three results: 1. Behavior or treatment in which physical force is exerted for the purpose of causing damage or injury. In the case of the shooting examples the idea is to destroy the clay pots or damage the target. Baseball isn't quite on that level. I'm not sure what a gun can be aimed at without intent to damage it. 2. Intense force or great power, as in natural phenomena. A gunshot definitely feels like an intense force. You could argue it for a strike from a baseball bat but it's quite relative and of course you can strike gently much more easily than you can shoot gently.
- timschmidt 1y ago> In the case of the shooting examples the idea is to destroy the clay pots or damage the target. Baseball isn't quite on that level. I'm not sure what a gun can be aimed at without intent to damage it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_Hunt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_Hunt 1984. The point of clay target shooting isn't to destroy something, it's to build a skill and test yourself against an impartial system. That's what Duck Hunt captures and what made it popular. It's why shooting is a sport in the olympics. Plenty of social reasons too, beyond hunting and self-defense, it can serve comradery and grounding. Some folks practice archery. Some folks fish. Some folks practice martial arts which they hope never to have to use in anger, but which they find calming, centering, and empowering.
- blitzar 1y ago"rappers do ..."
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- hoosieree 1y agoThe purpose of a system is what it does.
- sudhirb 1y agoSome mild whataboutery: is the purpose of a cancer ward to fail to cure a large fraction of its patients[0]? https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpose-of https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpo...
- nucleogenesis 1y ago“what it does” describes the actions taken - cancer wards work to treat cancer (which is their purpose). Outcomes of what they do isn’t relevant to the point. The purpose of most social media companies is to manipulate people for financial and political gain which is what they do.
- sudhirb 1y agoI think that "manipulate people for financial and political gain" is an outcome of what social media companies actually do - I was under the belief that in a general sense, they want to maximise the time people spend on their apps so that they can sell this attention to advertisers, independent of whether or not a given ad buyer wants to manipulate people.
- nucleogenesis 1y ago> they want to maximise the time people spend on their apps so that they can sell this attention to advertisers This is where they manipulate in my mind. They maximize that time by exploiting human psychology, manipulating people into scrolling their feeds endlessly eh?
- fsflover 1y agoMy smartphone doesn't manipulate or track me. There are no invasive push notifications or ads. Sent from my Librem 5.
- ruguo 1y agoThe algorithms are getting kinda scary now — they probably know me better than I know myself.