When I was a kid in the 70s I remember reading a national magazine article about another kid my age who had his own computer. Amazing! This was something I wanted.
Reading on, it described how he had built his computer from electronics and operated it from his attic. He had quite a few programs for his computer. One he liked the most allowed him to simulate buying and selling of stocks.
If you've ever read any ads from that period, the implication is clear: computers are awesome because they are going to challenge us to become better people. They will teach us at a speed we can learn, they will reward us as we progress, and the obstacles and learning will get more and more advanced.
People who don't have computers are going to be missing out -- on self development.
Contrast that to my trip the other day by commercial air travel. Everywhere I went, people were on their phones. Were they learning foreign languages? Becoming experts at symbolic logic or global politics?
They were not.
Instead they were playing the stupidest games imaginable. Facebooking, taking quizzes where any moron with the ability to type would get 90% correct -- and then sharing the results with their friends.
Zuck and others figured it out. Computers don't have to be computers. They have to be video games. Who gives a shit whether the guy on the other end is learning to be a better person. Challenge them with idiotic trivial tasks, then reward them with blinky lights, sound effects, and the imagined praise of their peers. They'll do that shit all day long. All they need is more batteries.
His observation is that for basically a generation after the industrial revolution began, all those folks who were forced out of a job by rising mechanization had nothing better to do but drink themselves into a stupor. It wasn't until they all died off (the essay says "woke up from that collective bender", but realistically, most drank themselves to death) that we got all the institutional structures of modernity - universities, nation-states, stable 9-5 jobs, labor unions, civic engagement, democracy, public education, etc.
And then once we did that, society went on another bender with TV and spent all the time surplus from their 40-hour work week watching MASH and Gilligan's Island. It's interesting to watch re-runs of Gilligan's Island on YouTube today, because the production quality & scriptwriting is basically on par with a YouTube webseries that a few college film students could put together with iMovie today.
People will remain people regardless of what toys you give them, and most are not going to do anything useful with those toys. But it's amazing today just how much creative output has increased, on all levels, relative to the world I entered in the 80s. I think the stat, when I was at Google, was that for every second of real-time that passes, 9 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube. Even if much of that consists of unboxing videos and pirated movies and music collections and gaming streams, that's still such a huge increase over the creative output of the TV-centric world of the 70s and 80s.
I find myself in agreement and in strong disagreement at the same time. My fear is your thesis is just an extended form of whistling in the graveyard.
Yes, these patterns you mention hold true, and we'd be fools not to acknowledge them, but there's another pattern that you're missing out on: each generation of distraction devices is more engaging and more adaptive. Don't like what's playing in the symphony hall? Go down the street. Painful but doable. Don't like what's on the radio? Twist the dial. Much easier.
So it's not simply that mankind invents some cool new whizbang and then an entire generation zonks out, it's that mankind gets better and better at inventing Whizbangs that are more difficult to zonk out from. So let's assume, and I really hope you're right, that the pattern holds and 40 years from now we see some new rebirth in institutions and inventions. This round was more painful than the last. Much more painful. And the next round will be worse still. As AI slowly grows, it's going to go after the youth; the old folks are already hosed. So really it's game over once we find a way to hook new generations as they come along and keep them hooked.
Those other waves didn't work like this. I'd argue we're either already there -- or within 100 years of it happening. So yes, it's a beautiful thought and I wish you the best. I just can't find it in me to think of this as being a winning argument overall. In fact, your examples like Gilligan's Island are actually reverse examples. Cost of production of niche entertainment content means fewer people make less money targeting smaller audience segments. Doesn't take a genius to figure out that we're headed for machine-created custom content geared to the individual. Things automate. Digital things automate faster. This cyclical thing where new stuff comes along and distracts a generation will become continuous. The only question is when.
Is it actually getting more painful? The last round ended with a worldwide depression and the deaths of 60 million people, including two atom bombs. (I'm counting TV & radio as part of this round; the distractions in the last one included rum-running, flapper girls & jazz.) And as a percentage of population, even that was a fair bit less severe than crises of years past; even including WW2, there's a clear downward trend in number of war deaths per capita [1].
I think what you're describing is the hedonic treadmill. Happiness isn't designed, evolutionarily, to make us happy. It's designed to make us repeat the behaviors that led to our ancestors passing on their genes. So TV holds our attention because in our ancestral past, paying attention to moving objects was critical to our survival. Alcohol holds our attention because in the slightly-more-recent-past, drinking alcohol-laced water was a good way to ensure that pathogens in the water were killed. Sex & porn hold our attention because...well, self-explanatory. Nowadays, mindlessly clicking through Buzzfeed & HN holds our attention because in recent years paying attention to social trends has been critical for survival.
On a personal level, the way to achieve enlightenment is to realize that happiness is a construct of our genes & environment, and to decide to be happy regardless. Whistling in the graveyard, in other words. On a societal level, those addictive behaviors that don't actually lead to better survival will get flushed out of the gene/meme pool in the next major crisis, much like how past pasttimes like jousting, duels, and blood-feuds (and soon tobacco & fast food) became passe when they no longer led to status or survival.
It's interesting to watch re-runs of Gilligan's
Island on YouTube today, because the production
quality & scriptwriting is basically on par with
a YouTube webseries that a few college film students
could put together with iMovie today.
Ha ha! Woah, woah, woah, there. Hold on a second. You are biting off a chunk of effort and talent there, and throwing it in the trash, without considering some of the huge, huge, huge barriers to television production back in 1960's & 1970's. (...not Gilligan's Island, but MASH, kind of)
Film making used to be so absolutely and drastically different from the way it is now, and there was a lot of sacrificed wastage both in time and material, due to the level of technology and it's reliability back then.
Just to do things like little title sequences and animation, or audio production that didn't look horribly dubbed and poorly lip-synced required careful dedication and the effort of multiple people. All because of poor technology in general, a poverty of integrated circuitry, no software at all, and most post production being performed optically, in-camera and with practical effects. Indoor lighting alone was painfully costly, and doubly so, due to the level of technology of the day. The undertaking of some examples of matte paintings and set design of the era (again, not Gilligan's Island...) are kind of mind-blowing to read about.
There were also political aspects such as centralized access to broadcast networks, which were also subject to high technological overhead, dealing with analog signals and the limited reach of syndication across geographic regions.
You can't credit today's undergrad capabilities visible on youtube, and trash what used to require an army of people doing new things for the very first time, with the boon that off-the-shelf appliances and downloadable software make possible these days. It was a drastically different world 40+ years ago.
Sorry for the rant. This was an XKCD:386 moment for me. [0]
That's my point. Technology has advanced dramatically since the 60s and 70s. You used to need huge teams of highly-skilled technicians just to handle the mechanics of editing, lighting, sound-recording, special effects, etc. Now you need: iMovie and a cell phone. That's allowed small groups of college students to put out creative works on par with what a major studio could do 40 years ago.
Or to tie it back to the Facebook example that started this thread: I regularly have political discussions with my friends on Facebook (or with folks here on HN, for that matter). If I say something interesting, there's the chance for that to go viral through reshares. When I was a kid, my favorite part of the newspaper was the Op-Ed section, and I always wondered what you had to do to get featured in the Op-Eds. Now everybody has their own personal Op-Ed section, with their own audience, and the type of discourse that was previously reserved for institutionalized publications now happens routinely on the Internet.
It's just that standards have risen correspondingly, so instead of this seeming amazing, it just seems like everybody is shooting their mouth off. Which it is, of course, but people fail to realize just how huge an achievement everybody being able to shoot their mouth off is.
I think GPS has progressed to the point that it would be difficult to stray far enough to get lost, or marooned for that matter, on a 3 hour cruise. That said, the likelihood you would not be able to communicate the boats location or be found by the massive influx in boat traffic would be low.
What's interesting is that most (all?) do not. Everyone has the resources, for the most part, to produce high quality content, but most simply do not. We have all this potentially productive tech, and we waste it on mindless entertainment. Sadly, I think this is one of those moments which decide the winners and losers of tomorrow. If you, or your family, are sucked into entertainment, you (or they) are highly unlikely to discover or invent anything, or start a successful business.
Well it still takes quite a lot of work and skill to produce high quality content. It's just more accessible now than it was. You have to write scripts, gather people, find the location, do makeup and costumes, have all the equipment(lights, cameras, audio, etc) and know how to use it, manage how you get paid through ads and sponsors, manage fans, and editing is huge time killer.
Entertainment can be mixed with education, and even the most successful people are not robots and do not work 24/7. How many times have you seen education gamified just here on HN? Did you see how popular the recent "Hidden Figures" historical drama got? There are countless books that have made huge changes on society, and it would have been hard to do that if they weren't at least somewhat entertaining.
I get that there's a lot of mindless media though. The Endless Scroll on Facebook is notorious for being a time suck.
This is a fallacy. Creation and consumption are not mutually exclusive. We can all be creators. We can't all be creators with global reach, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't all try. And the more people try, the higher the bar will raise.
The essay you linked is amazing. And it is a direct counter to grandparent's comment:
> And I'm willing to raise that to a general principle. It's better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation. When you see a lolcat, one of the things it says to the viewer is, "If you have some sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can play this game, too." And that's message--I can do that, too--is a big change.
I don't miss it at all. Not one bit. It amazes me how much time my wife spends mindlessly looking though stuff on it and the negative feelings that sometimes flow out from it.
I recently read a truly fantastic speech by Charlie Munger, which imparted so much clear & concise information in an easily digestible way that I could instantly relate to, it made me realise just how little I know. Specifically, he mentioned that you really need to notice when technology is going to help you and when it's going to kill you. It's made me re-evaluate my current relationship with technology and how negative it can be at (most?) times. I hope over time, people start to question their relationship with technology a lot more. I already see hints of this with mainstream media in things like Black Mirror.
I am amazed at the quantity and quality of some of the content on something like Kahn Academy that I have no idea why I haven't made more of an effort to try and grasp topics that otherwise are completely alien to me. Many of these will probably help hugely in my day to day life as well.
Recently I listened to an interview with a UK fund manager called Terry Smith, who said they don't invest in tech shares like FB, Netflix, etc. as they are such new areas which are still open to such massive change. Long term (decades) they probably aren't safe bets i.e. Netflix is great now, but once upon a time so was Blockbuster.
I do wonder if "peak" Facebook is over. There's already a large generational shift happening in younger demographics to things like Snapchat, etc.
I do hope that whatever may or may not replace it has a better balance towards positivity.
Yup, deleted my account a while ago, haven't used it in years. Don't miss it one bit.
At home, we are starting to have a 'problem' because my wife is constantly on FB. In the car, on trips, in restaurants, at the dinner table. It's fucking ridiculous. I have said a few times "what can be more important on fb than what's going on in the present moment with your family?". Behavior hasn't changed much.
What is starting to freak me out is the generations coming up. I have two young kids - pre-fb age - and they already have some questionable habits on my wife's iPhone - as soon as it comes out, they wanna look at pictures, go on youtube and fight over it. The second they see it...
I've been programming since I was 13 - a long time ago. Back then, you sat down at a table/desk to use your computer and then when you left, you did other things. You went out to play with friends. Ride bikes around. Go swimming. Go look at bugs. Eat something.
Nowadays, things are different. Different though because we let them be that way. Most parents I know are helicopter and at meet ups I'm always hearing about some bad thing that happened to someone they don't even know or is half way around the world. I'm not saying we embrace ignorance, but unless you can do something about that - and you're willing - then I don't see the point of fb and the news cycle.
As a parent (and developer), I have to be proactive and get the family back into the world. I'm not against tech in general (I'm teaching my son Basic right now), but the pendulum has clearly swung a little too far in one direction and fb/snapchat/etc, with their addictive behaviors, in my mind, are not good things for society.
People, to me, just seem happier when they're not inundated with gossip and negative news. I'ld love to see fb lose its dominance on the people who have their faces buried in their phones constantly. But, I don't think that will happen anytime soon. As long as people are checked out of the real world around them, it will be that much easier for them to get sucked in to fb and the like.
My grandfather was a waterman on the Chesapeake Bay. Didn't graduate high school, didn't go to college. Worked on the water until a few months before he died.
After his death, my family went through his belongings to sort out what people wanted and what should be included in the estate sale.
In the living room, there was the obligatory wall-sized, floor-to-ceiling bookshelf. You probably know the one from your grandparent's house. Filled with the kind of books you'd expect: encyclopedia, book of the month, condensed versions of great books, random novels, et cetera.
Rifling through the first book, I noticed there were notes written in the margins. About every 5-20 pages. Sometimes short, sometimes longer. I smiled and carefully set the book aside.
But the next one had notes too. And the next. And the next. Almost every book in the entire bookshelf.
My grandfather was a quiet man by the time I knew him. Of the ten words over dinner sort. But whenever I find myself reflexively going through Facebook or whatever other quick fix the internet affords me, I imagine him coming in after a long day of physical work, opening a book to his bookmark, and reading and noting a few more pages. Every day.
This is nice story but how is this any different than looking at wikipedia for a bit, reading and making notes on a kindle, etc. Your grandpa sounds like the type to use tools for personal enrichment so shouldn't the tools not matter?
IMHO, Wikipedia is mile wide and half a mile deep.
Apart from knowledge special to a particular thing, it contains pretty much everything. If you ever think it is not the case, it is certainly the place to put your additions to instead of your private bookmark.
I'll grant that Wikipedia has certainly gotten better. (And continues to do so!)
But it still tends to have large blind spots where the source is (a) pre-digital or (b) of interest to a relatively small total number of people.
Try heading to your local library or a used book store (Goodwill works in the US), find a technical or history book older than ~1980, then attempt to find the content in Wikipedia. Especially in history, the hit rate isn't good.
> the place to put your additions to instead of your private bookmark
My private bookmarks won't get deleted by a zealous reviewer five minutes later.
It can be hard to contribute to Wikipedia without enmeshing yourself in the politics of it to protect your contributions from deletionists. This gets covered every few months on HN.
I really value Wikipedia but I have to agree. Also I agree that most of the world's useful knowledge isn't directly accessible online - though most of it may now be said to exist in some digital format, somewhere.
In the late 19th century there was a strong drive in academic history towards the idea of "total history": comprehensive accounts of everything that mattered from the beginning of recorded history to the current day. All these incredibly well educated German historians started outputting 20 volume world histories.
And no-one except a historiographical specialist would read them now.
Most misses out on an enormous number (at least half the books on my shelves, and I'm no bibliophile.) Google's got them, even though they can't let us see them.
I think that this an overstated case. Back in the "dawn" of online education I worked for a university where one school was swapping to using iPads for all their reading. You sign up you get and iPad with all your textbooks on it.
Initial polling was that students hated it from the get go. They wanted, needed textbooks. At the end of the first semester they did the polls again and, surprise, nobody wanted to go back to dead trees. Books are expensive and text search is amazing.
We switched to laptops for every student when I was in high school. I'd say that, even pre-Facebook, it was a boon to increasing computer knowledge, a decrease to attention span, and about equal on educational outcome.
I loved being able to play ROMs during class, but the difference between looking at information on the screen and in a book? Not fundamentally different.
I'd say where digital information shines is in post-secondary education where you're beginning to perform self-directed research, for the reasons you mentioned. And some students have a modicum of self control by then... ;)
Long time facebook addict. I was the kinda person that would check FB every 10 minutes -- yeah, it was a huge issue for me. I could tell it was effecting my work and job.
6 weeks ago I had my wife change my facebook password and log me out of everything. There was a genuine feeling of loss and withdrawal for the first 2 weeks. I felt very disconnected and felt like I was missing out. I asked my wife to sign me in on Sunday. I had 100+ notifications and a few messages. Only 1 direct message and 1 direct post - both from the same person about the same topic. Everything else was just junk.
It turns out that Facebook was providing nothing of value to me. It wasn't even connecting me to friends in a meaningful way. 2 messages relevant to me in 6 weeks. It is mind blowing how much time I was spending reading status and linked articles and looking at photos. Just wasting time and energy.
I'm not on FB, and haven't been for years. My problems are Netflix/Prime and news (Google News feed and Hacker News primarily). I'd literally LOVE a smartphone which limited me to maps/navigation, camera, minimal search (for looking up crucial info on the go), email, SMS, and Slack. Oh, and Kindle. I HATE that my damn smartphone makes it so easy to fritter my life away. And that the only alternative seems to be completely dumb phones and carrying around a separate camera and GPS device. Ugh. I don't want a dumb phone, or a feature phone, I just want a dumber smartphone. And hell, I'd pay what I paid for my Pixel (unlocked) for one. I want something which values my time, privacy, and life as much as I objectively do...But am, apparently, too weak to govern myself.
My issues suck because I can't simply have my wife reset my password. I can't remove the Google News feed. And as long as I have a browser I can see Hacker News. Sigh.
I have a love-hate relationship with the crappy smartphone i do have. Like you, i often read HN in dead moments but don't have FB, but find the smartphone useful for directions or quick picture snapping. I'm however still strongly considering going back to a dumb phone (although i've been saying that for about the full 1.5 years i've owned this smartphone) and to hell with the random pictures. Our grandparents seemed perfectly happy and could only capture a 24 roll of family photos every now and then (unless they were journalists or whatever, but you get my drift). I don't know. Part of me does fear i'd miss out on social events or get lost or not be able to take that one picture or...
Maybe something like FocusMe to dumb your phone down by blocking things? It says the app is free. I haven't used this particular blocker but I've used a different one and it's great. No willpower needed.
I am the same way with HN, Reddit, or news sites. Every day I don't check the site, I feel like I am missing out on some important indispensable news and information.
If I may ask, have you stopped using Facebook / changed how you use it now? Asked your wife to keep you logged out maybe?
I know what you mean with the irrelevant notifications. Lots of tweaking which notifications I get--still more than I'd like but it's an improvement. No games, no groups, no pages.
I've mostly stopped using Facebook. Besides that last check on Sunday, I haven't used it since. I still have an account, but I don't know the password. I could easily reset it myself, but its just enough friction to make it a pain. I also now have someone accountable to (my wife) and that helps a lot as well.
> I have two young kids - pre-fb age - and they already have some questionable habits on my wife's iPhone - as soon as it comes out, they wanna look at pictures, go on youtube and fight over it. The second they see it...
This is also 100% true of my dogs. As soon as there's a new dog toy in the house and one shows interest the other will begin to fight over it. There are some deeply-ingrained mammalian social behaviors that have nothing to do with technology, and won't change anytime soon. I'd be wary of blaming a phone ahead of instinct (though blaming businesses for exploiting those instincts is a bit different).
That said, I commend your efforts to try to maintain a happy medium for your family, that's really the best way to address these sorts of issues.
I'd be careful of making any conclusions of behavior if you remove the animals from the natural environment.
I've semi-wild street dogs in that really are not that interested in any new toys that are around the house, but they are clearly following and learning from each other on other things. I'd say this is one of the traits they have in common with us.
What they are mostly concerned is food, sex and fighting over territory with other dogs. When the puppies play the main function of it seems very clear to me (future battles). The dogs belonging to the same pack do not often fight each other since the established hierarchy is rather clear.
a) The biggest instigator by far is a dog we adopted at the age of 3 who was abandoned in the street and then spent another 9 months in the dog shelter. Each dog's mileage will vary.
b) I've worked with kids for years, and many display the exact same behavior, regardless of the particulars of the "shiny object". Fighting does not necessarily mean a physical altercation.
c) I've studied animal behavioral psychology, and have yet to find anything I learned that fails to apply to humans. We vary by degree, not kind.
I've noticed largely the same thing. I tried to purge it by unfollowing / hiding every major news source without blocking friends because MOST of the negative stuff in my feed was attached to links in those news sources.
The algorithm knows how to make you engage though. I'd get lost in really good debates with people over topics that we've discussed a before...and it just struck me about what a time sink it is because no matter how much we discuss things, nothing changes. All I'm doing it generating ad traffic for Facebook because they're keeping me engaged.
It's a lot easier to like a baby picture and walk away than it is to walk away from a topic you like discussing (and there are a lot of political topics that I like discussing). One of my good friends is a teacher and at some point in our discussion I made an observation that I'd never really thought of before (that had some negative implications)...and he did not take it well and got really, really upset with me. I apologized by phone, we cleared it up...
But at that point it really just finally hit the "enough is enough" point where nothing good is coming from this activity anymore...and I was done. And it's been great...except that now I notice how much time other people spend on it a lot more.
Regarding the observation point of contention, we were discussing the limits of current attempts at implementing school choice where schools had to opt in rather than giving people the money to go wherever they wanted. I realized that by including any type of religious name in a school, it basically legalized discrimination against poorer families since government funds wouldn't allow them to attend those schools. Struck me as an angle of the discussion I hadn't considered before and he took it as implying that he endorsed discrimination against those families - which would understandably upset anyone.
Yeah, I stopped using facebook completely, because I suddenly realised I was in the habit of checking it absolutely everywhere, no matter what I was doing. It was a habit, whenever my hands were free I would open my phone and go on facebook, even though it was always the same re-shuffled crap, negative news that were making me feel like shit, I'm normally a very positive and optimistic person, but I realised that absolutely nothing coming out of facebook was positive. Not a single thing. So I just said to myself - show some strong will, and stop using it. And I did. But god, it was hard for the first 2 weeks, then the compulsion started to go away.
And yes, I was exactly same as you - started programming around 12-13 years old, but when you stopped using the computer you would go and do other things. Now it seems to be literally everywhere.
I wonder about what my toddler thinks of my/my wife's smartphone habits, and the extent that we can permanently shape her attitudes toward technology before she reaches school age.
Children learn some things from peers, no matter what their parents do. For example, kids whose peers speak Standard American English will do the same, and will generally not have an accent — even if their parents do. In this case, it is probably a 'good' thing that kids are picking up skills from friends instead of parents.
But consider smartphone usage. Even if I could, by words and actions, impart to my toddler that technology is a tool and not a master to be heeded, does this attitude stand a chance of sticking once she starts school and sees older/richer kids with smartphones? What are effective strategies for inoculating against influences that you know will be coming?
I wrote an essay 8 or 9 years ago about how technology in general is eating us alive. I specifically mentioned Facebook.
The comments on HN at that time were quite interesting. "Oh, you don't understand. Facebook is just a fad", "I know what I'm doing, dammit!" and so forth.
ADD: Wow. It's one thing reading the usual noise in the comments today on this article. It's quite another thing to look at HN eight years ago and see the same kind of response. Doesn't reflect so well on us. I would much rather have been wrong.
Make no mistake about it -- enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or becoming happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It's seeing through the facade of pretense. It's the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true.
There's a very strong similarity in the meanings and origins of the words "enlightenment", "catastrophe", "revelation", and "apocalypse". Most of them have a sense of an overturning or of a revealing. There's the similar terms and expressions "the scales fell from my eyes", "I saw clearly", "flash of insight". They're not unrelated to concepts of creativity, genius, or intelligence. And there's the sense of the world "prophet" as "one who receives a message" (usually with a connotation of divinity).
In almost all of these, you might substitute a modern psychological concept: that of a dramatically changed world-view. The things you once believed, they are no longer true.
I watched the 1950s version of the RMS Titanic story some months back (I've not seen Cameron's remake), A Night to Remember. One lens through which to view that film is of the gradual revealing, the enlightenment, if you will, or lack of same, of various characters to the plight and fate of the ship, including that of several of those not aboard (and ultimately the world via headlines and news reports).
The first to clearly grasp the situation (as portrayed in the film) was the ship's designer, aboard for final adjustments as a shake-down. Then the captain and members of the crew. The contrast between the observers on the Californian and Carpathia, remote to the Titanic, struck me particularly (the first being utterly ublivious, the latter understanding, and also understanding that despite their own best efforts, there was no way to reach the ship in time).
Some passengers responded with denial, some with anger, some with outrage, some, assessing the situation and recognising their fate, with equanimity.
I don't know about "enlightenment" as that means different things to different people, but there are models of the world you can arrive at that appear more truthful to you than the models of other people that can be... very, very painful.
> It amazes me how much time my wife spends mindlessly looking though stuff on it and the negative feelings that sometimes flow out from it.
I felt like that, so I started unfollowing things/people that made me feel negative emotions and now my feed is full of Synthesizers and Dog Memes. My own little echo chamber!
I've run across a shorter (~15 - 45 pages or so) compilation or speech a ways back, but it's not turning up. He covers a certain set of ground fairly frequently though.
Did you actually see people playing facebook quiz games or did you just assume that? You literally don't know anything else about those people. You're just assuming they're not intellectuals because they were on their phones. Lol. I hate this uppity assumption that everyone has to be an intellectual, know 5 different languages, study quantum mechanics, and whatever else in order to be seen as worthy of being alive in this age.
Seriously. Anyone who saw me out in public on my phone would see me messing around on Twitter. They don't see me later talking bioethics in Star Trek with my friend, who does the same thing on his phone in public.
People who reduce others to what they can observe in public spaces are probably not as obnoxiously stupid as they seem, but I wouldn't know that by their public behavior.
Television went the exact same way. From 'a university in every home' to a continuous stream of entertainment.
There is some choice but how many re-runs of Discovery channel content can you watch (and most of that is infotainment, not actual stuff you'd want to learn).
The one great thing about the internet is that it is many-to-many rather than one-to-many in it's foundations so we do have a lot more choice than on TV and that university is there as long as you want to look for it.
There is some romanticisation of the past going on when you dismiss the Discovery channel as infotainment. I don't mean that it isn't infotainment, but what's wrong with that. TV has worked as an educator though it doesn't resemble University.
Ordinary TV watching people have a much broader mental scope -- spanning the globe than their ancestors did. They do better on IQ tests. The TV shows they watch are more complex than the Vauderville shows of old.
> There is some romanticisation of the past going on when you dismiss the Discovery channel as infotainment.
Today's Discovery Channel (and History Channel, and TLC, etc) - are vastly different than what they were when they started. All have definitely "dumbed down" to the LCD.
I understand that this is normal change for a business, especially one centered around TV entertainment. I also know that even in their prime, these channels were never as educational as, say, PBS and the like. But compared to today's programming, their earlier incarnation was vastly superior.
> Today's Discovery Channel (and History Channel, and TLC, etc) - are vastly different than what they were when they started. All have definitely "dumbed down" to the LCD.
While with "educational" channels it.comes off as dumbing down, there's a broader effect of appealing to narrow groups that drive popularity and then moving on to appeal to the masses. Outside of TLC/Discovery/History you can see this in Food Network (where the cooking slowly migrated to the Cooking Channel -- typically on more expensive cable tiers) while Food Network was taken over by food tourism shows, advertorial series, and reality/competition shows; MTV, where the music keot migrating to subordinate channels while the main channel was taken over by non-music reality/competition programming, and lots of other outlets.
"Challenge them with idiotic trivial tasks, then reward them with blinky lights, sound effects..."
I was once speaking to a dev who worked on slot machines video 'games'. He mentioned that making such games had a lot more to do with psychology and exploiting certain 'addiction' traits and less about game and level design concepts used in mainstream video games.
But the line is getting very blurred these days when I look at mobile games. At least you have the remote possibility of making some money in slot machines, as opposed to pay-to-play mobile games.
Oh yes, so I once worked on online poker games, and as part of the training material we all learned about variable schedules [2] and operant conditioning [1].
It's hard for me to use Facebook or play Candy Crush after being exposed to that material. On the other hand, the real heroin, loot-dropping Action RPGs, for some reason I can stand to play those in short spurts before losing interest. I'm not sure why, perhaps there's something wrong with their scheduling...
Addiction by Design by Natasha Dow Schüll is an excellent book about the video slots industry in the US, its behavioral engineering principles, and the effects it has on the lives of the people it hooks into pointless and expensive dopamine grinding.
Second this rec! I only play poker/blackjack at casinos but after reading Addiction by Design I'm almost scared of even trying a slot machine. The addiction extends to the casinos and politicians who become addicted to the profits generated by the addicts and it swallows the entire industry.
Is it a problem? If people are happy with that status quo, who are we to challenge them? It might not be the original intent, or the hopes of some (and only some), but if people are content with this outcome, there's little debate to be had.
The question presented here, though, is whether or not allowing Facebook to monopolize the industry is a threat to society. Services provided are irrelevant. This is a matter of centralization.
>If people are happy with that status quo, who are we to challenge them?
Don't mistake addiction for contentment. How many of those people would like to be doing something else, but just can't pull themselves away from the slot machine?
and how many people tell themselves they'd like to do something else (say, learn a language or instrument) as a form of ego-protection because it's "what sophisticated people do"? The underlying assumption that we should all want to learn Latin and to play the Cello seems to have been roundly invalidated, despite continuing to be played out in the public sphere.
Probably not very many people tell themselves that. Seems more like something cynical and judgmental people assume other people tell themselves.
But I can tell you almost anything creative / productive / self-developmental feels more rewarding than the time I fritter away doing nothing on the internet, like idly scrolling Reddit.
I'm not content that my default mode is to do things that never feel rewarding. So any minute I can reclaim for something more self-developmental, like a Duolingo Spanish exercise, makes my life a little better and satisfying in my own eyes.
But _why_ do you want to learn Spanish? Is it because you are planning an extended stay in a Spanish-speaking country, or have Spanish-speaking friends, or is it because you have a romantic conception of multilingualism?
My point was that people often seem to romanticise fairly arbitrary personal development goals as being a lofty intent, but when push comes to shove you'll find them in front of the TV or playing a game. What does that say about our internal reward system and the value of forcing yourself to do something that you tell yourself you'll enjoy over something you genuinely enjoy? The idea that entertainment is a "lower pursuit" and learning arbitrary skills is a "higher pursuit" smacks of social construction.
Could you substitute "eating healthy" and "exercise" into this line of thinking? Or other alternatives that you yourself might agree are "better" while maybe being difficult to choose to do, and not as "enjoyable" as some less ideal alternative action?
That something is "enjoyable" in the short-term does not mean that it is beneficial in the long term.
Doing drugs, getting high, gambling, any other short-term dopamine hit is easy, and feels good in the moment, yet can pretty easily be characterized as bad in the long term, and objectively worse than alternative actions that in the short term are not as pleasurable and enjoyable. I use obviously extreme examples to illustrate the logic.
Figuring out which pursuits and behaviors fit into which bucket certainly is not quite so straight forward. But I think the OP you are responding to has something right when they describe it challenging to escape the easy/addictive and replace it with the difficult/beneficial.
If you only characterized exercise as "practicing picking up a heavy weight and putting it over there. Why do you need to do this? etc." then certainly the benefits can seem ridiculous.
That there is no direct practical need to learn Spanish, doesn't mean learning to speak it doesn't garner ancillary benefits.
There's a balance to be had here. I've tried to "be creative" all the time and it just doesn't work. You need those moments idly scrolling Reddit or HN (or going for a walk outside, or vegging out with TV or videogames) for your brain to a.) have new stimulus to process and b.) have time to process it.
I'd be terribly unhappy if all I did was surf Reddit, but I was also equally unhappy when I just tried to work, produce, and learn all the time.
I mean, if you really want to take it to that extreme, why is the argument against facebook videogames and not videogame culture as a whole? Seems like in this case, Facebook is just a scapegoat.
I completely disagree that videogames are bad (in moderation, of course, as all things). Games often involve problem solving, learning systems, practice and continual improvement. Compare this to other forms of entertainment media and games look good. There are vapid videogames on mobile and social which are little more than slot machines, but that doesn't mean all or most games are fruitless wastes of time. And even in mobile, if you get deeply into many of the top performing games, there is a lot of thinking and strategy involved. It's far from idle, passive, worthless entertainment.
What's more, games often help people connect to others, sometimes from around the world, in a shared interest. For people who are socially stressed or are going through a rough time without enough support in real life, this can be extremely helpful. And even for those who have plenty of social life, it's often fun to meet people in game.
In my opinion, this is the most dangerous aspect of games, though - they can fulfill that feeling of achievement that would otherwise belong to creative work, and satiate the need for that kind of work. The problem is that the achievements aren't helpful in the same way that eg building a company/invention/coffee table are.
I say this as a lifelong game player, and it's not to discount their positive effects - I think I'm a much better strategist and planner as a result of playing games as a kid.
Thank you! I very much agree with this. Most claims I see made against video games (as a whole or phone-based) tend to be made from atop a pedestal, and usually with very little willingness to open one's mind to the plausible benefits (visible or otherwise).
Video games covers a very broad market, but the race to the bottom in price in some segments seems to have been followed by unproductive time sink mechanics made by people who didn't realise (or perhaps didn't care) that Cow Clicker was a parody.
I've had to put the kongregate minigames site into my own /etc/hosts file as 0.0.0.0 to stop myself playing the "Idle"/"Clicker" genre.
Positive games do exist, but they are thinner on the ground than they used to be. I think.
> Games often involve problem solving, learning systems, practice and continual improvement.
A lot of videogames focus on instant gratification and variable time rewards. There have been some games focused on problem solving - games where instead of simply playing you'd find yourself spending 20 minutes looking over your handwritten notes trying to puzzle something out - but they're a minority.
Many things that are harmful in large doses but beneficial in moderation. Alcohol has many beneficial effects when used in moderation, but too much is both immediately a problem and can cause systemic problems. Drugs (of the legal/medical sort) are specifically used because of their beneficial nature, but most of them cause harm when used in excess.
The problems come when something has a feedback loop which promotes more usage beyond normal usage. Alcohol has this, and so does heroin. Different games have this to different degrees. Like most things I've mentioned, different people are susceptible to this to different degrees, which complicates the issue.
I think most of those who've responded to you recognize the argument is against Facebook, videogames, tv, etc and in general all vapid time sucks designed to keep the user in an unenlightened state
I'm not sure I agree there. I think most of the responses were in the same vein as "look at these mindless sheep who can't lift their heads from their phones".
> Can you judge how people should live their lives better than they can?
Me personally? No. We as a society in which that person lives? Yes, to the degree that it affects us. That's why we have public education and vaccination.
If you want to retire to a remote cabin in the woods with a ton of heroin and finish out your days, I have no complaints. If you want to do it such that others need to clean up after you (whether that be garbage on the street or an unpaid hospital bill from an emergency room visit), then you are subject to their desires to a greater or lesser degree. You aren't allowed to have the benefits of society without the drawbacks. That's what civilization is.
Oddly, most of the garbage that accumulates on the streets where I live consists of empty cigarette packs/butts, coffee cups, beer and soda cans, junk food and fast food wrappers, etc. And the hospitals are full of people suffering the consequences of recklessly consuming those things.
It's not all that odd. What society deems is beneficial as a whole is not necessarily what is beneficial for an individual. It's not necessarily beneficial even, it's just what's been decided is. A society without caffeine might be better off, but we've decided we don't believe so for a multitude of reasons. That doesn't mean we are correct, it just means we've made a choice.
Cogs that don't fit get ground down. That's not meant as some dig against modern society, all human groups feature this to some degree. Your prototypical small native american tribe is no different.
>If people are happy with that status quo, who are we to challenge them?
Because that happiness is an illusion. One that prevents them from seeing the seriousness of their situation. Whether it's texting-and-driving, or climate-change-denial. This "tool" is going to do us more harm than good.
Can you qualify that real quick by providing evidence that you are more capable than others at identifying degrees of reality vs illusion in activities?
what is "needed" seems more like a post-facto rationalization for each individual. everyone's future is uncertain. extra education generally provides more options and flexibility, while the same doesn't really apply to a more limited education.
Excellent point about centralisation. I can't help but feel many people either misunderstood or didn't read the article. In my view, the power Zuckerberg wields is staggering, although I've seen many postings here with contrasting views on that level of power.
The article is excellent. It's well structured and insightful. It also leads us to ask excellent questions and provides relevant content to mull over. As an example, Zuckerberg's message was fascinating in what it didn't say.
My superficial value add to truthhawk's article is as follows.
1. How much sway does Facebook actually have? Do most people seek information outside of Facebook? If they hear/see something enough, does it become truth?
2. Would Zuckerberg want to be president? I've always viewed the President as being a servant to power brokers behind the scenes. Wouldn't Zuckerberg have more influence by striking deals with potential candidates and hold leverage through Facebook profile analysis? Does Zuckerberg have the power to be more than a president?
3. Does anyone actually have the power to take on Facebook? Might that person be subjected to extra criticism (eg. during the next election) if they don't play ball?
4. Facebook exists and it is particularly powerful. If you were to decentralise the leadership (as discussed by truthhawk), would that add benefit? How? I see potential for a fragmented committee, or worse. Could Zuckerberg be like Jobs was to Apple?
5. Long term, assuming Facebook and Zuckerberg survive the test of time, who takes over? What sort of people would gravitate to that role? What might that mean for this wealth of information on many citizens of the world? Even if Zuckerberg is a benevolent dictator, the potential vacuum of power that will be created horrifies me, especially thinking about the personalities that may fight for it.
I don't believe Facebook will disappear any time soon. There are serious questions around Facebook that we desperately need to consider. This article is excellent as it helps focus us on this goal.
This is why I (mostly) love HN. It really makes me think about the world around me in so many interesting and meaningful ways. I may have given up on MSM and once-brilliant sites like Ars Technica (who now thrust biased gender and governmental politics down our throats). I hope HN can keep its secret sauce flowing.
The best aspect of social media is social cohesion, and Facebook is decent at it. Being able to maintain, develop or otherwise keep in touch with people has a huge impact on quality of life.
The tragedy of Facebook is that it has integrated my ability to connect with friends and random people with 'news' using perverse solicitous internet marketing.
Of course, most of these temptations I've requested, essentially forcing myself to scroll through a Reddit-like waste of time just to see what my cousins or friends are up to. Yet the inertia of bad decisions is hard to steer against.
I'd view more ads or pay $100/month if Facebook was purely about individuals, had no brands or influencers, and it was just a way to maximize social cohesion.
If Facebook introduced a big "No News" button as an easy way to opt out of the noise, would it make the world a better place? Zuckerburg is making the world a better place through philanthropy but in business he's in the unique position of being able to magnify human ideals and spark a type of social enlightenment and cultural renaissance.
> taking quizzes where any moron with the ability to type would get 90% correct -- and then sharing the results with their friends.
This bothers me so much for some reason. Title a kindergarden math quiz "Only people with an IQ of 150 can pass this test! 90% of people cant!" and when people get a 100% on it, they will inevitably share it, to show off. And then another person sees it and says "there's no way cousin Sally could get that good of an IQ score! I've got to try this to prove that I'm better!"
I had this realization recently. The web is undoubtedly a great thing. Computers have obviously made our lives unbelievably better. But I'm starting to seriously question if the smartphone will ultimately be seen as a positive development for humanity. To be sure, we need modern telecommunications. Late 90's MMS phones covered this use case completely. But this world where everyone has an attention stealing machine in their pocket that feeds them nonsense 24/7 is seriously starting to affect us.
Add to this the economic absurdity of having multicore 64b, HD display, wireless, Gigs of ram and 10H of battery life; just to do a high res version of the 80s television/teletext. And don't forget to upgrade with the new model, because you clearly need an octocore to swipe right.
I'm cynical but I liked that race at first. A smartphone was cool, but I agree that it's not the result I planned.
It's even a little more absurd, because it seems that society aggregates issues, and try to develop solutions, but the solution just replace the other sources of problems, so on and so forth. Moving target.
I'm sure soon some people will pay to have disconnected areas to relive how it was before.
ps: the easiest way to get smarter is to avoid relying on society, and solve problems on your own. For that reading an old book with a pencil nearby is probably more than enough. society and tech are religions somehow; distortion field.
In your opinion its a problem. The arrogance to say you know better than everyone else in such absolute terms is astounding.
I would counter that it is completely fair for someone to want to escape reality and grab simplistic rewards to avoid the absolute drudgery of being crammed into a plane with noisy, rude, and smelly strangers for an extended period of time. What kind of deep thought is possible in this environment?
Right?! They're on a plane--excuse me, commercial air traveling mass transportation vehicle--and they're expecting to see people studying Ulysses and learning Latin.
I really can't expand anymore on the article itself, so I'll just respond to your expressed sentiment. I'm interpreting you as feeling that the core problem with FB is that there is no one there "who gives a shit whether the guy on the other end is learning to be a better person."
I contend both that that is not the case, and that that concern is the precise inversion of what a developer's goals should be. FB is scrambling to ensure its users get the "correct" news on their feed, and every feature rollout has been intended to increase the social harmony among its user graphs. However, making those the focus requires the psychological manipulation you touch upon in your post. FB's product ends up not being a general purpose forum where people can express their social selves, but rather a precisely crafted echo chamber whose interface is a general purpose forum.
Don't have any contempt for the FB users you see at the airport, they're just as human as you and me. Somehow though, I've recently been able to get actual fun and satisfaction from FB. Turns out when you use it to just post links you like, or to write out and discuss ideas you have, or to check the latest Hegel memes, or show off something you've made, or to play meta games with people, or to just chat, you can have a good time without almost any of the addicting BS.
On a more serious note, I feel this is the right attitude towards the kinds of things. I've never had a problem with my feed and if something is uninteresting I just block it, period. The feed always ends up being a mirror of the users curiosities and interests so if you have a problem with it it's up to you to change it. Technology is a gateway to knowledge and self actualization, but you can't force those things into people, it's their journey.
I'll play devil's advocate. Humans are social, no way around that. It'd be much simpler if we weren't but then we wouldn't be human. Social media is what you make of it: it's a tool, or if you let it be, a game.
For Facebook, 95% of the time I only use Facebook Messenger and Events. Both of these things are only as intrusive and distracting as you choose for them to be, and are very efficient for communicating and organizing events. The other 5% I scroll through the news feed and unfollow anything non-wholesome or people that I don't keep in touch with anymore, which leads to a trimmed, much less populated feed.
Snapchat I find redeemable because it's a much more honest representation of people's lives, since they can have greater control of who sees their content and the knowledge that it is impermanent. Instagram and Facebook have both carbon copied the app's functionality in a testament to that value.
Instagram is definitely more on the side of the video game, but I use it as creative inspiration. There are some incredibly talented photographers on Instagram, and I also follow a lot of motorcycle photoblogs for build inspiration.
Reddit has helped me solve so many problems and has given me so much helpful advice that I can forgive the time I've wasted there.
tl;dr use social media productively and this vilification won't be necessary.
> tl;dr use social media productively and this vilification won't be necessary.
But that doesn't address that problem of Facebook acting as an intermediary for an increasing amount of our communication. Using Facebook "productively" still provides the company with an opportunity to aggregate and use your personal information to further its financial goals.
True, but I didn't because the OP didn't either. It is a problem that hasn't been solved yet, and for me, so far it's been an worthy compromise. I avoid putting anything truly personal on my Facebook - it doesn't have my home address, I turn location settings off, I never send sensitive information over Facebook messenger, etc. I try to minimize what they have, and I think that's an acceptable tradeoff.
I agree with this. Perhaps the 'it's a problem' for me is defined more as 'This is a problem, it just goes to show how much humanity has these wonderful innovations and most people never seem to use them to better themselves'. I bet people said the same thing about books when they first showed up en masse.
In fact, there was mass hysteria around Dime Novels once:
I generally agree with the idea though. It seems as if the better we get at sharing honest to god information, learning materials, and the like, the more the technologies to deliver that inevitably get used to deliver entertainment over substance.
> Were they learning foreign languages? Becoming experts at symbolic logic or global politics?
I'll bet some of them were doing these things or things equally meaningful. Probably in roughly the same proportion as they would have been 40 or even 400 years ago.
Most people don't spend significant portions of their lives learning things or challenging themselves. From what I can tell this has always been true.
It speaks more to you as an individual that you believe the people around you should be pursuing things like "symbolic logic" or "global politics" rather than mindless games. Who are you to indict others for their hobbies, and on what authority can you judge their hobbies' value?
Look, HN is becoming a self-parody with this anti-Facebook circlejerk. People are allowed to have different lifestyles, and despite the inane comparisons to heroin that are being tossed around this thread, it's really not indicative of a systemic societal failure that people rather play Candy Crush on their phone than whatever noble pursuit you'd have them do while waiting to take off.
Take a look at that old photo of people reading newspapers on the train sometime. People thought the sky was falling with "new media" then, too. Every new media goes through an initial renaissance before it proceeds to mainstream appeal and accessibility. Not everyone wants to be like that kid you read about who built his own computer.
> Contrast that to my trip the other day by commercial air travel. Everywhere I went, people were on their phones. Were they learning foreign languages? Becoming experts at symbolic logic or global politics?
> They were not.
I am currently using my phone to learn mandarin using the "Hello Chinese" app [1]. It doesn't require internet connection for lessons that you have already downloaded, so it is perfect for long trips and such.
my first foreign language was rather obscure (Pashto) so I had to learn it in a classroom without any apps or other programs to help with self study. Learning using the hello chinese app is so much better compared to classroom learning it just boggles my mind. I can go at my own pace, it uses sound recognition to grade my pronunciation, I can study words and phrases, everything. It is a wonderful tool
Ironic the the apex of decades of some of the greatest mental achievements of the last century (Von Neumann, transistor, IC, compiler design, nuclear war survivalable networking protocols, etc) has been coopted to create a planet of Eloi. You can't make this stuff up.
Steve Jobs, tellingly, did not let his children use the Ipad.
Lmao! We get, what, around 20 years of a social networking boom and you take it to mean that thousands of years of amazing work has been coopted? Sorry, I don't know what world you're living in. The world I'm in has this Facebook crap, sure. But we're also getting into very advanced genetic engineering, we're starting to develop a yearning for space travel, we're starting to worry about advanced AI/robotics taking over our jobs, we're beginning to think about climate change and what we can do about it, etc. Kids are learning programming. Private space industry. Large Hadron Collider. Dark matter and dark energy. Exoplanets.
Some people just love overreacting and arrogant intellectualism.
The hell do exoplanets have to do with anything in this thread? Half your "points" are just stream-of-consciousness Scientific American covers. Blah blah, exciting times, whatever. Irrelevant.
The other half, your societal analyses, are 50 years out of date. Climate change, space yearning, AI fear - you'll find it all in 60s and 70s sci fi.
None of which even remotely addresses the "planet of Eloi" assertion. You may as well have just pasted the lyrics to "We Didn't Start The Fire".
The argument I made in my essay eight or nine years ago is still true, it's just gotten worse: technology continues to evolve to hack into the human brain in order to commandeer its attention, not assist it.
If you want to look at it in terms of predator-prey relationships, right now we have a predator evolving to eat the most valuable finite resource on the planet, the attention span of the apex lifeforms. So far it looks to be running the tables.
Before it was FB/Internet/Phone games, it was TV, so we're perhaps just continuing further down a well worn path.
See Roger Water's underrated Amused to Death album or the book that inspired it Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Showbusiness.
Yes. Despite the potential, the most profitable/frequently used applications seem to appeal to the most basic parts of our brains, and thrive off of providing the dopamine hit. And just like heroin addicts, we've become slaves to getting that next high.
On the other end of the spectrum, my wife participates in a medical research group within Facebook, because the group creator and that community find Facebook more natural to use.
I share your concern but we can extend the problem to mobile phones.
that is such a bleak zero sum view. I can distract myself and improve myself at two different times. I've maintained and made some great relationships using facebook. I know people that still self improve using computers. I find it greatly amusing that people can have this opinion.
* One of the most addictive products the world has ever seen (Opioids, another such product, were used to overthrow countries)
* The single most important media company in the world
* Controlled by one person
Threat to free society? Jury's out. But at this point, it certainly seems worth regulating.
(Edit: The above points are not meant to paint FB/Zuck in a bad light. To their credit, they've built an incredible ecosystem and a mind-bogglingly good product. We all strive to create sticky/addictive products.
My point is: When your product is incredibly addictive to a large chunk of humanity, regulation should be considered)
> When your product is incredibly addictive to a large chunk of humanity, regulation should be considered
Yes. Let me compare FB to a phone company. When telephony was first invented, it quickly turned out to be addictive to a large chunk of humanity. Did we leave it unregulated? No, we didn't. In fact, there was regulation stating that telephone conversations may not be eavesdropped by telephone companies. Other regulations allowed other companies to be active on the same network so people could call eachother, regardless of their operator.
But somehow, we think that these types of regulation should not apply in this day and age. Strange.
This is actually a great comparison. FB has > 1 billion users, and it would be great if through gov't regulation those users could chat between whatsapp, snapchat, apple messenger, etc.
In the past this would be deemed "anti-competitive", now it's perfectly reasonable from an "innovation" standpoint.
It's the inconvenience of having multiple accounts and logins with multiple services. Sure it's not as inconvenient as having multiple phone line accounts so AT&T customers can talk to Bell Atlantic customers but at the end of the day, your data is providing revenue to these companies and the companies continue to silo themselves.
Wouldn't that be easily solved if all the other services offered a "log in with Facebook" feature and routed messages to other people who also logged in with Facebook?
I assume there's a gaping flaw in this idea that I can't quite see at the moment ;-)
Part of the gaping flaw is that Facebook will very quickly disable your API account so you can't offer login with Facebook, if you're competing with them. :)
That's a great comparison. Facebook has taken on that kind of quality for me. It's become one more communication channel. Fantastic for keeping up with my friends who use it, but not intrusive. I'd say telephones are still addictive (along with email and other forms of communication as a whole), but more in the category of food being addictive than drugs. Yes, some people used to ring up $2000 phone bills, but the more common case was legitimate communication.
One theoretical framework that justifies regulating telecoms, but not necessarily Facebook is that telecoms usually have special privileges granted to them by governments, up to and including monopoly status.
Building the hardware layer for a telecom network requires access to public land, and often private land where the landowners may not be cooperative. In exchange for the government enabling the telecom to build its network, the government gets to impose rules, sometimes even mandating competitor access to said network.
Facebook is different. The internet is already there, and is not owned by any single entity. Facebook does not need to compel cooperation from anyone to operate. It does not invite regulation in the same way a telecom does.
Now, there are plenty of people who believe that anything is fair game for the government to regulate if it's in the public interest, but I think that position is less universally accepted than that of trading special privileges for regulation.
> Yes, some people used to ring up $2000 phone bills, but the more common case was legitimate communication.
Telephone tariffs in some parts of the world made long distance relationships very hard. Monopolists (often government controlled) took consumers to the cleaners every chance they got.
Only in the last two decades have prices finally been coming down.
So even those $2000 phone bills could easily be legitimate communication.
Today I'm still very conscious of the time I spend 'on the phone', especially when abroad. On mobile phones I've been hit more than once with a surprise bill because of living close to the border that was in that neighborhood (but the phone company was good about dropping those charges because even if I was on Dutch soil my phone kept switching to a German base station that was very strong where I lived).
>But somehow, we think that these types of regulation should not apply in this day and age. Strange.
Who is the "we"? I certainly think it should apply. I'd argue that the main difference in this day and age is that the "we" now includes corporate entities as persons who, thanks to Citizens United, now hold the lions share of political influence to affect whether regulations like this come to be.
I don't think FB itself is the structural threat to free society - treating corporate persons equally with flesh and blood people under the law is the structural threat. FB is just one of the more frightening corporate mega personages at the moment. Any of them would be equally so if they were as adept at people farming.
It's safe to assume data miners won't be interested in designing a neutral ecosystem.
Consider the Open Mustard Seed project;
Open Mustard Seed (OMS) is an open-source framework for
developing and deploying secure and trusted cloud-based
and mobile applications. OMS integrates a stack of
technologies including hardware-based trusted execution
environments, blockchain 2.0, machine learning, and secure
mobile and cloud based computing. This platform enables
the managed exchange of digital assets, cryptocurrency,
and personal information. Harnessing mobile and personal
data, OMS establishes a sovereign identity, pseudonyms,
and verified attributes and provides each user with a
3-factor biometrically-secured digital wallet. This gives
individuals control over their identities and their data
and supports the formation of decentralized, responsive,
and transparent digital ecosystems.
* Sadly, the developer site is down at the moment, but the design considers a standardized set of APIs to verify identities and allow personal ownership and hosting and licensing of your social media data.
> Other regulations allowed other companies to be active on the same network
well, this sort of thing is due (at least in part) to the physicality of infrastructure.
adding more telephone lines (and gas, electrical, etc) is welcomed for the first person to come through, but subsequent businesses/developers have a LOT more pushback if not outright blockage from local authorities.
I disagree with those saying that this is a good comparison. Telephone companies were not regulated because they were addictive, but rather because they are a public utility. Facebook possesses none of the characteristics of a public utility:
-Supplies an essential good or service
-Prohibitively expensive to replicate/enormous initial investment
I was telling people last year (before the tide shifted against FB) that there will one day (decades away) be Big Tobacco style litigation by governments against Facebook for intentionally making their service addictive when they knew the harmful effects (e.g., depression). I did not expect the sentiment to change so dramatically but I guess people are looking to blame anyone for the election.
Man I agree with you 100%.
I have been trying to get this message across whenever these topics come up in discussions with people.
We are risking the minds of people.
Take this example. So many mobile games which essentially leverage the thrill of gambling to make their games addictive. Of course, this only increases micropayment revenues. How many people get hooked and waste hundreds of hours? How many kids!?
To me this is the same as cigarettes. Why do we regulate it? Because the average person is unlikely to know its harmful effects. What about these applications? Which are profitable by tapping into our desires and impulsive tendencies.
okay, then let's regulate donuts, let's regulate hacker news because I just can't stop myself from checking it everyday. let's regulate cereals and candy, etc. Oh and coffee too. oh and toothpaste as well, i can't help but brush my teeth two or even 3 times a day!
my sister has an addicition to shopping for clothes, so that's going to need regulation, as well as my friend's action to watching tv, etc.
Of course, the laws and regulations that have cropped up sometimes are in response to the addictiveness of particular vices. That's why we don't regulate shopping for example. It is kind of disingenuous to put "shopping for clothes" and nicotine addiction on the same footing.
I agree with much of what you said. I'm not sure where I'd place Facebook in this case. Honestly, I'm not sure I'd make ruddct's argument for regulation based on the addictiveness of facebook more than I'd make the old anti-trust, money in politics and unchecked influence arguments.
Cigarette addicts can lead useful, productive lives before cancer or emphysema takes them out. Gamers on the other hand twitch away the best years of their natural lives, in some self-chosen dark sweatshop. Cigarettes then arguably the more benign of the two.
I feel like your conflating 2 arguments here. And I agree with 1 but whole heartedly disagree with the other.
Many Mobile games do abuse psychological elements. Agree they shouldn't abuse and should be stopped.
Waste hundreds of hours? I thoroughly enjoy hundreds of hours of game play so I don't see anything wrong with that.
Tapping into our desires? What's wrong with tickling our fancy?
Tapping into our impulsive tendencies. I feel like this is abusing human psychology again.
I'm not a gambler but I have felt the excitement and joy of it. I also love video games. I see nothing wrong with either of these things. But there is a clear distinction between the rewards of playing and the manipulation a company takes to enrich their bottom line.
Facebook will remain an "ads" company for as long as it's profitable. Marketing dollars will always need go somewhere, so I'm not convinced the advertising market will just wither and die in the face of adblockers. As long as Facebook commands an army of eyeballs, its advertising business will be profitable.
Facebook has shown a willingness to diversify its social properties via synergetic integration. See: whatsapp, instagram.
Facebook will likely continue to diversify its business. For example, it could easily repurpose its excess hardware to enter the cloud computing market and compete with AWS/GoogleCloud. I would be surprised if this is not on the roadmap.
Yes. As we've seen, the only way to stop such things, is for the next disruptive company to come along and fuck their shit up.
Something will likely come along. My guess is that it will be spam-related, which will make the FB user-experience too difficult to use to get a quality experience. FB will try to appeal to government for protectionist legislation, but it won't happen fast enough.
The question is if you can hold out long enough and if the change you predict will happen fast enough.
That can get expensive quickly, so it's not quite the inverse of holding stock where the only downside is how far the stock can drop, not how far it can go up.
Except it's not physically addictive. It's at most psychologically addictive and the withdrawal is not terribly painful. Just stop using it. Distract yourself with a good novel for a couple of days and it's done.
That was not my experience. I had a goal of reading 52 books last year, one for each week of the year. I reached 40 but never felt the need to post any cover photos on FB. Your relationship with it changes quite fast once you start finding other things to do rather than hang out on Facebook
Facebook is a fad that will pass. Pretty soon people will be onto the next big digital media thing and forget all about their facebook accounts. But targeting and regulating a single enterprise just because it is too popular will set a dangerous precedent in law that will reverberate throughout the ages.
There have been other dominating monopolies before, (ma bell telecom monopoly comes to mind) which was much dangerous than a website.
Also facebook isn'really a media company. Yes they have some news stories, but that's not what people really go to facebook for, people go there to keep updated on their friends, which doesn't seem like such a threat.
Yes internet and social media addiction is bad and dangerous, but that is something that would exist with or without facebook and can be addressed in other ways besides regulating facbeook
> Facebook is a fad that will pass. Pretty soon people will be onto the next big digital media thing and forget all about their facebook accounts.
I used to think Facebook would become a passing fad as well, but we've been saying this for a while and nothing has changed other than Facebook growing larger in size.
> Also facebook isn'really a media company. Yes they have some news stories, but that's not what people really go to facebook for, people go there to keep updated on their friends, which doesn't seem like such a threat.
The Facebook brand is tenacious and it's pivoting into other things. Take for example the recent deal to stream live MLS games [1] or news outlets leveraging Facebook Live for supplementary content. Let's also not forget that, sadly, Facebook is a primary source of news and information for many people. I think the days of Facebook being only about status/friend updates are over.
I've been thinking about this, and personally, I thought Twitter was done years ago. To me, it was just a media that was designed specifically to give a few well-privileged famous celebrities a way to spew their empty garbage to the masses. It's very much a one-way "popular kids" channel.
I thought that most people would find it boring and useless and abandon it. But I think it's done the opposite. It's fed into the tabloid-news impulse of the lowbrow class, and only become more popular.
The genius of FB is that when sub-groups of people piss each other off, they can just unfriend, block, and ban, and they're in a nice comfy bubble.
The next thing that comes along will probably be both of these. With better AI-generated/sourced content.
I just started using Twitter this past year. What you get out of Twitter really depends on who you follow, which is not obvious at all to get a hook into and find good accounts you'd value hearing from. I luckily found a few good ones, and you find more by being exposed to content they retweet. It has been a great boon to me because I found a few cogent tweeters of the kind of politics and analysis I like, who I would not have been exposed to otherwise. I feel like it has expanded my political awareness and given me a better informed commentary than I'd find elsewhere. Not just empty heads there. You also get some minor amount of conversational interaction with them and others, and real time commentary on unfolding current events, and some of the jokes that get retweeted are funny. It's easier to see the value of Twitter on the inside than from the outside and its gimmick of short messages.
A lot of content to shift through, so following too many is not so good, and no real way way to sort them into themed content or more favoured tweeters, is my issue.
Facebook is about talking (and texting, and instagraming) to your friends (and family, and acquaintances, and people you can't quite remember). That's not a fad, that's a general human desire.
Facebook the company might fail in the market and be replaced by someone better, just as they did to their early competitors. The desire for this kind of communication is universal though (and Facebook surely did much less to invent the idea than Graham Bell!). It's not going away.
Facebook is a de-facto standard of communication. They have your info, you friends info - and you need FB to find and share with others.
The technology medium is completely irrelevant.
It's like saying 'hospitals are not important for saving lies, what matters the most are 'roads' because that's how sick people get around'.
My Space was never a communication mechanism, it was almost purely social, moreover, it didn't have broad appeal. My mother and grandmother never used MySpace - but they use Facebook.
Facebook has cross generational and cross cultural appeal, and has a 'global critical mass' making it the default platform for a lot of human communication.
I don't like Facebook at all, but they are here to stay for a while, until something else replaces it.
> I don't like Facebook at all, but they are here to stay for a while, until something else replaces it.
Just like MySpace. At the time, MySpace was the defacto standard of communication for most young people of a minimum socioeconomit status. You're missing the point by ignoring the history/reality.
Telephones still exist because the infrastructure is difficult (expensive, time consuming, hard to maintain) to replicate in a robust fashion. Wireless has come a long way, but it's still using the hardline protocols because we still have hardlines. Usually where financial incentives to switch are different.
That's fair criticism. My intent was to give an example of a hugely addictive product that shaped the course of history. Facebook is, obviously, not physically addictive like an opioid.
But it is addictive. Dopamine-hit addictive (thanks, likes and little red notification dots!). In what appears to be a very universally appealing way.
On one hand, you compare Facebook to opioid drugs in terms of addictive potential.
On the other hand, you suggest "regulation" in response.
But, if history and the nature of the state are our guides we must conclude that state intervention is unlikely to produce healthy outcomes, since the state has been unable to craft any "regulation" in the face of a century-long opiate(-iod) epidemic other than a prohibition environment, which has been disastrous for public health and dynastically enriching for drug cartels.
We are agreed that the government's response to opioids has been both awful, from a humanitarian perspective, and ineffective, from an engineering perspective.
But regulation must not be viewed as a monolith. Especially in the realm of communication tools, where many good, pro-consumer pro-competition regulations exist. e.g. number portability for mobile providers, common carrier rules, etc)
(Disclaimer: Obviously not all comm. regulations are good, cough cough cable companies in America. But clearly some regulation of these entities is needed, so let's fix the regs rather than trashing them.)
My sense is that, with time as the X-axis and need for the state as the Y-axis, we're experiencing a downward slope.
I find it plausible (in truth I find it inevitable) that the state will crumble and that society will be better for it, especially in terms of corporate domination of everyday needs, which I believe that state empowers rather than "regulates."
* Facebook is not "unregulated" - the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Trade Commission both regulate it. The latter has taken multiple interventions, and will probably continue to do so in the future.
* Facebook is not physically addictive - there's a huge difference between addictions like gambling and drug addictions.
* Facebook is not the most important media company in the world - Facebook does not produce news, only disseminate it.
* Facebook is not controlled by one person - it is a publicly traded company.
Very interesting. Is it really controlled by one person? Or is facebook dependent on user's, well, using it?
If facebook went away tomorrow, would meatspace life materially change for any of its users?
A little peer pressure to affirm that Facebook is a giant waste of time, narcissistic and generally kind of silly is all it takes plant the seed to drop FB altogether. I have seen that work in meatspace.
The "what would happen if it went away tomorrow" question is not particularly useful to determine facebooks power, since it's not going to go away tomorrow.
I think the argument is about influence, not complete determination. Influence can be exercised independent from a services replacability.
All three of those points are hyperbolic to the extreme.
Unlike opioids facebook can not kill you if you stop using the service. And addiction rates are still being studied best I can tell. Certainly no leading papers claiming an epidemic [0]
Sources required and likely highly deterministic on how you develop a scale for such ranking
*FB is a publicly traded company with a board, it, by definition is not completely controlled by one person.
I personally am no fan of social media, don't really see the point in most contexts, but a call for government regulation into communication is the wrong step. IMO cults of ignorance, luddites, and anti-intellectualism are the threats to free society not social-networking.
And yet, you have something called: personal choice. People should be responsible for their own actions. Most of the concerns listed in the article, are things any other company or entity could do: "creating shadow profiles", 'crawling the web', etc.
If you don't want FB to have your pictures then don't go there. The parent article is over-reaching it's concern.
And it's not exactly accurate that it's controlled by 1 person. Ultimately FB can't do anything we don't want it to do. If FB does something we don't like, we're just one tab lick away from putting them out of business.
The last thing we need is more useless regulations that will stifle the already stiffled and slowing of innovation.
It's addictive if you want/need to be social. My wife does, not me. I'm not a very social guy honestly, I have a few friends in my inner circle who I text/gchat/fb messenger with but I don't use the facebook app or the web interface.
Since I deactivated my acct in Dec last year to focus on bschool apps, I've accomplished so much, and I say that not to brag, but to illustrate that it was a bit of a timesuck for me and I've been able to do a lot more since I quit.
It's not Facebook, it's the fact that we're all too happily Amusing Ourselves to Death: http://a.co/frMmE2s
“We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.
But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.
This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.”
Exactly, Facebook is not a cause to be dealt with: it is an effect of those who are willing to use it. Very few of them can be swayed by articles such as this one. They simply have NO INTEREST in the possible consequences. This interest, or a desire to live by a higher standard, can only come from WITHIN. Until this changes there will always be Facebooks waiting to take advantage of them.
The events of the last couple of years caused me to evaluate the psychological toll that me self-induced exposure to media, of all forms, was taking. I came to the conclusion that with social media, mankind was participating in the largest social experiment of all time and just hoping that things turned out well. I decided the results, so far, have not been promising and I no longer wanted to participate. I deleted my FB and canceled cable. Now I chose what I'm exposed to. I advise more people to do the same.
“We have to create culture, don't watch TV, don't read magazines, don't even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you're worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you're giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y. This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you and your friends and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And we are told 'no', we're unimportant, we're peripheral. 'Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.' And then you're a player, you don't want to even play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.”
― Terence McKenna
it's stereotypical counterculture talk, but the dichotomy of creating vs consuming really sticks with me
Funny Story. I had to create a new FB account recently so I can give them money(advertise) but I didn't want people to friend me. So, I put a short version of my name. But somehow they figured out that I didn't give the correct name and suspended the account. So much for trying to give them money. :)
> I had to create a new FB account recently so I can give them money(advertise)
Can you really not place advertisements on Facebook without a 'social Facebook account' (I accept you obviously need some kind of 'account' for billing, monitoring purposes, etc.) linked to your real name?
The threat is that Facebook has become too big to fail. A major leak of private data and messages of its users would be devastating to society given the scale.
What happens if/when Facebook fails as a company? What happens to the data then? It gets sold off. That's a scary prospect.
Facebook is in the fickle game of Internet advertising. When the noise overcomes the signal in what Facebook shows, when the content of the users' connections gets drowned out to advertising, people will leave in droves. When advertisers fail to see the return on their investment, the money will dry up.
> A major leak of private data and messages of its users
What's to say this isn't already happening in real-time? You don't even need to tap the trunk lines (to use a Matrix reference), you simply need to have enough "fakebook" contacts and some Persona Management Software [1].
If a major leak will be that devastating to society, we need a major leak even more urgently, so that the illusion of privacy is dispelled and people can properly calibrate to the costs and/or risks of their behavior. Otherwise we only continue to raise the stakes.
I really don't think the best deterrent to getting into a fatal car accident is to get into a fatal car accident. Also, I don't wish to experience losing a limb but surviving a car accident in order to prime myself to avoid a fatal accident.
What data can facebook possible have that would "devastating" in a leak scenario? Facebook has only what users have put on the site to share, and all data present is at least semipublic. There are no addresses, no bank accounts, no SSNs. The valuable part of facebook is already freely available: your list of "liked" pages and your social graph.
It's very reductive to claim that only addresses, bank account [numbers], and SSNs could be dangerous if leaked.
What about people who discuss private matters in chat? (e.g. sexuality, medical history, drug use, etc.) Yes, we know that's a bad idea, but most people aren't HN readers.
What about state actors using Facebook's metadata alone to quash democratic movements before they get off the ground?[1] To advertisers, most of the social graph is available only in a semi-abstracted form (e.g. target X, Y, and Z qualities and degrees of connection). A leak or sale could make that information available directly.
What about criminals using a public leak of location data and some predictive algorithms to strategically rob homes? (and maybe also using patterns of likes and connections to predict whose home is worth burgling?)
Really, to say that the valuable part of Facebook is already freely available brings to mind the words "limited imagination." Facebook keeps the valuable part to itself and meters even limited access to it. And there is extensive danger with the possibility of a leak or sale of the raw data.
That's what I'm saying... Actually, it reminds me of when Wikileaks first came out, and I'd been reading the book of Revelations (as literature, it's an epic poem). There is this part where there is a scroll with 7 seals. An angel asks "who is worthy to break these seals?" People are weeping about it.
What kind of society can handle a full disclosure of information on this magnitude, now or even in the future, looking back? Imagine living 40 years from now, and your parent's full social media records have just been leaked in a mass dump of some data collection company. Could you handle that?
Okay and without appealing to apocalyptic literature, just think about the potentially devastating consequences of mass numbers of people getting access to their enemies' private data all at once. Good for you if you survive that kind of dump personally, but what about your community, your family?
But back to the metaphysical level, shit's about to get real wild if scientific knowledge keeps growing like it has been, especially as "ai" comes more able to translate and interpret these masses of digital data... Plus the vast stores of biological information waiting to be tapped.
Really, a history of likes, a corpus of chat messages, a corpus of public status, and some corpus of potential location data/ usage data depending on the devices used; that's what you liken to an apocalyptic event? Your family, your community, everyone will be just fine. Potentially some population already living in oppressive situations will be impacted (your religious family learns you're gay, etc) but the vast majority will just stop using Facebook and move to the next social media site. What kind of data do you imagine people storing on facebook (remember nothing is there you, the user, hasn't explicitly decided to share with someone aside from whatever they track internally interms of usage and location).
By default a person's friends list is visible from their public profile so if you want to go put together a graph you're welcome to.
First off, yes, I also think people will make it through this and be better in the long run. But I think this stuff is inevitably going to be a major source of heat, and it's going to take some processing. There is a lot of 'potential energy' stored up in private information (I'm not just talking about Facebook). People keep secrets, and the amount being held behind cryptographic algorithms is only growing by the year.
I'm mostly talking about private messages, browsing history, stuff that people would prefer not to be known widely because of pervasive judgements and stigmas in our society.
"What kind of data do you imagine people storing on facebook..."
Nude photos and videos, secrets, accusations, candid personal details, private plans, irrational fears, fantasies, love notes to people who aren't their spouses, etc.
The human web is thickly interwoven. You say "Potentially some population already living in oppressive situations will be impacted". Well, their experiences would not be trivial, and your experience is not disconnected from "those people" either for that matter. I'd imagine they are your friends, your neighbors, your community too. People around us are having secretive relationships ("affairs"), while others hide domestic or sexual abuse. People have skeletons in the digital server closets, things they'd rather forget about and move past, but which are lingering on redundant backups somewhere.
Uh, it's widely known that fb buys tons of data from many 3rd party brokers. It's not hard for them to get whatever they need, including ssn's I'm sure. And they definitely do have addresses from 3rd parties.
>" Facebook has only what users have put on the site to share, and all data present is at least semipublic. There are no addresses, no bank accounts, no SSNs."
No FB buys third party/offline data about its users, I don't we know what they have:
Reading on, it described how he had built his computer from electronics and operated it from his attic. He had quite a few programs for his computer. One he liked the most allowed him to simulate buying and selling of stocks.
If you've ever read any ads from that period, the implication is clear: computers are awesome because they are going to challenge us to become better people. They will teach us at a speed we can learn, they will reward us as we progress, and the obstacles and learning will get more and more advanced.
People who don't have computers are going to be missing out -- on self development.
Contrast that to my trip the other day by commercial air travel. Everywhere I went, people were on their phones. Were they learning foreign languages? Becoming experts at symbolic logic or global politics?
They were not.
Instead they were playing the stupidest games imaginable. Facebooking, taking quizzes where any moron with the ability to type would get 90% correct -- and then sharing the results with their friends.
Zuck and others figured it out. Computers don't have to be computers. They have to be video games. Who gives a shit whether the guy on the other end is learning to be a better person. Challenge them with idiotic trivial tasks, then reward them with blinky lights, sound effects, and the imagined praise of their peers. They'll do that shit all day long. All they need is more batteries.
Yes. It's a problem.