I'm always a bit ambivalent about confessions/apologies of this sort by former execs and employees of these powerful companies. On the one had I'm glad they are speaking up and recognizing the harm being caused by the businesses they helped create.
On the other hand, it's hard to ignore the fact that typically these people have already profited enormously from these companies and they will never have to face any sort of real ramifications or consequences for the net harm that may ultimately be brought to society.
It's one thing to be sorry, it's another to avoid being complicit in such ventures to begin with. But that's the thing... where is the incentive to "do no harm" in Silicon Valley? There isn't any.
It's an interesting thought experiment to imagine what the world might look like if people were held accountable indefinitely for the externalities caused by the work they conduct.
Not saying this is practical or even desirable, but clearly it would change people's priorities quite a bit. As a software dev there's very little keeping you from accepting a fat job offer from Facebook unless you happen to have a particularly strong & discerning conscious/moral code. I'd like to believe that I'd turn it down... but I'm not so sure. No wonder the world's brightest minds are working at companies like this.
> Not saying this is practical or even desirable, but clearly it would change people's priorities quite a bit.
Historically, the problem with indefinite liability has been government abuse and degradation of evidence (witnesses age and forget, documents are purged as part of regular scheduled maintenance, etc) which work together to create an unfair environment for the victim or perpetrator depending on the specifics of the case. Statutory limits "clear the docket" of potential cases, so to speak, which prevents the government from using an infinitely growing list of crimes and violations combined with selective enforcement to target "undesirable" or opposition elements within the populace.
I do believe that indefinite liability for felonies and fiduciary responsibilities is very desirable in a fair justice system (balanced with a case by case evaluation of future criminal potential so that people who have reformed without prison aren't too heavily punished) but I'm afraid it will require a massive societal change. A system as complex and noisy as the justice system cannot both be an underfunded afterthought and fair. Kind of like healthcare makes up almost 20% of US GDP, so too should the justice system if we are ever to properly align the incentives of management and the public. With the seemingly unstoppable pervasiveness of data collection and surveillance, it might even be practical in the future to prosecute very old crimes in a fair way as long as enough resources are dedicated to enforcement and oversight.
Unfortunately, the people who decide these things are extremely disincentivized from implementing the kind of sweeping changes we'd need.
We are not in the same historical conditions. We have internet, darknet, social media, citizen journalists, cloud distribution... So maybe we don't need the traditional system. Maybe we need more people standing up against injustices, lack of accountability, and narcissits, something like #metoo.
If we need a more traditional system, then solutions to lower the %GDP of healthcare exists, as every other country in the G20 are at 12%, and kept their growth on par with inflation, unlike the US. Government spending on public safety is around 2%, on par with the rest of the G20. So fixing the former would definitely go a long way in raising the later, placing the US in a leadership position in term of fixing many other problems.
Somehow, as citizens, we need to find a way to incentivize our elected and unelected officials to do good, prioritize the majority of the population, and to take decisions that are sustainables. I don't really have a specific idea how to achieve that.
> if people were held accountable indefinitely for the externalities caused by the work they conduct
Yes, it would change peoples priorities: If this was the case (and the definition of "externalities" was broad enough to encompass "No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth") literally nothing of consequence would ever happen.
The those tropes in computer engineering about suits never getting fired for buying IBM, about legal departments wrapping everything in red tape, about bosses insisting on processes, reports and cover sheets? They are on the hook for vague 'externalities', so they cover their asses. Only when we collectively accept a certain degree of risk can progress happen.
Running for the nearest torch and pitchfork shed is not how an open, liberal society deals with adversity.
I'm not really trying to propose a concrete solution so much as shedding some light on why these things keep happening over and over again. For a successful founder it takes a relatively short amount of time to strike it rich and secure multi-generational wealth for yourself, while it takes much longer for negative side effects to become apparent and take their toll on the wider population. But by that point you know that any externalities will be "someone else's problem" so there's no real incentive to err on the side of pursuing things that will be more likely to be net-positive in the long term
I'm not sure anyone could of predicted this could of happened as a result of building social networks online in the way it has been done. Consider the idea that the novel idea of a feed morphed into overwhelming data that leads to the demand for curation. The seemingly simple and innocent concept of likes, shares and posts are built not intentionally for malice but out of innocent curiosity for connection.
That being said I think the financial incentive immediately takes over here and as a result those innocent ideals are trampled by analytics and pure psychological nudging.
Would you need to? FB is in PRINCIPLE a bad idea. Who would want to have an advertising based for-profit company largely controlled by 1 person be responsible for managing the social interactions and community building of the world? Like what in there does NOT sound like a terrible idea?!!
I mean I wonder what kind of self-deciting stunt Zuck has to pull each day to keep a straight face when he looks into a mirror... The situation really is just so obviously absurd.
My understanding is that the original goals in the infancy, much like the rest of the internet at the time, explicitly wanted to avoid ads in favor of prioritizing user experience. Obviously the timeline shifted away from this but most of the internet moved to that. That being said, the psychological impact even without the ads is damaging enough without any sort of intention to encourage self control.
I believe that the ads play a more central role than you give them credit for. If you are a for-profit company selling something your incentives are aligned in a specific way - you want to do everything you can to maximize sales... If you want to sell ads this means in general you want to understand and be able to target specific users because this seems to be what advertisers are interested in. So FB is designed in a way to maximize that. Now imagine you have a different org not focused on selling ads but actually trying to measure and optimize things like usefulness to the user/city/country/world. It would live in a totally different optimization landscape and look totally different (over time)!
FB could be very different from what it is today if different decisions had been made!
He probably honestly believes that he is making the world a better place. And there is probably not much feedback to him indicating otherwise, so why would he not? Don't see why stunts would be needed. As long as one believe that a small group of people can (and possibly should) take responsibility for so many others - a quite common belief for his demographics - it is internally consistent.
Yeah, I don’t really disagree... I just hope that there are/will be people in his life who push views like this to him. Maybe I should write him a mail?
> It's an interesting thought experiment to imagine what the world might look like if people were held accountable indefinitely for the externalities caused by the work they conduct.
I don't think it would be practical to enforce, nor necessarily very fair. Would we want to, say, drag the coal miner into court over his personal contribution to global warming? The world is a tangled web of externalities and none of us would be in a moral position the throw the first stone.
That being said, there is definitely a void of responsibility in social media.
Traditional media is a useful frame of reference. Let's say that some journalist invented a totally bogus story involving a pizza restaurant, a child-sex ring, and a number of named persons. I think this journalist would be hard pressed to get this past his editor and into print, and with good reason, because the editor is responsible for the validity of the newspaper, and so is the newspaper itself. The most likely outcome would be a lawsuit which they'd lose big time.
Back to social media. Let's have a look at Facebook. This is a tech company, not a media company, so they are not really responsible for their content. The users are kind of responsible but a lot of users are fake anyway so no responsibility there either. Behind it all are The Algorithms, and The Algorithms are not really responsible either, it's just convoluted AI type stuff which no one really understands.
But let's rewind a bit. Is Facebook a tech company or a media company? Being a tech company is really convenient in terms of washing their hands but should we let them get away with it? Or should we redefine them as a media company and let them own the responsibility of the content which brings in users and ad money? Could the buck land in any other place when you think about it? Sure, it would be a hassle for them, they'd have to employ a lot more people to monitor and moderate content, they'd need to put mechanisms in place for better validation of identities, and they'd be less profitable. But that would be their problem to deal with. Free passes are not always forever.
Even if you have a particularly strong moral code you may reasonably take the job as there is a higher degree of probability that you may affect change from the inside vs. the outside... and if that isn‘t possible you may try to go the snowden route...
It might be a little counter intuitive but in terms of jobs it is always good to exercise some counterfactual thinking: What would happen if I didn‘t take the job? Another dev without a strong moral code would likely simply do what they are told without thinking about consequences and long-term impact. Having loud voices within FB itself (hopefully in important positions) might have a big impact! Imagine Zuckerberg getting the low-down for all of his probably well-intentioned but horribly excetued ideas BEFORE they are rolled out...
I don't see anything bad with working on social network. That being said, that chain of thought is wrong. If you take that job, you share responsibility for what you do and you are no better then that other dude. You don't get points for someone else theoretically being worst - that is just arrogance.
I don’t think it is wrong... it is optimistic in the sense that I consider the possibility of affecting positive change within FB as likely or at least non-zero. You don’t just have to be the waterboy, you could be on the coaching team and really influence where things are going. Obviously a lot of conditionals and hurdels there though... the incentives won’t be neatly aligned for you.
That's very optimistic, though not entirely impossible. Have you ever tried to enact large-scale change in a massive organization from the bottom rung? Also are you gonna rock the boat when your options haven't vested yet?
Similarly, the fact that Steve Jobs pitched his devices as great things while not allowing it to his child (IIRC) makes me a bit sad about the whole situation, myself included.
> As a software dev there's very little keeping you from accepting a fat job offer from Facebook
Agreed with this. It's not only nothing keeping you from it, the society would probably push you towards accepting it. It's a big popular brand so not only would you get a high salary but it would most likely include a high social status. Friends and family would think you've gone insane not accepting a good offer from Facebook and it would most likely be good career choice as well. It must be easier to get other job offers after having worked at Facebook or somewhere similar.
Deep down I think everyone knows this, you will gain economically and socially in every way and the only thing you will need to suppress is the possibility of you feeling you contribute to something less good for society. Easy choice.
>On the other hand, it's hard to ignore the fact that typically these people have already profited enormously from these companies and they will never have to face any sort of real ramifications or consequences for the net harm that may ultimately be brought to society.
And they rarely put their money where their mouth is, meaning they don't use that accumulated wealth to try and solve the issue they've helped create. Talk is cheap.
Statute of limitations exists to protect the people. Imagine being a disagreeable sort to the government, and then being punished with every violation ever (every driving mistake you've ever had but were never charged with, every incidence of jaywalking, having to go through decades of taxes instead of two years, And similar things caught by some surveillance device).
"In his talk, Palihapitiya criticized not only Facebook, but Silicon Valley’s entire system of venture capital funding. He said that investors pump money into “shitty, useless, idiotic companies,” rather than addressing real problems like climate change and disease."
Amen brother. Nailed it.
I caught up with a friend the other day. He has a first class honours degree in Physics from Cambridge University. He went on to do a PhD in Quantum Mechanics. He is the smartest person I have ever met. He works for a company that trawls social media looking for "trends". This is a guy who could probably be building the warp drive, or a nuclear fusion reactor - instead he spends his days writing code that helps clients sell people shit they don't need - because that is what this insane "market" puts value on. It is a terribly toxic culture exacerbated by social media. I did a "hard break" from social media a year or two back and have never regretted the decision.
It wasn't too many years ago that the best minds of our generation were engaged in trying to reverse engineer a popular text document format (that remains ubiquitous to this day). In each case, it's a shame we haven't built a better climate of collaboration, but capitalism doesn't reward sharing, it rewards risk and sometimes artificial scarcity.
> because that is what this insane "market" puts value on.
Because that is where he decided to work. I imagine he could find a role elsewhere focused on the areas you mentioned if he wished with those qualifications.
I don't doubt for a second that VCs fund a shedload of shite and that the social media world has pernicious effects that we are only just starting to understand, but in your example I don't think the tech industry can be blamed for your friend wasting his life building widgets.
As someone in a similar situation: I hold a PhD in Molecular Biology, yet the pay as a post-doc was so low, I couldn't even get my two kids into a decent school. And don't even discuss pre-doc salaries if you have any family ambitions...
Guess where I am in now? Machine learning consulting, left science - doing work that finally pays my bills and gets my kids to a first-class school.
I don't intend to mock you -- I am sure there is much more relevant context to your life decisions, and they're your own, anyway.
However, I have observed friends seemingly get caught in a pattern: go to a top school, so you can have a high-paying job, so you can afford to send kids to a top school, so they can get high-paying jobs, so that...
In some folks' lives, the value of the "top school" seems to have a circular definition (not true for all folks, of course). It's a little sad, because by breaking out of that pattern, many more possibilities open up (like working in important and fascinating science for lower pay).
Well, I live in Spain - the qualitative difference here between a standard public school (the ones you can go to are the closest ones and we live in no fancy neighborhood...) and a private one simply is that in the public school not even I understand the English teacher (yes, that seriously happened to me), while the private school at least has the standards I was used to (I went to school in Austria). So overall, for me the issue here is mostly about the rapidly growing inequality gap and our society's relentless, unhealthy obsession with [market] performance & efficiency at all costs.
But yes, I totally understand what you are referring to - having my kids go to a private school means we have a number of those "circular types" you described to cope with...
I don't need to change the system. I only need to change my own behaviour. Eventually, when enough people have got sick of the current situation, and have changed their behaviour too, we will have a new system...
> It does not change anything since most other people do not change their behavior.
I disagree. People do change their behaviour. You did. I did. There are many, many others. It's just not reached a critical mass yet, but give it time, it will. There are whole communities out there that didn't exist ten or fifteen years ago that are kicking back at the system because it gives them a better life.
Keep doing what you are doing, keep the faith, look for ways to accelerate change (something I've become increasingly interested in). It will happen.
I disagree that removing yourself from the system changes much of anything. It's effectively no different than committing suicide. The rest of the world goes on. And, in fact, they have more power, because now a smaller percentage of conscious individuals control any resources.
There's a difference between simply removing yourself from the system and doing things differently. It's simply a behavioural change. You live with a new set of priorities, or you can think of it as playing by a new set of rules. Why live with a set of priorities and values that makes you burnt out, ill and depressed?
You don't have to believe me though - research it yourself, if you want further proof that the current system is not working look at suicide rates, rates of medication use, self-medication (drugs, alcohol, food) and so on. We are living in a very sick, literally, society. Pick anyone of these and you will see trends near exponential.
I am not suggesting anything new or something that is not currently being done, right now, by hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people, and it does, slowly but surely, change things. I am not saying we are anywhere near there yet though.
The Market is, left to its own devices, notoriously bad at pricing social and human values. Two examples: teachers and nurses. The social value of a compassionate nurse, if you are cheyne-stoking or supping on your last chemo cocktail is huge. My partner is a nurse and the comfort she has given to the sick and dying cannot be priced by the market. Compare to the banksters who brought about 2008 GFI.
In my friend's case he was simply not able to get sufficient funding for his core research. In the end he gave up and got a job and I don't blame him for that.
> The market is going to buy a warp-drive when someone makes it.
It won't happen if our best brains are figuring out how to make you click on ads and concocting the most effective form of fake news. It is a massive diversion of raw talent and resources away from, say, that nuclear fusion reactor.
People tend to think that the compassion of people in nursing profession come for free and that those people are effortlessly like that. Nothing could be further from truth.
But also, there is much more in nursing then compassion. It reqires a lot of self control and knowledge.
I wonder if the same can be said for internet porn. I too used to think people who wanted to ban porn were just kooky evangelicals, but at some point realized myself how empty and depressed I felt after watching it.
I'm almost more curious about the societal consequences of young people (mostly male) being raised on abundant internet porn and its role (if any) it plays in how men emotionally and physically connect with women or other men.
What is it about porn that makes you feel depressed? I've heard that opinion before, but I just can't relate, despite being one of those people raised on abundant internet porn. It has been a very clear net positive for me. I'm in a successful long-term relationship.
Are single-player games tearing society apart? Is a deck of cards wasted on solitaire? Must all bicycles be tandem?
Keep in mind that one's personal experience may not be representative of the "average" person.
> single-player games
I get obsessive about some games. A completionist, one might say. And when I've achieved what I want to in the game, I suddenly wake up and realize I haven't been outside for a week and I've ignored my friends, family, and colleagues. Worst, the guilt of that realization can be so overwhelming that I am tempted to ignore it and simply start another game that takes over my consciousness.
I've observed similar behavior in some others. It was most obvious among World of Warcraft (WoW) players when I went to university. I knew more than a handful of WoW players who dropped out of school because they found their in-game social circle more important than just about everything else in their lives. Rather than studying or going out, they needed to be present for the next raid (WoW session).
You'll observe that in more than just porn and games, you'll observe it in life in general. In fact for a lot of people that's the definition of a mid-life crisis: Suddenly waking up, realizing that you've been wasting your life slaving at a job you don't like, to make money that pays for things you don't own which you only have to offset how shitty your job makes you feel.
If your doctor told you right now, "you have exactly two weeks to live", would your life be unchanged for the next two weeks, or would you suddenly wake up and think "Holy hell, what have I been doing for the past age(self) years?"
> In fact for a lot of people that's the definition of a mid-life crisis: Suddenly waking up, realizing that you've been wasting your life slaving at a job you don't like, to make money that pays for things you don't own which you only have to offset how shitty your job makes you feel
Another obligatory Fight Club reference.
> “ Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off. ”
I feel like this is just describing the human experience. We go through cycles of obsession and focus, and then a realization that our obsession and focus has kept us from other parts of our lives. We adjust, and then repeat the cycle.
It could be video games, but it could be lots of hobbies, or work, or a new relationship, etc.
Completionist is a good term for that. I gave up online games when I realized how much of a problem that is for me. My hard rule about games in general now is that I only play them with other people in the room.
I have a similar problem. I realised while playing GameThatCannotBeMentionedBecauseOfNoDisparagementRule that reaching maximum level in Magic or Archery skills on real life versions of those skills would make me a pretty good stage magician or archer.
I never did end up learning magic tricks or real archery, but I did go onto Duolingo and learn German. Kaj Esperanto. Και Ελληνικα…
I've done this with League of Legends. I find that it corresponds very closely with times in my life when I am depressed[1] about some other aspect of my life. When I feel out of control, and the game provides a stable environment with known rules, where I have a great deal of agency to impact the outcome. It's a trap, if course; in real life, ignoring problems is (usually) not a good strategy for resolving them.
On the flip side, though, when I'm not playing as part of one of these sessions, I like my relationship with the game. Especially, it's a great way of keeping in touch with a friend long-distance, which is normally something I struggle with[2].
[1]: In the colloquial, not medical, use of the word.
[2]: Somewhat, I also put less effort into long- distance friendships by choice; putting in lots of effort to keep in contact with someone who I wouldn't otherwise interact with becomes a chore and I don't get as much out of it. Since I would still be gaming otherwise, this doesn't become a chore, and regularly using voice chat makes it even better, compared to a game like scrabble where it's just text. (This part not being unique to League, of course; any other real time team game would do the same).
WoW isn't single-player, is it? I think GP was commenting on the fact that spending some time alone (with video games or otherwise) won't necessarily tear society apart, as long as it's done in moderation.
Increased access to the Internet by adolescents has created unprecedented opportunities for sexual education, learning, and growth. Conversely,the risk of harm that is evident in the literature has led researchers to investigate adolescent exposure to online pornography in an effort to elucidate these relationships. Collectively, these studies suggest that youth who consume pornography may develop unrealistic sexual values and beliefs. Among the findings, higher levels of permissive sexual attitudes, sexual preoccupation, and earlier sexual experimentation have been correlated with more frequent consumption of pornography. Researchers have had difficulty replicating these results, however, and as a result the aggregate literature has failed to indicate conclusive results. Nevertheless, consistent findings have emerged linking adolescent use of pornography that depicts violence with increased degrees of sexually aggressive behavior. The literature does indicate some correlation between adolescents’ use of pornography and self-concept. Girls report feeling physically inferior to the women they view in pornographic material, while boys fear they may not be as virile or able to perform as the men in these media. Adolescents also report that their use of pornography decreased as their self-confidence and social development increase. Additionally, research suggests that adolescents who use pornography, especially that found on the Internet, have lower degrees of social integration, increases in conduct problems, higher levels of delinquent behavior, higher incidence of depressive symptoms, and decreased emotional bonding with caregivers.
Many of my friends have expressed that they don’t want to watch porn. They do it anyways and hate themselves for it after you know... they are done.
I personally think it’s completely natural to have such urges and to cave to them. In fact, for men specifically there are some benefits in keeping the system well lubricated (pun not intended). It’s just something one has to moderate.
Additionally, i have noted that people’s expectations of their desired partner is usually skewed from what they see in porn.
>>Additionally, i have noted that people’s expectations of their desired partner is usually skewed from what they see in porn.
Porn is hardly the only - or even the main - driver of this, though. Look around you: you'll see billboards, magazines, TV commercials, banner ads, etc. etc. basically a plethora of images showing gorgeous women. Compared to that, porn's effect on men's partner expectations is probably negligible (unless it's for specifically sexual attributes like whether they shave their genitalia).
Note that post-coital depression/tristesse/dysphoria (terminology has varied over time) is a very real thing that people feel, regardless of whether porn is involved. Human contact can counteract this, however, which is an advantage of in-person sex.
You could try giving normal, mainstream porn a shot.
I don't think adopting either far end of the spectrum view of womens' sexuality is healthy. On one hand you have people who think less of women (putting it lightly) who are sexually active, and on the other people who treat them like they're children and believe there's no way they could be enjoying themselves as performers and that someone must be forcing them into it.
Women aren't any different from men wrt sex - some like to have a lot, some a little, some with different people, some outdoors, some with members of the same sex, and some with members of both sexes. Like green eggs and ham, kinda.
It clearly shows nothing of the kind. Point me to the large swaths of recorded history where the men and women are treated equally in their society and the women express less desire for sex.
There's a difference between wanting and signalling that want in an overt way. Throughout history women have been conditioned to satisfy their sexual desires in much less overt ways than men, but that doesn't mean the desires themselves are any less in frequency or magnitude.
there is no evidence that human sexuality is the result of conditioning, but let’s pretend it is. who conditioned nearly all the other mammals to have the same pattern we do? and why did we bother to condition ourselves to behave in a way that nature clearly provides?
First, I have talked to an actual expert in the field of human sexuality, and yes we do condition on anything that occurs simultaneously with any orgasm. You can try this for yourself by picking something you don’t mind accidentally fetishising.
Secondly, what pattern? Dogs (and TIL dolphins) hump random things; hyenas are (in human terms) femdom sadomasochists; the male antechinus gets horny once in their life, then has as much sex as possible before dying of exhaustion; female ferrets literally die if they don’t have sex; bonobos have sex pretty much as a way of saying “hello”, “sorry”, or as a social favour; and pandas famously don’t mate enough for their own survival.
It shows that men have, more often than women but not uniquely, had the physical and political power to disregard consent. Not the same thing as wanting more.
Herin lies the problem with your bait-and-switch pseudo-tolerant stunt. Telling him to keep his opinions to himself is bleeding into his rights to express them.
I feel like society is using science to rediscover the basic findings of the moral theologians. Compare the daughters (secondary effects) of lust listed by Thomas Aquinas to all the newly "scientifically verified" side effects of pornography use.
Unfortunately, some people do not recognize the difference between "I personally don't like X" and "X is immoral and destructive" and "because X is immoral and destructive, it ought to be banned". Morality isn't just about killing or stealing.
Yes, I agree and should've said that I'm not for banning internet porn, but I do believe it's harmful in the same way that nicotine or addictive drugs are. I wouldn't support a system where the gov't forces ISPs to filter porn, but I would be in favor of web browsers or ISPs building more tools for parents or addicts to self-filter porn on their own.
It is a matter of prudence in governance. For example, we may permit prostitution (without sanctioning it) if we find that banning it will lead to worse state of social affairs (e.g., society "convulsing with lust", as Aquinas wrote when writing about this very topic). It can be argued that the tolerating of prostitution is actually as such preferable to the toleration of pornography.
Point being, because it is a matter of prudence on the part of civil authorities, I am not claiming that people have the right to these things as hedonists are wont to claim.
The difference usually lies within addiction and the knowledge of one’s addiction to it. If you knew you were addicted to cigarettes and dissatisfied with that addiction, for example, you’d likely feel a wave of depression after lighting up.
Some people can “handle” porn in that they don’t experience any negative effect from it. Some, unfortunately, cannot.
Alcoholics. Gambling addicts. Drug addicts. People who leave their children to starve while playing MMOs.
It turns out that a small subset of humanity is incapable of controlling themselves regardless of the medium and all that really matters is how destructive the activity is when abused.
The next question is... after the detachment, social awkwardness and unreal expectations... what happens when you add the constant drum beat of "He asked me out now I'm charging him with assault"?
I'll be amazed if people are dating in 5 years at this rate.
Traditional factors that once explained men’s sexual difficulties appear insufficient to account for the sharp rise in erectile dysfunction, delayed ejaculation, decreased sexual satisfaction, and diminished libido during partnered sex in men under 40. This review (1) considers data from multiple domains, e.g., clinical, biological (addiction/urology), psychological (sexual conditioning), sociological; and (2) presents a series of clinical reports, all with the aim of proposing a possible direction for future research of this phenomenon. Alterations to the brain's motivational system are explored as a possible etiology underlying pornography-related sexual dysfunctions. This review also considers evidence that Internet pornography’s unique properties (limitless novelty, potential for easy escalation to more extreme material, video format, etc.) may be potent enough to condition sexual arousal to aspects of Internet pornography use that do not readily transition to real-life partners, such that sex with desired partners may not register as meeting expectations and arousal declines. Clinical reports suggest that terminating Internet pornography use is sometimes sufficient to reverse negative effects, underscoring the need for extensive investigation using methodologies that have subjects remove the variable of Internet pornography use. In the interim, a simple diagnostic protocol for assessing patients with porn-induced sexual dysfunction is put forth.
Essentially, yes, Porn on the internet seems to be a 'serious' problem in that it affects relationships and personal health in a measurably negative way.
The problem is banning something also affects those who do not have a problem which in this case most likely is the overwhelming majority.
I'm raised with internet porn and I don't believe I have a problem. Why should I be banned from watching something I enjoy?
I don't buy the crap about porn changing people. Sure you can say that for yourself if you got addicted but you can't just throw that out as a general truth. Porn has been around for a long time now and I don't really see people behaving different today.
The real curiosity is why you think there may be "societal consequences" based on your own personal experience? Isn't this quite similar to how "kooky evangelicals" behave?
I always found it amazing how vastly different internet communities are from real-world communities. Skim through just about any YouTube video and the comments are filled with some of the most vile garbage. We'd all be murdering each other had this been the case in real-world communities. But, instead, we think twice about what we tell others we meet face-to-face and we deal with the impact of our actions right then and there. If we get angry, we might say something terrible to someone and quickly see the pain in their eyes before realizing the terrible thing we've done and regret ever doing so. The feedback is immediate and necessary for our personal growth. Social media just amplifies the worst in us without ever seeing the impact of the words that we put online. It pushes people in disagreement further apart who would easily understand each other by simply communicating face-to-face and sharing the emotions surrounding their differences. Instead, everything is lost in endless pile of Twitter or Facebook feeds which regurgitate apologies of "caught" offenders and cries of the offended. All of this, in all likelihood, would've never happened in real, physical world.
I would argue it is not simly a distinction between online and physical. Online doesn‘t exist in a vacuum but is located in our physical world. Something in our physical world drives us to go crazy online. Imagine a perfectly content physical world, would you imagine the people there go crazy online just because it is online?
I would argue we simply live in a world where many people are frustrated, scared, unhappy or just bored. To change how they behave online we don‘t just have to police online better but affect social change in our physical realities. Change the dogma for what it means to be successful. Move from for-profit to for-positive-impact. Teach the benefits of cooperation + friendly competition over battle royale. Such change will carry over to the net. Imagine FB moving away from advertising and for-profit motives to a for-positive-impact poly-centric community governed network for communities, I bet people would behave differently there...
I think this is very insightful. Agree, that the online experience basically allows an unimpeded vent for frustrations that are always there but are checked in physical social situations. It's kind of a negative feedback loop, though...in the sense that when you are seeing everyone's unfiltered thoughts, you feel even more justified in your own frustrations and prejudices. You're just blowing off steam, but these thoughts are genuine representations of these "other" people.
Discontent would be expressed somewhere, but yah, it's definitely encouraged to escape (no friction!) through Internet discussion.
Thank you! And yeah, I agree. However, the main point I wanted to make is that we won’t really fix this problem until we resolve the root causes in physical reality. Lot’s of discussion don’t seem to touch on this and are seemingly looking for bandaids to cure a broken limb...
I think it's the combination of anonymity and inability to police themselves. Offline communities make it easy to do the latter, even if it's something as crude as punching a person in the face. So people can say anything and they face no consequences.
> I always found it amazing how vastly different internet communities are from real-world communities. Skim through just about any YouTube video and the comments are filled with some of the most vile garbage. We'd all be murdering each other had this been the case in real-world communities. But, instead, we think twice about what we tell others we meet face-to-face and we deal with the impact of our actions right then and there.
If you come to this conclusion, you are living in a deep filter bubble in your real life. I often say to people (in Germany): Just go to work by tram at a later time (when hardly any people use the tram to go to work) and you will see how large amounts of "ordinary" people really are/look like.
I was in late night tram regularly in Germany and no one bothered me, no one talked to me inappropriately etc. There were no fights or other aggressive behavior. I have met some young groups apparently going from party a couple of times, but they mostly laughed noisily which hardly qualifies as some kind of horrible behavior. Overall, it was quite boring experience.
So maybe your local culture is somehow worst then the rest of Germany?
Let's say it this way: People you would prefer not to have to deal with in your life. If I give a more direct descriptions, the "guards of political corretness" come out their holes...
I actually feel that Facebook got it somewhat right, by focussing on networks of people that know each other in real life, and requiring/strongly encouraging real names.
By tying the things you say to you, and your reputation among your actual peers, you're more likely to think twice before posting something needlessly hurtful or provocative.
The ability to act anonymously online is obviously important in many contexts, such as seeking mental health advise or indulging in strange yet benign hobbies. But for political speech, communities requiring real names would seem preferable.
You have to also consider selection bias. YouTube has a lowest common denominator appeal. And the stuff you're talking about primarily appears on things that are even further lowest common denominator appeal. You're not going to find people ranting and raving on the comments to something like a Leonard Susskind lecture on YouTube.
Take the other side of the issue. Anonymity means people can discuss controversial views without concern for what other people might think of them for holding such views. So for instance, consider Nazi Germany. The Nazis were never actually particularly popular in Germany [1] but managed to obtain a stranglehold in power largely because they made people afraid to say otherwise. It was difficult for people to speak against the Nazi party when all it took was saying such things to the wrong person to end up getting 'disappeared.' Without the ability to completely suppress free speech, the Nazis likely would not have managed to obtain power - and certainly not to maintain it.
And the above is something that is a constantly recurring theme in history. Those that would do bad things enable their actions by making people scared or otherwise unable to speak against said actions. This should sound familiar given recent events. It's increasingly seeming that sexual abuse is something that is completely systemic in Hollywood. But the powers that be were protected by the fact that their victims were unable to speak out. For instance Weinstein managed to kill a New York Times article that was being written about his abuse, 13 years ago. And in the past accusers of people like him would be putting much more than "just" their livelihood in jeopardy. But the internet allows these people to come together, have a much larger voice, and indirectly protect themselves and also substantiate their claims. A few isolated claims can be explained away - dozens, if not hundreds, of claims cannot.
I would argue that what we're seeing is an evolution of society, with some growing pains. Ultimately being upset about what somebody says on the internet is pretty pointless. I mean really we all should be seeing things that we disagree with, fundamentally and vehemently. If people were honest in real life - this would also be the case. I do not think that people censoring themselves, or making themselves somebody they are not, for the sake of social conformity is a positive trait. Yes it spares peoples feelings and helps things get along, but a social consensus (which defines our state of society) built on falsehoods and invisible pressure is no consensus at all. The reason the civil rights movement succeeded is because it happened long before the civil rights movement, as we know it, actually happened. The masses had long since changed their views, but social pressures prevented discussion of such.
Thank you for your insightful comment. I absolutely agree with you. There is a very bright and positive side to social media, which has been especially apparent in recent months. Yet it's hard to not see the worrying trends in public ridicule and constant outrage on social media over petty things. I would like to believe that these are growing pains and we'll eventually figure out how and where to draw the line. We are definitely evolving. Perhaps this is the time when we evolve out of our primitive and humble beginnings and into a sci-fi-ish society.
No offense to Chamath (what I know of him, I think he's generally pretty smart and likable), but this is a bit of a stretch:
> He said that investors pump money into “shitty, useless, idiotic companies,” rather than addressing real problems like climate change and disease. Palihapitiya currently runs his own VC firm, Social Capital, which focuses on funding companies in sectors like healthcare and education.
I provided those data points because they represent more than half of the portfolio. I never said that SC didn't make investments in "real problems", I was making a point that they were also investing in companies that could be considered "shitty, useless, idiotic companies" and/or "weren't solving 'real problems'".
> That seems like a pretty healthy mix.
Yes, these guys are very good investors, no doubt. As a fellow capitalist I too would have made the same bets. But that has nothing to do with my point - which is the vision of the fund is inconsistent with what I would consider the vision of the majority of the companies that are invested in.
> aren't you contributing to the problem he's describing?
I'm increasingly convinced this sort of rhetoric is about advertising values to attract founders who care about alignment thereof rather than any real indication of their own investment choices. Social Capital isn't exactly focusing their money on getting poor kids from the hood into upper-quintile careers.
Whether you’re searching for what’s happening in politics, what’s streaming this weekend, where to find size-inclusive clothing, ways to give back, or how much coffee to put in your coffee, we’re here to help you explore every topic that interests you."
If you listen to the talk he says many times "Get the Money" then focus on the real problems
The key here is you have to get the money first, then you have the power and resources to make social change and fix the real problems
So his mix of investments does not have to 100% "real problems" like climate change, his (stated) goal is to get capital from those other projects and use that to fund other companies that focus on "Real Problems"
And InstaEdu, within the education section, was that site where students would pay people to do their homework. It was just a place where students could cheat.
Chamath makes a very good point. Basically that the same brain you are using to respond to constant interruption from social media and its feedback loops is the same brain you are using to do supposedly great works. The former tasks train you brain to think in a pattern that is opposite to the way needed to do meaningful work. In other words, social media products "machine teach" your brain whether you like it or not. Take back control.
I quit FB but didn’t delete my account. I just deactivated it.
Boy they would send me emails with one-liner teasers of my friends posts hoping I would go back. They even sent me an email with one-click to immediately activate my account. So I simply filtered these emails to the trash.
They have texted me twice so far but I simply ignored it.
> Same here. But different people value different things out of relationships. I prefer to have a handful of people close to me and don't seek out daily updates on everyone else.
> In fact, I enjoy running into those people or meeting up with them periodically even more because then they can tell me everything they've been going through in person. To me that's more fun than getting a stream of micro updates on everyone.
Keeping up-to-date with multiple people using FB is like trying to watch multiple shows in one line snippets concurrently mixed together. When you could just wait a bit and then watch it all as a contiguous story or have a real meaningful conversation with a person to catch up over dinner or something.
I feel like a lot of people would agree with this. It wouldn't stop them from using Facebook though. No one at the fast food line claims it's healthy. Beating akrasia is tough.
>"Responsible for overseeing core growth components, building new systems to maximize adoption and virality and growing Facebook adoption throughout the world."
Then he's quoted in the article saying:
>"The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works,” he said, referring to online interactions driven by “hearts, likes, thumbs-up.” “No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth. And it’s not an American problem — this is not about Russians ads. This is a global problem.”
Yes its a global problem sir, why wouldn't it be? This was exactly your mission according to your LinkedIn summary.
It's interesting that these folks never seem to have moments or self-reflection or concerns for the greater good while they are sitting in strategy meetings and taking these company's money and stock options. How convenient for him that he can now make such headline-grabbing pronunciations for his own self-promotion.
However, what makes you decide to espouse this one rather than the one where he was younger and more naive, worked at the sausage factory for a while, and eventually realized the magnitude and dishonesty of what he was overseeing?
Holding people accountable for their actions is important, but we're still at a point where the internet is considered by most to be inherently benign. Putting all our attention on a few individuals allows us to pretend that the internet isn't a complete Pandora's box for society -- that it's just Zuckerberg's fault.
I don't think it's social media itself. Social media merely amplifies who people are. How one handles this amplification determines the utility one derives from social media.
The HN crowd tends to be dismissive of social media (a lot of "get off my lawn types" around here), but I came from the world of BBSes, and to me social media is simply an evolution of what BBSes were. For years I tried to figure out how to reproduce the sense of community that BBSes brought about, but never found the right niche. Then I realized Facebook was actually a evolved version of a BBS.
I am friends on social media with complex people (who understand nuance) who tend to use social media carefully. They use it to share events, describe experiences (in pictures and words), and once in a while write insightful status messages. They usually don't have extreme views, and tend to debate issues in an even-handed way. I find being on social media with these folks to be enriching because I get to learn a thing or two.
If you follow the right folks on Twitter, you'll get to overhear a lot of conversations about the important issues in Python, R, or what have you, and gain a context that eludes most people who learn programming languages from books. Social media is good for that.
Less complex people tend to share on whatever they found on Reddit, their favorite political website or whatever trashy site that supports their preconceived notions. They tend not to write a lot of prose, and when they do it's not very well-thought out. Many of our older less tech-savvy relatives tend to fall into this category. We tolerate these people because we're related to them, but they are the ones who use social media in a somewhat unhelpful fashion. And before social media they found entertainment in forwarding fake news emails without verifying them on Snopes. But we mostly dismiss them because their believability factor is low anyway.
In the middle are the really dangerous folks, the really intelligent but extremely partisan folks. I won't name names, but if you follow certain celebrities in the AI world, they will often share partisan and unexamined articles that reveal their political bias. You would think the more intelligent someone is, the more of a critical thinker they would be, but it turns out that most people who are good at one thing aren't usually good at everything.
BBSes weren't collecting psychological profiles, facial recognition data, credit card transaction histories, public records, etc.. to build profiles with which to manipulate their users on a mass scale. BBSes didn't encourage users to share information about their friends and family who weren't on those BBSes with them. BBSes didn't follow their users around on other BBSes and document everything they did or said on them. BBSes didn't track their users' physical locations 24/7. They also didn't have psychologists on staff helping them to figure out how to make their services as addictive as possible by exploiting various flaws in human psychology. Nobody ever said "if I stop using this BBS I'll lose contact with my friends and family".
Beyond the very basic fact that people sometimes communicated with each other over BBSes, there is absolutely no comparison between them and what is happening right now.
BBS was a totally different phenomenon... a network based community of interest.
Facebook is different. It is a scaffold built around your existing relationships. Like a scaffold, it appears to support that fundamental structure.
But unlike a scaffold, it tries to shape the underlying structure. Unlike a BBS, whose constraint was enabling people to access, it is optimized to maximize consumption of itself.
Facebook can be a community, and used to be more community like, but it’s designed to be something entirely different.
What strikes me about the experience you are describing (your own on social media) is how active a role you have taken in your experience of it. You should know that very, very few do this: they absorb the medium as it is presented. I have watched people completely tune out to their children playing with knives, cars coming at them, etc. because their focus is so absorbed with what is being presented. This behavior is directly traceable to the reward mechanism in the brain and our ever-increasing need for it if we indulge the addiction.
When the entirety of a platform is created with the intent to addict you, and ever color, line, word, behavior is designed with that intent, you have to be particularly strong-willed to resist it, much less even to notice it. Subtlety is the key, and these systems are getting very very good at making you believe you are willingly participating when really, you just can't make yourself stop.
Facebook has a place, and the way you've described your use of it is a great example. I try very hard to use it in much the same way.
But for most people, there's a great line I loved from Stargate SG-1 all those years ago that describes the path they must take to having a healthy life where social media is concerned:
> If you follow the right folks on Twitter, you'll get to overhear a lot of conversations about the important issues in Python, R, or what have you, and gain a context that eludes most people who learn programming languages from books.
I've tried this a few times, but discoverability on Twitter is impossible. I don't know who's an authority, digging through someone's past posts is hard, following a discussion is really difficult. It feels like I'm tasked with digging through a SMS chat log looking for content. Am I just doing it wrong? I can't keep up with twitter. I follow 20-30 accounts and inevitably every time I open up the app and there's 600+ unread posts. I couldn't imagine following any more than that.
It takes a bit of work to figure out who the influencers are.
For instance, in R you will want to follow Hadley Wickham (tidyverse), figure out who replies to his threads and build out your list from there.
In Python, I started off following folks whose PyCon talks I liked. Certain names come up often in the Python world, names like Dave Beazley, Raymond Hettinger, Wes McKinney, Jake VanderPlas, etc. I started there and built out my list.
I'll admit some days there is low signal to noise because lots of folks interleave their technical tweets with tweets about their personal lives or tweets of (sometimes very funny) jokes. But I accept it because life is like that. When you meet people at a social gathering, you can only talk shop for so long. Software development is as much sociology as it is code slinging. It's often as important to know why (the motivations, use cases) something is done a certain way as it is how it is done (algorithms). There is explicit knowledge, and there is tacit knowledge, and the latter is harder to mine but gives one a deeper understanding of the whys as opposed to the hows.
Yes it is easily to be overwhelmed, but that is the price one pays for picking the brains of people who build the tools you use every day. Once in a while you pick up something valuable which makes it all worthwhile.
There are slight UI hints and overall content creation experience that drives the quality of the dialog.
On consumption side, even if someone creates a long and thoughtful well-balanced post, on Facebook it's likely to be hidden with a "see more" link after the first sentence or two, so long and thoughtful doesn't get as heavy of distribution as short, witty and too often simplistic.
On creation side, the single-line text-field does not encourage a long and thoughtful point-by-point debate either, it's designed for "omg, lol, this sucks" type of feedback.
> You would think the more intelligent someone is, the more of a critical thinker they would be
IME, many intelligent, successful people are merely manipulated in a different way, by appealing to their egos. They don't believe they are vulnerable to manipulation; they believe that they can detect if someone is lying and that if something is persuasive to them then it meets a high standard.
I've known salespeople who sell to the wealthy and successful; it's just a different sales pitch, AFAICT.
It's not necessarily social media it's people's belief in what they see in social media. Our ability to analyze from a skeptical point of view has not kept up with our ability to distribute information.
Sadly MSM did not help us in that matter as they adopted the "get it out first" and "clicks are the only thing that matters" point of view.
Finally I put a lot of blame on the Murdoch/Fox propaganda machinery which was very good at getting out media which was specifically designed to confirm the hateful opinions of their audience. It made it possible for people to embrace "double-think" - distrust of media while at the same time trust in their media.
I feel like this is a, "guns don't kill people, people kill people" argument.
If you create a product that is both an echo chamber for reinforcing your beliefs, while also tricking you into believing fake news, and a huge percent of the population is negatively effected by that - can you really keep blaming the people instead of the product?
> can you really keep blaming the people instead of the product?
Yes. Freedom of the press/media is an agreement that as adults we individuals are responsible for our own consumption.
Anything less is an extremely slippery slope usually leading to some form of official 'Ministry of Truth' which, in the current political regime, would be Fox.
> Freedom of the press/media is an agreement that as adults we individuals are responsible for our own consumption.
I think that's a fair agreement for traditional media. Commercial social media, though, uses psychological research to optimize engagement and promote addiction. That is to say, that they are actively working around individual responsibility. Are adults as individuals responsible for their own cigarette consumption? Somewhat, but not entirely.
I don't think the solution is anywhere near requiring the commercial social networks to regulate content. I think that would produce the worst possible outcome. I think a better approach would be along the lines of banning optimization for engagement, requiring chronological timelines, or user-controlled, transparent timeline algorithms.
And ultimately, the goal needs to be to replace commercial social media with decentralized social media.
What does that have to do with assignment of blame? I can say a book is crap, and makes it's readers dumb, without saying that I'm going to ban it.
I can say a social media site is bad and it's creators should feel bad, and that's just another kind of critique. The critique might shape the behaviours of those who read the critique, and are able to reflect on whether the social media site is worthy of their time.
If this is problematic today, imagine how things will be in 20 years. It will be nightmarish.
You're on Facebook, you have a baby, you post photos of your child on Fb and he/she becomes an entity in Fb's database. Your child grows up and eventually creates his own Fb/whatsApp/Instagram/whatever account and the cycle continues with his own children. This is just the beginning, folks.
I'm terrified to see what happens when the generation of children who are being sold out to Facebook/Google/etc by their parents from birth grows up and ends up in positions of power.
That wasn't really the point I was making, which had more to do with the fact that having a middleman recording everything you do will be so normalized to them that they'll never give it a second thought.
However, that is related to the point you made.. though you seem to be trying to write it off as a non-concern by using the 8 year old with a pony example.
I wasn’t trying to write it off, but I was trying to be funny.
To your point, I wonder what happens to people psychologically when they have to be ‘on’ all the time. We’ve built up too much of a culture of judgementalism and one of the aspects of recording everything is that everyone knows your business. It’s like living in a small town. Which, incidentally, a lot of people move to the city so they could just be treated as a random person when they go into a store instead of Betty and Charlie’s boy.
Is this the same debate as "rock and roll is the devil's music" or "TV is rotting our kids' brains" that we have every generation, except now it's social media?
Not saying I disagree with the overall position, but I feel like there's always something to point to that is "ripping apart society"...
Even those debates aren't remotely the same. Just because some people are idiots and create a scare due to irrational beliefs they have been indoctrinated with, doesn't mean that there aren't actually things to be scared of for good reasons.
Rock and roll was mostly deviating from the mainstream and going against some religiously motivated moral ideas, which is an idiotic reason to be afraid of something. TV absolutely did and still does rot people's brains, so to speak, because that is actually the goal of some of the actors behind it, and similarly for the antisocial networks of today.
Obviously they are not identical, but my point was about the social discourse (good or bad, valid or invalid, etc) around new things that disrupt or "bother" established parts of society, and are then vilified in the media, and as a result become even more controversial..
I feel like this is where we are headed with social media now.. That's all..
Kind of. Every technology has costs and benefits. It's important to evaluate the net benefit on a personal and societal basis. Criticism of rock and roll was clearly overblown, but I do believe that most forms of TV and social media are detrimental.
The flaws in the assertions made by this Facebook exec are exactly the same as those who assert that Russia "attacked our Democracy" using "social media". In both cases the issue isn't "social media", its our sick society where most people are thoughtless, lack critical thinking skills, and are easily influenced. When people are vapid and whimsical they are extremely susceptible to any kind of external stimulus much like someone with a compromised immune system is susceptible to disease. Unfortunately, by the very nature of our national disease, introspection is absent. Consequently, instead of dealing with the root cause of social strife (the nature and intellectual capacity of our citizens), we seek to externalize the blame ("It was the Russians!" .. "Social media is to blame for our national discord!"). Critical thinking, awareness and presence of mind are not lacking due to some widespread genetic problem. These are skills that have to be honed and developed from childhood. Paradoxically, this problem only gets worse because those who sit at the top of the pyramid of our society don't want a nation full of critical thinkers. They want a nation full of people who are constantly worried about where their next rent payment, credit card payment, or insurance premium are coming from. The last thing they want is a nation full of people willing and capable to challenge the status quo. As a result, things will continue to deteriorate as the vast majority of citizens are more concerned with when the new Iphone is released or what trouble the Kardeshians have gotten themselves into this week.
I think the real rot of social media is the filter bubble it creates (along with social media merging with news, ala google censorship).
I remember my early days on BBS's and IRC, when if you were an idiot you got called out for it. It was a generally more hostile atmosphere with less patience for idiocy, which at first doesn't seem like a positive, but by creating rules like the one HN foisted with little user input on us of arbitrary enforcement of "don't be unecessarily negative", I feel we actually create a worse space by coddling users. The same applies for users self-coddling via filter-bubbles they put on themselves, or filter-bubbles imposed on them by whatever company. (for example, reddit censorship and manipulation has been getting out of hand for years, and it's obvious they have been angling towards IPO, which will be their death I hope.)
This is why I still like irc and usenet to this day.
The secondary rot of social media is the surveillance dystopia it has created and is enabling.
I strongly believe social media in current forms is bad for society and for people individually, it is a digital addiction that feeds the worst of human nature with no redeeming quality.
Everyone I know who still is used by the service always reports their experience as some variation of outrage, gossip, fake news, distraction, attention draining, rumor, innuendo, hearsay, time wasting, conflict, narcissism, vanity, boasting, egotism, or at best some ultra staged portraiture intended to signal how wonderful someones life is in a completely artificial self-selected setting. Does any of that sound like a good thing?
Calling it an addiction is problematic, IMO. Clinically, gambling is still the only officially "recognized" addiction that isn't an actual substance one abuses, so there's very little academic rigor applied so far to other behaviors that we talk about as being addictive. Sex addiction (which I bring up because it's also one of these "brain-becomes-addicted-to-hormones-that-make-you-feel-good concepts) has been blamed for many a sexual harassment lawsuit in which the "victim" of the "addiction" attends a luxurious "treatment facility" for a week and is then "cured" until their next "relapse". The business model is shady as hell, and even the most well-meaning anti-porn groups base a lot of what they say on very shady science like brain scans that happen to look similar, when you can get a lot of activities to yield similar brain scans. Therapists who approach it as a symptom of other issues (attachment issues, for example) rather than an addiction have had more success actually breaking habits, but rigorous research is hard to come by in that field so far.
More than social media by itself, the real force that is accelerating the harmful effects of this new "addiction" is the mobile phone - due to the fact that it is with is all the time, everywhere. That together with push notifications, and ease of use complete the instant gratification feedback loop that feeds off and drives the addiction. So much of our attention is consumed by it, that even in social gartherings, it is hard to have a conversation with some one without being interrupted or distracted by the device. It has almost become a joke - family gatherings and social get-togethers become places for people to congregate huddled over their mobile phones...
Social Media has been terrible for society. I say this as someone who spends considerable time on social media. But it's full impact has only starting to unravel. We have seen nothing yet, the end result of social media, IMO, will be magnitudes of order more ghastly than what we have seen. In developing countries, social media is playing havoc in sowing division among very fragile social order. The kind of forwards, memes, jokes my dad receives from his Whatsapp community is shocking. And at age 75, he has no capacity to distinguish between real and completely made up propaganda. The effects are slowly been realized.
> We are living now, not in the delicious intoxication induced by the early successes of science, but in a rather grisly morning-after, when it has become apparent that what triumphant science has done hitherto is to improve the means for achieving unimproved or actually deteriorated ends.
I recently marked 4 months with zero acces to my Facebook news feed. I used the hacker news plugin to prevent the feed from showing on my laptop, and when I realized how much I was still looking at the app on my phone, I deleted the mobile app.
I can’t overstate how much of a positive change this has been for me. It was a level of life altering freedom and a return of free time and mental clarity in the ballpark of abstaining from alcohol.
The number of times it has inconvenienced me is precisely once. I still have messenger for those people who like to reach out that way. I still can log on and see events and notifications.
But the addictive news feed is gone from my life and I couldn’t be happier.
I often browse /r/4chan and I have to admit than even though 4chan is not a website I often go to or use at all, it seems like it's a much more attractive and fun place to go to.
I really don't understand the point of stating your real identity on a social media. Internet security is already not perfect to this day, so what's the point? Facebook doesn't even let you meet new people outside your network, or even interact with friends of your friends in a trustful manner.
4chan is like the local pub, facebook is like a bar where everyone has their name and interests written on their face. Evidently 4chan seems more natural.
4chan is entirely fictional. When go there, you expect to read lies and bullshitting and thathappened. And you know that people put that out there not for the sake of influencing others, but for the sake of entertainment and fun.
4chan is like a pub without regulars. You can't go there to meet specific people.
As I mentioned here a number of times before, I already removed fb from my phone years ago. The best thing I did yesterday was to log out from fb on the computer.
I think people doubt the power and threat of social media (and online porn[0]) because of their physical properties: They are images on a screen - how much harm can such things do? They are not intravenous drugs.
But what if social media, or some aspect of it, or online porn had the same cognitive, emotional, and/or physical effects on people as heroin? In fact, isn't that what online businesses spend so much on, and a generation of smart people work so hard on - addictive engagement? If someone developed engagement that powerful, do you think they'd stop themselves and say, 'this is too much'?
My point is not that social media and online porn have the same effects as heroin; they do not. Whatever their effects, they are at least different. My point is that we shouldn't dismiss their danger based on our preconceptions about the medium by which their effects are delivered.
I remember the first few years of facebook (back when you had to have a university email address to sign up) and I genuinely think it was a positive, value-added-to-the-world kind of experience. I had good friends on there and we would share things, discuss different topics, and in general just interact with each other in a way we weren't able to before. There wasn't even a "news feed"; you just visited someone's page and looked at what they had posted or posted something there yourself that you thought they would appreciate.
Facebook is nothing like that anymore, and while there's certainly a lot that's changed, I think there are two specific things that turned it into what it is now.
1) Every single thing you do; posting videos, sharing your thoughts via text, leaving comments, joining a group, etc. runs on a point system. Everything is scored via "likes", and not only do you evaluate how good a post was based on the score it receives, but Facebook does too. The higher the score the higher your post will appear in other people's feeds and the more friends it will be shown to. Facebook even shows a post to a subset of your friends to judge how well it will perform, and if it receives a lot of likes it will be pushed out to a broader audience. You are, quite literally, playing a game.
Not only does that change your value system from "hey I found something that <friend> would like and I'm going to share it with them so we can talk about it" to "hey I found something that will get me a lot of points"; it also means that trivial content rises to the top. Cat pictures are kinda-neat to everyone but not extremely meaningful to anyone, while a thoughtful post on a specific topic probably doesn't appeal to everyone, but it will mean a lot to a few people. But with the one-vote-per-person rule, the thoughtful post gets buried.
2) Advertisements displace real content. YouTube, for all it's other flaws, has a very straightforward ad model. Ads essentially just piggyback on videos. If you make a really good video that means that lots of people will want to watch it, lots of ads can be shown, you get lots of views, and all three parties are happy without interfering with each other's interests. With Facebook, ads don't piggyback on other content, they replace it. If you are a company and you want to advertise yourself, you make a post and then pay have Facebook show it to more people and place it higher in their news feeds. Real content gets pushed down. And what's worse, there's no real distinction between ads and content. I believe you can even pay to boost your own posts, even as a normal user.
I think that there are going to be problems with any social platform, but Facebook is gross. It's a social game that exploits people's natural behaviors and ways of thinking, and does it without them realizing it to make a profit.
> I think that there are going to be problems with any social platform
The problem is the idea of a "social platform".
We need social technology, not social platforms. We need technology that allows people to communicate and share, but we don't need a middleman that is semantically involved in any of this. Telephone networks don't care about the content of your calls, they simply allow you to talk to people. Parks and pubs don't have people who monitor what you are talking about, they simply provide you with a place to meet.
That is what the internet and technology building on it should provide.
Chamath is all about entertainment, his Q&A was fun to watch and filled with brilliant one liners that are quote worthy in their shallowness. Ultimately his advice is useless to a group of people that have to work for a living.
He also pontificates and chastises social media yet he is a prolific on twitter.
You know, if everyone on facebook would stop doing this stuff:
[link deleted since although it's all over the internet, who knows if that subject agreed to it being everywhere anyway it's "Guy slightly changes his friend's Facebook pictures"]
then I think it would help the platform. It was a great site when it was just basically a nicely formatted yellow pages for people, with no news feed. Now it's just another place trying (well it feels like it) to push, bot generated news down my throat. This kind of sucks because I can tell they, do, put a lot of effort into what they are doing (which means they must care about it) but the result is still much worse than when it was just a personal homepage, (imho of course). Also I get the creepy feeling that they it's the most likely thing to turn into the people rating engine (like the black mirror episode), so that kind of turns me off, quite a bit (I mean, that wouldn't be quite as bad as having jew armbands in 1939, but... it's in that direction certainly).
I'm surprised that, in all this time, no one has done better.
Here is our manifesto from our site (qbix.com)
The internet has given us opportunities to connect with one another like never before. Yet, most sites we use today have barely tapped that potential. We believe in the power of well-designed tools to improve people's lives and bring about positive social change. They are characterized by five main aspects:
Time: Instead of priding ourselves on how much time people spend in our apps, we want people to get in, get out, and get results.
Utility: Help people get things done in the real world, rather than building an online persona.
Notifications: Let people control which updates they receive about things happening in their life, instead of getting them addicted to notifications like a slot machine.
Organic: In every context, pre-compute useful information and present it to the user, enabling them to do more in less steps.
Business Model: Make money by helping people accomplish useful things as a group, not just by selling advertising.
These aren't just empty words. They are actionable goals to aim for in social apps.
I also find it quite surprising nobody else seems to mention this. I checked some other interviews, and it seems to be normal for him. This is probably the way people communicate within Facebook. I don't think it's fitting in front of Stanford students, and it definitely doesn't help bringing your message across.
Sure - maybe the wrong forum, but the depressive sentiment that our sore thumb ideals are hammered down by the social media monster is mutually felt and quite inline with the article. No one knows exactly what it is like to be you, but many of us feel a similar desire to do more than use our best skills for the mundane - to alter the conversation is a nobel aspiration.
I too struggle with knowledge that I am bright, but that I may not be quite bright enough to be what I really want. Its a frustrating and lonely thought many of us in this field share. Expressing it though - even writing it in a public forum - is often an invite to the social monsters that prowl around here to say "then you obviously aren't that bright". Don't listen. Walk your path.
Just do your best and understand that luck and good timing means more than hard work and brilliance (ask any lotto winner). To say anything else is a like a banner ad for survivorship bias. None of us matter much in the scheme of things and all radical ideas are seen as trash to those "in the know" at some point.
I've come to terms with a lot of things I am powerless over. I've had to accept that the Anthropocene extinction is happening and most people are only vaguely aware, only a few people are willing to change their lifestyle choices. I've accepted that billions of people just want to escape poverty and live with a few of the comforts most of us take for granted. Who are we say no to them? I've accepted that in order for humanity to keep growing, everything else will keep dying little by little. I wish I was wrong but everything I am saying is supported by observable facts.
I've started to grow disillusioned with the tech industry, how different is it from Wall Street at this point? I've grown a lot as a designer, a developer, a writer, a salesman but now I'm only interested in earning an honest living, not so much to 'save the world' like I felt when I was 20. It's tempting though, I struggle with the fact that I may live and die on this world without having had much consequence on anything. Yet I'm beginning to realize that in the end, all we may leave behind as a species is a lot of plastic, crumbling buildings, cigarette butts, and toxic landfills. There is the slight chance that we expand beyond the Earth but judging from geopolitics, I'm not sure we have our priorities right at the most critical time in human history.
I'm afraid that I am too meek to swim with the sharks and in the event I do succeed, then I have to be ready for the day when someone from my past will get jealous and exaggerate something from my past to some desperate media outlet trying to get views. I would much rather buy a cabin in the mountains and grow my own food, enjoy the simple things that have always made me happy. I'm content with a camper van, working remotely, and seeing what's left of the National Parks with my camera and my dog. I'm at the point now where I don't even think I want to get married or have kids, this is where I'm at age 27.
>God I wish at least one person in the whole world could understand what it was like to be me, to be the dumbest person in the smart class all the time.
Isn't that impostor syndrome (something I've read about here like 100 times)?
this is petty pandering and moral grandstanding. if he thinks his gains are truly ill-gotten, he can purify his money by giving it to charity. instead he is buying bespoke suits.
You seem to forget that humans are pretty vunerable to making bad choices, both individually bad and collectively bad. By helping eachother in weak moments, building correcting and preventive systems using culture and technology we manage to do better that we could do entirely on our own.
Blame is not useful, agreed. Always have to do ones best with that cards one has been dealt. Including helping others, and letting others help you.
Give me one example where humanity cured a social ill by everyone independently choosing to abstain, without organizing, starting a movement, or adopting some policy or technological solution. Show me one time where mass numbers of people said "i'm quitting smoking cold turkey" at the same time, or show me a country that cured obesity because everyone woke up one day and decided to eat less. You can't.
On the other hand, it's hard to ignore the fact that typically these people have already profited enormously from these companies and they will never have to face any sort of real ramifications or consequences for the net harm that may ultimately be brought to society.
It's one thing to be sorry, it's another to avoid being complicit in such ventures to begin with. But that's the thing... where is the incentive to "do no harm" in Silicon Valley? There isn't any.
It's an interesting thought experiment to imagine what the world might look like if people were held accountable indefinitely for the externalities caused by the work they conduct.
Not saying this is practical or even desirable, but clearly it would change people's priorities quite a bit. As a software dev there's very little keeping you from accepting a fat job offer from Facebook unless you happen to have a particularly strong & discerning conscious/moral code. I'd like to believe that I'd turn it down... but I'm not so sure. No wonder the world's brightest minds are working at companies like this.