This is a funny and particularly well written post that touches on a serious topic. Tech addiction and attention seeking are not yet being self-moderated. We are living out a massive social experiment of sorts because of the rapid advancement of the internet. I believe it is a certain net-positive on society, but we need to pay more attention to the cons.
I like the probably-accidental double-entendre here. ;)
I think there is some attention (though probably still not enough) being paid to algorithms/clouds/etc gamifying our dopaminergic cycles, often without our best interests in mind. But it's worth remembering that individuals can easily fall into these anti-patterns independently, without coercion from centralized servers or dark UI patterns.
When I first heard the RHCP lyric referencing "getting high on information" I thought it a clever turn of phrase, maybe even a bit of a good thing; now I view the phenomenon with deadly seriousness, as I find it an ongoing struggle in day-to-day life, trying to keep focus on what matters amidst a deluge of both noise and signal.
We don't have a natural moderation mechanism for it, and must rely on self-awareness and then self-discipline in the moment. Horribly unreliable. For most desires we have built in moderators, like in hunger you get full, for exercise you get tired, for sex you get a cocktail of chemicals that make you satiated, and so on.
Thinking outside of chemicals, the way we experience the web now is deliberately shallow to keep you moving from item to item, and full of hooks to bring you back before you get engaged in something in a way that would be satisfying.
A while a ago I realized this and saw myself uncontrollably refreshing some of these discussion sites. One of the reasons I decided not to delete my hackernews account when I deleted my accounts on other sites like reddit was because of the “noprocrast” feature. It’s not perfect but it can help prevent being totally consumed.
