Where and when else could you mail $1 to Rolling Stone's original hq and have them send you a longer Bob Dylan interview, and then on the opposite side, the publisher reveals their costs?
Rather than framing it as "protection from my own impulses," I think it's more fair to frame it as "protection from teams of professional researchers and engineers and marketers whose entire life's work is fine tuning how to most effectively profit from my impulses"
Well, yeah, but that type of protection isn't compatible with freedom. Neither the freedom to consume nor the freedom to iterate on a product. I don't blame companies for making their products addictive. I smoke cigarettes. I drink. Sometimes I crave a Big Mac. I don't blame them for selling me poison, as long as I recognize it as unhealthy. The best way to protect yourself is by educating yourself to recognize manipulative patterns, and by extension sharing that with other people. We know from drug addiction that simply banning something doesn't work. And an insight from some great druggies like Philip K Dick and Hunter Thompson and Burroughs is that the list of things that can be addictive is endless. If someone made an app that made people chew their nails, or lick an escalator banister, or shock themselves with electricity, people would get addicted to it.
I was hypnotized a few times as a child by a professional hypnotist. When in college I was invited to a "seminar" which turned out to be a cult indoctrination session, I immediately recognized what I was seeing the group leader doing to the audience.
We don't need external protection, we need herd immunity. It's like"give a man a fish" vs "teach a man to fish".
I like your clarity about personal responsibility, but it might also help to remember that human capacity for self-regulation isn’t uniform. We all grow through developmental stages and carry traits that shape how we handle influence, impulse, and awareness.
The idea that “we just need herd immunity” assumes we’re all equally capable of recognizing manipulation or addiction, but as ericmcer noted, the evidence all around us suggests most of us are not quite there. In many ways, that belief in our individual mastery is part of what Western culture keeps overestimating, as if understanding the trick is enough to undo the conditioning.
There also seems to be a deeper resistance in our western cultures to actually pausing, turning inward, and staying present with what’s happening inside us. We intellectualize awareness instead of living it. Real freedom will begin not with more information or clever systems, but with learning to meet our own impulses directly. To listen, to stay with discomfort, to see what drives us without immediately trying to fix it. Until we're willing to practice that kind of contact with ourselves, we’ll keep playing defense against the surface symptoms.
I agree, and I don't want what I wrote to be read as "people just need more self control." I lack self control, that's why I have addictions and bad habits. I know other people who have even less self control, and some who seem to be immaculate. I don't care to be judged or to judge anyone else. I guess that's why I framed it as herd immunity.
Here's what I mean (from an addict's perspective). What makes me hesitate when I reach for a cigarette or another drink, and decide maybe I should call it a night, is not the knowledge that it's bad for me. It's thinking about friends who have died from lung cancer and cirrhosis. As a whole, as a society, we've become more aware of the effects of certain poisons because we've witnessed the results and drawn the conclusions.
So with screen addiction, we're just starting to witness the results on a generational level. Yes - screen use is a little different because it can have good sides as well. The screens are magical devices that can educate us and improve us, too. Someone addicted to watching their diet and exercise with FitBit has a different psychological problem space from someone addicted to watching people put ants up their nose on TikTok.
I agree with you wholeheartedly that all of these things prevent us from focusing and staying present and dealing with real problems. I'm really just saying that removing any or all of them doesn't address that underlying void which causes people to seek consciousness altering substances or mass distraction. There is no distraction or game the human mind won't latch onto to avoid reality - that's the curse of knowing you're going to die. We need immunity against the surface thing that's eating us alive right now. But of course we'll keep playing defense against the next thing, because we have no immunity from it. Changing human nature seems to me like a utopian vision, which has never worked in practice. Yeah, we can romanticize some cultures that seem to be better at managing it. But give them a cell phone, a credit card and an Amazon account and you'll see how long it takes for them to fuck themselves over too. Those that do survive the modern world with things like a Sabbath day of rest or avoiding technology completely, do so because they have very strong communal practices that ensure individuals have little agency or choice - and they also happen to believe in a divine plane of existence beyond the mortal coil, which changes their calculus when making bad decisions. I'm not advocating for either thing. I think changing human nature is impossible, and I think heaven is a placebo. Changing individual human behavior to be more present and more self-aware, I think, is possible. But it's an incremental process. First you have to train each individual to notice a new danger. Then they can develop defenses against it.
I guess I just said something very classically Conservative and yet heretical, but this seems like the way the process has to work, as opposed to wish-casting us to all look inside ourselves and put down that cellphone or that cigarette. We are flawed. We as a species take advantage of each others' flaws in a climb to the top of the monkey barrel. There's no way out, even if Elon thinks there is on Mars, or Zuck thinks there is in Hawaii. Herd immunity amounts to enough of your friends and neighbors gently telling you to wake up and take care of yourself. That's probably how a communally sane society evolves in the end, too - once it reaches some kind of equilibrium with its technology, its drugs, and its environment.
> Changing individual human behavior to be more present and more self-aware
to what though? Id argue people prefer going on a website for something to do than dealing with the sad reality that is modern life. Dont blame a UI designer because your lifes empty
How does a child learn this if they are peer pressured to be on these platforms? The parents can say no up to a point. But eventually the environment demands a child to be on these platforms to participate in their social circles.
How do you enforce a rule to a large group of barely related individuals?
Slow, rhythmic speech pattern. Relaxing tones. Asking you to focus on your heart rate or breathing. Counting, or asking you to count mentally. Low lights or candle light. These are the things that come to mind.
There is a massive gap between "100k engineers have found a way to make most people in my demographic waste all their time by choosing to doomscroll" and "actually Nazis".
Both are bad, but as different as chronic fatigue and terminal cancer.
Reminds me of when Google Plus got “integrated” everywhere, but even worse.
If we take the thing nobody asked for and shove it in users faces as often as possible, this will get lots of happy customers and the product will take off!
Huge agree. Apple likes to pay lip service to this with "screen time" features, but will they make a smaller phone for people who don't want their life centered around staring at the shiny screen? No, because they don't sell as much as big phones.
What they want is for the government to run the satellites and provide the data on the taxpayers' dime, but only let private companies interpret that data so they can sell their forecasting
For consumer hardware spaces (tablets and smartwatches) they're currently acting like they care, but they have previously checked out of those spaces and then come back years later saying "Just kidding actually we are doing tablets!"
What might save this one is that the Oculus Quest ecosystem being Android based with similar hardware, so it should be pretty easy for an ecosystem of appropriately designed software to get ported over.
Kind of like how big screen Android devices have been an afterthought for most apps (hope you like enlarged phone UIs) but what might rescue tablets this time is foldable phones showing up and making developers consider "what if the screen isn't a tall rectangle?"
I still think there's high chances they have one or two generations of hardware trying to copy the Oculus Quest / Vision Pro and then pull the plug and say "forget VR we're doing AI glasses." They were ahead of the curve with Google Glass, but have that habit of bailing on things and giving up the first mover advantage.
AR is going to be on the back burner unless miniaturization improves for the price point. The only player in that space I'm aware of is Anduril's EagleEye, which is Son of HoloLens 2 for the Army's IVAS contract. AFAIK Anduril yoinked all the staff and tech from the HoloLens team (or a lot of the staff anyway) when it fell over.
MS and Magic Leap tried to make holographic AR work, but the state of the art wasn't cheap and compact enough for them to make any money on it.
https://archive.org/details/stanley-catalogue-34-1929/page/6...
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