We need to reclaim our attention
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I agree with them.
It's hard to pay attention to something for long unless it's entertaining. Reading a book, reading a paper, etc -- these activities take discipline that most people don't develop or don't often apply. This isn't new. The mistake is thinking that the ability to concentrate on something non-entertaining is the baseline. One reason so many people think they have ADHD is because they make that mistake.
We had the same anxieties about radio and TV. Those anxieties were right and wrong. Technologies do change how people behave but it's always the same story. There will be entertainment freely available and you'll have to choose to concentrate on things that aren't entertaining that you consider worthwhile.
Society can survive with bad tendencies. Think about 50 years ago when American restaurants were full of cigarette smoke, and rivers would get so polluted they'd catch on fire. People still survived, even thrived. If we had ignored those problems, probably someone today would be saying "Opiates? Global warming? Just more moral panics, the way a few decades ago everyone was worried about the environment and smoking."
The dangerous thing is that once these trends become part of your society, it's hard to imagine the world without them, and hard to see why people make such a fuss about them because they can become an immutable part of your reality. You become blind to them. I'm sure, given enough time, we'll become blind to new negative trends in society just as we've become blind to previous negative trends. But that's not a good thing.
Just look at the overall physical fitness of, say, an average 18 year old in 1950 vs today in the US. By loads of measures (obesity, muscle strength, cardiovascular fitness, diabetes, etc.) there is an enormous degradation in the physical fitness of America's youth. I'm certainly not blaming this all on TV and videogames, but at the same time I think it's a huge mistake to pretend our technological advances haven't had other, large negative side effects.
A poor person today by contrast has junk food as the cheapest option.
You're a little quick to correlate screens and health metrics. I don't think that explanation holds up at all if you consider data in other countries.
There is soviet sci-fi novel that features a distopian society where people a killed before they become frail and become a burdain, and its considered an honour. They can't imagine the world otherwise.
(It should be noted that this particular feature is not the central premise of the book, but merely one of the facets of said dystopian society.)
Dr Andrew Huberman, professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford, does some excellent lecture-like podcasts on the subject that are well worth a listen.
In contrast, modern media not only knows much more about the user and their behavior but can fine-tune each individual expereince in real-time to maximize view time and "engagement" per-user without any oversight as it is impossible for a watchdog to see what each individual user is presented with. This is much more dangerous as the content can be fine-tuned based on each user's individual profile and weaknesses/addictions.
The modern web is the fentanyl version of TV in terms of addictiveness.
Then the addiction rating should get higher if there is more endless endgame content, more multiplayer content, boxes to purchase, etc.
You get the idea, if the industry is so determined to find the bliss point of a game/food item then the governments need to evolve with that challenge.
What do you mean by this? Until very recently, TVs and radios never had the ability to report feedback on what people were consuming or whether people were watching ads. There were some surveys like Nielsen ratings that involved a small sample of people installing special hardware. TVs and radios have never served personalized results to individuals, even if there were “algorithms” involved — the targeting was toward the entire population at once, not to each an every person viewing. For most of TV & radio history, the “algorithms” were people and not computers, people manually sifting through data for weeks just to see if a show was popular.
It’s pretty odd to suggest that TV & radio was historically similar to what’s going on with today’s social media. Serving personalized results and gathering instant personalized viewing habits (“engagement”) is what’s fundamentally different than TV & radio, the feedback cycle fundamentally changed from a slow group feedback to a fast individual feedback, and that’s precisely why social media is more engaging and more dangerous.
With your video game idea, what's the difference between this and other software? Some social media seems like the game that never ends.
An "unprecedented new thing" comes around every generation, and every time, there are fancy arguments touted about why this unprecedented new thing is unlike all the other "unprecedented new things" in the past.
For what it's worth, I'll say this: when I watch TV or a movie, it appears that the producers, writers, and set designers work hard to make sure that my attention is captured during every moment of the theatrical event. Movie studios perform A/B testing to see what kind of cinematic techniques are more engaging to audiences. Music studios use computer software to mathematically model what kind of music the masses will enjoy. Newspapers engage in yellow journalism.
All I am pleading for is a higher standard of proof and some contrarianism when people claim that whatever modern thing nowadays is unprecedented even among all the other unprecedented things of the past.
It's completely missing the actual attention grabbing factor here - there's a huge amount of content for consumption on demand in those networks. Unlike TV or radio where at most you could have 100s of channels simultaneously available, there's billions of articles/videos/posts/songs/articles/etc. available with a few clicks.
At best algos get you there faster.
I used to browse Instagram casually. Like, once is a blue moon. I would see updates from my network and spend a few mins here and there. This was probably like over year or two back. (not 100% sure)
And then a few months back I just could not take my eyes off of Instagram reels. This feature wasn't there before I think. I was just completely hooked. It was pretty interesting. I had to delete my instagram off of my phone.
They definitely are figuring out the formula to retain people's attention.
Again, this is just a data point of one.
So it's you agree that the villains are evil, but your defence for them is that they are inept?
If this is an addiction, then it will be one that's gonna be very difficult to break for most people.
In most places it's nowadays near impossible to go about your day without some kind of online activity or interaction. Especially as during this pandemic a lot of "in person" alternatives for it have been phased out of use.
So in practice the addicts are regularly forced to interact with their source of addiction. How are we supposed to fix that?
Maybe today's normal life, at least for us in the developed world. But I'd wager that spear hunting a wild animal in the woods with your fellow tribe-mates is far more thrilling and rewarding than any video game.
That could be the issue, our brains don't differ from our ancestors who did things like those, regular life today lacks life-threatening thrill which could be the reason of growing addictions.
I know of a phenomenon present among some peoples in Siberia, the part of the tribe that lives out in the wilderness following reindeer live a tough life but depression among those tribe-members is non-existent. While those living in the towns have substance abuse problems and high suicide rates.
Edit: TBF this is a chicken/egg problem, people have been dropping out of school forever and maybe the video games were the outlet for their stress, but I don't think we can simply act like all is fine while making games targeting adolescents as addictive as possible.
The only other occasion I surpassed that level of adrenaline was in Iraq in 2007.
Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu matches up. Various forms of racing will also hit the same pathways in the brain.
Hard to achieve for sure.
One thing that happened to be though, is that once I got really skilled at physical things, going back and playing games was a lot more boring. It is like the artificial reward loop didn't work anymore once I'd tasted the real thing.
(Either that or I got old enough that my reaction times dropped sufficiently so I wasn't one of the top bad asses playing FPSs so I wasn't having as much fun! ;) )
No they aren't, and the suggestion that people could be "addicted" to video games makes a mockery of the concept of addiction.
Except some of the past moral panics were about reading books, they worried that kids were reading the wrong books, voraciously!
Reading popular fiction didn't used to be considered something that took discipline, it used to be considered escapist entertainment, people did it because it was entertaining.
Millions read books and newspapers (not sure if that's what you meant by 'papers'), only a couple decades ago. On the subway in NYC for instance, you would be surrounded by people reading both paperbacks and newspapers. Not very long-ago, in the adulthood of people currently middle-aged! It's not true at all that this was a rare thing undertaken only by people applying discipline.
It might be no big deal that this attention has shifted to social media, just another shift in the particular mediums used for cultural production and consumption. Without even getting into that debate -- just the fact that you believe that reading things on paper is something that takes discipline that few have ever developed -- is astonishing to me. It has definitely not always been that way. It was not that way literally only 20 years ago, not very long ago at all -- it is remarkable that things have shifted so quickly you now believe reading books has always been a thing only for those with discipline, to be done distastefully like eating your veggies.
(It could just be a shift in mediums, but the essay tries to illustrate the deleterious effects on our lives of the new mediums, which I recognize from personal experience and observation, myself).
Speaking of which: has anyone had the experience where they sought to be evaluated for ADHD and the professional they went to said "nope, this doesn't look like ADHD"?
I'm wondering if there are criteria people use to exclude ADHD as a diagnosis, or if the assumption is that if people are seeking diagnosis/treatment that they're experiencing something enough like it and should be given ADHD interventions (and of course, the incentive under fee-for-service would be to provide the intervention for a fee).
https://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/168201153351/have-yo...
It's so easy to take out your phone to check a social media app, or open a tab on your laptop to a social media website like Reddit, versus turning on a radio or getting up to turn on the TV.
A comic book doesn't fit in your front pocket, but a phone does; there's just so much less friction for distraction today.
So yeah, it is pure moral panic, except about something average HN commenter does not think he do.
I really hate how contentious and polarizing ADHD is. Reminds me of being trans. There are people who benefit greatly from being medicated, much more than the risk they take. That should really be the end of it.
What if this is a moral panic like prohibition or the red scare more than like comic books. Was American drinking culture in the early 1900s insane and were there soviet spies in the 1950s? Actually yes, and that doesn't justify McCarthy or make Prohibition a good idea.
And this is the challenge. How do we respond proportionately without going "OMG THINK OF THE CHILDREN" or blending the actual problems with our other phobias?
This opinion is respectful of nuance. Multiple social changes are converging, it is not just one the scapegoat of screen proliferation among toddlers, it is a re-examination of existential pillars unlike anything I've seen in my 50+ years (e.g., what is work? what is authority? what is worthy of protecting? what should one believe? how does one believe?).
I wonder if the new Satanic Panic of ADHD/OCD/Screens/Internet is a reflection of how children (hell, and adults) are internalizing the shakiness of what we had been taking for granted for so long. This proposal fits the reams of anecdotal reports from parents and teachers about kids becoming more difficult than they were in the past decades (and it also fits the past decade of bizarre social and political shifts across the globe).
Ironically, we won't be around for the historical analysis of WTF is actually going on because it'll take generations to parse it, distill it, and make a narrative out of it. Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau all saw the French revolution coming. In hindsight that is survivor-bias because we don't read the works of people who were wrong about the political state of France in the 18th century! So we can't even look around today and say: who's right? It has to happen before we can judge it.
Of course, that's not to say we should throw moderation and discipline to the wind when it comes to child-rearing. Seems like the age-old cure of moderation is all we have: if you only do something occasionally, how can it cause long-term negative consequences (barring meth, of course)? Any better ideas?
Interactivity changes the equation. Limitless options change the equation.
Radio and TV couldn't tailor themselves to an audience of one, your ML powered social media feed can.
This is the reverse slippery slope fallacy.
There is no threshold, no effect size where this tuns net negative, etc. We took these 10 steps, were worried and nothing happened, we can do more steps.
> If the people warning about the effects on our attention turn out to be wrong, and we still do what they suggest, what will be the cost? We will spend less time being harassed by our bosses, and we’ll be tracked and manipulated less by technology – along with lots of other improvements in our lives that are desirable in any case. But if they turn out to be right, and we don’t do what they say, what’s the cost? We will have – as the former Google engineer Tristan Harris told me – downgraded humanity, stripping us of our attention at the very time when we face big collective crises that require it more than ever.
But then there's addiction, which can hijack one of your brain systems like your dopamine or endorphine systems. In the case of internet addiction disorder, reading endless feeds must be related to dopamine for sure.
Today, almost everywhere in the West, you need a professional job to have a decent lifestyle, and these jobs require some minimal capacity to concentrate that the average man doesn’t have and never had.
tldr: It's down. But why? Did everyone wise up and decide watching as much television was not good for them so they started to do more productive things? No, of course not. Time was simply shifted to other entertainment mediums, like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Youtube, and so on.
In another 10 or 20 years, it wills surely shift several more times, too. And so it goes...
Beware or you too will be collateral damage on the balance sheets of these media conglomerates. Unmediated reality is still there for you to peruse, but 'augmented reality' will be the next big wave for tech and I'm pretty sure that it will end up being used mostly for advertising purposes.
I personally think there have always been distractions, maybe what’s different now is how some people get positive validation from their social media interactions, certainly an author would. A lot of people don’t though.
Advertising works, on everybody. The only way to get to a level playing field is to filter it out of your life as much as possible. The only thing I haven't found a solution for is billboards and radios and TVs playing in places that I have no control over.
NB also made their logo reflective, so there is utility in that. All these people running in black shorts and shirts, there ought to be a law.
This means that it is actually possible to not be affected by advertising and still use fashion items, on the theory that everyone else is affected by advertising and the effect you want is to leverage that effect.
I'm sure the most fashionable people are aware of this since they need to parse the fine distinctions of brand associations to maximize their desired effects. Ironically I think they may be the least affected by the advertising even while becoming the strongest real world advocates.
This might sound silly, but I deliberately train my eyes to avoid looking at advertisements on posters whenever I take public transit (not completely successful, but it does reduce exposure).
For radio advertisements, that's what the 'over-priced in ear headphones' are for (admittedly a luxury and not a necessity as I could achieve the same effect with earplugs or cheap, noise-isolating earphones, but I enjoy the high-quality music).
TVs are the most difficult because they easily catch attention due to the moving picture. I also try to avoid looking at them like billboards when I go to the gym (plenty of TVs) and turn off the display whenever using the treadmill, but it's a conscious decision I make before walking in.
Also, for what it's worth, I don't think the value of iPhones are overstated by advertising. I purchased my first one after reading a book by an academic about the lack of privacy in technology. It was a suitable option for a phone that's relatively private while working with relatively easy setup (versus most Linux phones). So, iPhone usage may reduce the effectiveness of targeted ads by collecting less data to use for advertisers.
So yea, I echo the claim. But I’m probably wrong. Where’s my blindspot? Is there a way to test how affected I am by ads?
I volunteered in several marketing positions for educational non-profit organizations and university clubs, and read books about marketing and advertising to try to improve at my job.
A great deal of advertising tactics rely on emotional appeal first (e.g. identifying a human need or fear–like the want to belong, the want to find a good romantic relationship, the want to save time or money, the want to look smart–then selling a product or service as a solution. Another common tactic is to reduce friction to make a purchase, to make impulse purchasing easier (e.g. one-click purchases, very visible purchase buttons). A third is to use other high-pressure or manipulative tactics (e.g. a countdown timer to get a discount, or offering free gifts or books to make a purchase).
You're likely to reduce the effectiveness of these advertising tactics on you by being aware of them (though there's a high chance they still have an effect). Besides knowledge from reading about advertising, good habits to reduce ad effectiveness include: delaying purchases, especially large ones, by writing them on a list and seeing if you still want them after a month; avoiding regular, small purchases of ~$20 because they add up; and holding yourself to a personal budget, where impulse spending comes at the cost of other life goals (e.g. setting up an emergency fund, saving to afford a vacation with a loved one, or pursuing educational training).
"The only winning move is not to play."
Wouldn't it be great if all youtube did was just store and replay videos? But it doesn't, it's an engagement and advertising dollars slot machine.
www.youtube.com##.html5-endscreen
.ytp-pause-overlay
www.youtube.com###secondaryOther than occasional captured lectures, everything 'educational' on YouTube seems to me to be optimising for that TED-style sense of wonder / happy familiarisation with the content, which is poorly associated with learning outcomes.
Covers Quantum Field Theory and General relativity in as approachable a manner as I imagine is possible while still going deep into detail: https://www.youtube.com/c/viascience/videos
Theoretical machine learning, Information theory and probabilistic inference: https://www.youtube.com/user/mathematicalmonk/videos
Heavy emphasis on analysis and measure theory: https://www.youtube.com/c/brightsideofmaths/videos
While ScienceClic's coverage of differential geometry topics is mostly a thin vertical slice of the subject, it covers it with incredible visualizations and pedagogical approach: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xodtfM1r9FA&list=PLu7cY2CPiR....
https://youtu.be/5ESJH1NLMLs "Children of the Magenta Line" by Warren Vanderburgh https://youtu.be/YvEB05xdAy4 "Total Synthesis of Vitamin B12" by RB Woodward
You may tell me I'm cheating by posting videos that are obviously not "native" to YouTube, but YouTube was the way I found them, how I watch them, and how I share them with other people.
OK, so YouTube-native videos are hard mode. Try https://youtu.be/WHASYE2e5Xo I suppose? I like it. It has life lessons I'd argue are at least as valuable as the videos you're thinking about.
Kling is building an operating system and a web browser, and frequently relases videos about the work. Most go through development of a single feature. The videos are unedited to show all of the development steps: design, implementation and debugging. A Masters program usually has more theory and larger scope, but this is more hands-on and in-depth.
Math and art are thing I like, just keep hard blocking stuff you don't like and upvote stuff you do.
This isn't unironical scaremongering, it's a real thing and it is newsworthy. "Here are 10 youtube channels that go into more depth that the master program of any university" is exactly the kind of clickbait garbage people wish the media would do less of.
Also, the "old media" no longer really exists, it lost its identity and was assimilated long ago. Every media outlet that exists is deeply invested in the web, everyone is "new media" now.
I also think it's funny to describe "old media reporting on new media as scaremongering" when scaremongering in the form of conspiracy theory and false expertise in new media (social media) is arguably its greatest flaw. What facebook et al have empowered in terms of fear and control is truly breathtaking. I don't think the insulated tech community of hacker news can truly appreciate how many people in the West have been led to fully distrust science and academia. How many reject medical science and climate science. How many have been manipulated into thinking collapse and violence are imminent and have engineered their entire lives around that belief, from moving to far away rural areas and stockpiling weapons and supplies. The breadth of the scaremongering and thoughtcontrol that social media enables is unparalleled in our history.
But sure, the problem is "old media".
Scenes in Amsterdam right now:
https://www.nu.nl/binnenland/6176186/noodbevel-museumplein-n...
It’s a great tool for getting eager participants and then “gamifying” it to achieve some wanted behavior that extends to real life.
Would be a decent Black Mirror episode.
For example we have people who forgo actual social interaction and instead favor synthetic relationships and achievements.
Potentially you could maid millions happy by giving them a synthetic world and IRL they live off some form of UBI but because the made up world is most of their existence they don’t mind nor care about their IRL standard of living going down, etc.
"Individual abstinence is “not the solution, for the same reason that wearing a gas mask for two days a week outside isn’t the answer to pollution. It might, for a short period of time, keep certain effects at bay, but it’s not sustainable, and it doesn’t address the systemic issues.” He said that our attention is being deeply altered by huge invasive forces in wider society. Saying the solution was to just adjust your own habits – to pledge to break up with your phone, say – was just “pushing it back on to the individual” he said, when “it’s really the environmental changes that will really make the difference”."
The article fails to define both the problem and the solution.
How exactly this “attention theft” causes significant negative societary consequences is defined extremely vaguely, and almost exclusively through personal anecdotes.
The offered solutions, forcing employers to respect working hours and forcing social media companies to change their business models, are borderline non-sequiturs to the article’s thesis.
There is a comment about this possibly being a new “moral panic”, which the author dismisses out of hand. Yet in the same article, he implies his son dropped out of school at 15 because of WhatsApp.
It seems as though you're suggesting that we use authority to "solve" these "systemic" issues - which really are just individual issues for a subset of the population. This suggests that you are comfortable deciding what's good for others. How would you respond to obese or social-media-obsessed people who are content with their lives and not interested in your "solutions"?
Everything the market does as a byproduct of maximizing profits is fine, but all other intervention with provably better mental and physical health outcomes is authoritarian. Did I get that right?
Uninstall social media from your phone, delete your social media accounts, put your phone in a box when you get home, etc, etc, etc.
These “problems” are trivially easy for an individual to solve. They are so easy to solve that I disagree with the basic premise that we even have a problem.
I think we could rewrite this article from the perspective of any generation. Just replace the phone with whatever hysteria was happening in that era. Music, video games, comics, or whatever.
The author of this article seems to just throw her hands up without having tried even a single thing.
“No, I cannot manage my own behavior. It is society that must change!”
Tobacco clearly kills you (and people around), ruins you and make you stink like pile of old crap. We still allow it, but regulate it heavily since bad effects are out there, everywhere. TBH I don't mind some regulation on too-powerful social media, they've enjoyed their free pass for way too long and so far they definitely didn't make the world a better place, in contrary.
“I see you explaining why x is difficult for most people, but I don’t struggle with it so the difficulty is invalid.”
I find these two examples particularly interesting because the regulations have done absolutely nothing. Heroin has never been more popular or more regulated. Tobacco is lightly regulated and the declines in usage are almost completely attributed to campaigns against smoking, not the regulations themselves.
To me, it's also a problem of "Moloch does it". Scott Alexander describes it well and gives a handful of great examples in Part I of his Meditations on Moloch.[1]
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2021-10-01/why-social-...
[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TxcRbCYHaeL59aY7E/meditation...
Some things on the frontpage are clear advertisments, there has been evidence of shilling about certain topics by using post templates etc etc. but still somehow the impression persists that some dude from Idaho just posted his awesome BBQ recipe and the perfectly framed and well-lit tech equipment in the background is just coincidence.
And it scares me 'PR firms' exist and are named as such because the term 'propaganda' started to take on a negative connotation. Kinda like how Google became Alphabet, or Facebook became Meta. Advertising, marketing, public relations, propaganda, manipulation.... where does the distinction lie?
Do you care to give a couple cases/examples on the Reddit front? Like proven scandals where people or groups have conspired to deceive? You mention a dude from Idaho, but I'm not in-the-loop enough to get the reference.
https://blog.wishpond.com/post/115675438254/reddit-marketing...
https://contentfac.com/a-complete-guide-to-reddit-marketing/
There are also useful subreddits to find examples: https://old.reddit.com/r/AstroTurfing/
It is hugely powerful to not get caught up in all this nonsense at the individual level.
I know so much more than what I knew in early January 2021 because I spend my time reading books, doing tutorials or taking MOOCS instead of wasting my time watching TikTok. I literally don't even know what the user interface to TikTok looks like and never will.
If anything the exact problem is people are giving up agency at the individual level. As if there is absolutely no choice other than to be helplessly addicted to your phone. That implies then that it is not your fault that you check your phone or txt while driving.
But, it is also true that in this 'attention economy' the large companies are hiring psychologists to try to break your agency, to try to take it away from you. And they are doing a pretty damn good job, and aren't going to stop any time soon. "Stolen" in the title of the OP is not really an exaggeration.
>It is hugely powerful to not get caught up in all this nonsense at the individual level.
I mostly agree with this, but in the same token think we should be aware of "this nonsense".
>As if there is absolutely no choice other than to be helplessly addicted to your phone.
Don't think anyone is saying that. Think what we are saying is more along the lines of something like 'the problem is systemic, essentially baked into the business model of advertising/marketing, and it should be addressed'
Theft can happen only when it’s involuntary.
> the problem is systemic, essentially baked into the business model of advertising/marketing, and it should be addressed
That’s not the root cause. It is just a choke point for blame.
The root cause is the choice people make, which we’ve established exists. If people want help, there are plenty of mitigations for social media, like alternative front ends.
I suppose I am arguing that it is involuntary. Social media addiction is a real thing. "Stolen attention" seems to fit here. But I guess the line does get blurry. When a true heroin addict shoots up, is that completely voluntary or completely involuntary? Probably neither.
>The root cause is the choice people make, which we’ve established exists. If people want help, there are plenty of mitigations for social media, like alternative front ends.
So the root cause is not that these companies are being manipulative for financial gain, the cause is that users aren't choosing alternative front ends to social media (or some other mitigations). Hmm... Not sure I agree.
Yes, it is true users have some sort of agency or choice in the matter, but that doesn't mean these large companies aren't still doing the sneaky things that we know they are. Even you including the word "mitigation" in your response speaks to the fact that the problem is deeper than the users choice. Mitigation is secondary.
Also, I think this is a great discussion that is well worth having. The 'root cause' of all of this... (I tend to think it's just greed.)
Ironically, making highly digestible content for social media is something that requires a certain amount of sustained attention.
And yet we have worn masks for months at least. If the price of a free internet is the equivalent of wearing a gasmask then I would rather do that, at least until we we have the equivalent of the nano-robot immunesystem from the Diamond Age.
If we let the government make the rules here we will lose the last place where we can play freely, and will almost certainly not solve the problem we wanted to be solved.
I am aware of the bias of large companies that stops certain people from building, which is why I wrote play.
Seems like different activities are falling under corporate purview.
These kind of traps are addictive to even otherwise happy and well-connected people; there are basically no subcultures on earth that has produced individuals who voluntarily abstain from social media (only cultures where such technology is banned entirely, like the Amish).
When you have dopamine tablets as low hanging fruit you use them as much as you can so to keep your mind busy, in a simple society you don’t have those tablets all around 24/7.
People are praying on our boredom in our contemporary society, it wasn’t like that in the past.
Plus, I don’t think the default to be being slightly bored but being slightly mentally inactive, boredom is a modern concept of our very complex modernity.
Politics itself if implemented well, uncorrupted, could very much take care of it. The problem to me is political institutions and other human institutions became too weak and lost to capitalism so now that money has the final say in everything we became paralyzed because we can't imagine things being an inch different, which to me just doesn't make sense.
I mean why the f*ck would unhealthy stuff be impossible to control? Why can't food be healthier? Tech be healthier? Work be healthier? Why can't ignorance be fought and won? There are fallacies buried deep in the arguments people use defending that this specific configuration of stuff we have now is inevitable. All I know is History is deffo not done yet, things do change, one way or another, sooner or later.
Repeat after me: Social media is not reality.
In a way, social media is the new tabloid mixed with popularity contests and politics. Very easy to consume, mostly bullshit, mostly doomscrolling eventually, mostly divisive and tribal in the cult-like movements.
It is somewhat scary when people believe the "movements" on social media, they are mostly being engineered. People's first reactions and bad takes are what you find mostly on social media, those are usually worked out in normal reality.
There is some good to social media, for hobbies and information, but it is submerged under the astroturfed and cult/popularity/tabloid madness.
Fighting this "metaverse" from down here is pointless. Showing people close to you how to recognise the manipulation and teaching them how to harden themselves against it is far more effective and worthwhile, I believe.
Eg (just first thing I found googling for this commonly heard theory/model):
> A strong belief exists among addiction treatment specialists that the primary reason addicts remain addicted is less about pleasure-seeking and more about their need to escape and dissociate from the pain of his or her (often trauma-based) emotional isolation.
http://www.consultant360.com/articles/why-do-people-addictio...
Never in modern times have we worked less. It is not that much the 7 or 8 hours of not-quite-daily work which make us tired, it is that on top of it come the 2 or 3 hours of not-really-interesting-but-designed-for-addiction serials watching, the 1 hour of news article browsing, the 2 hours of reading and sometimes writing hundreds of comments about what makes us rage on whichever form of forum or social media or newspaper comment section, the 1 hour on social media of keeping-connected-with-family-and-friends you wouldn't have cared about before, the 1 hour of wanking off to the hundreds of thousands of hours of free porn available in 1 click while you would never have bought a porn magazine before, the 1 hour of browsing online shops for stuff you don't really need of for which you could just have bought the first item at your supermarket without spending hours of research to get the very best one or to save 10 cents.
For most people, at least half of this time spent connected to Internet would have been free 15-20 years go. Free to cook, free to rest, free to read, free to get bored, free to do something a bit more productive or interesting than indulging into one's vices or immediately yet falsely rewarding consumption, which is what the new Internet-backed face of consumerist capitalism excels at providing.
A lot of Internet leisure now occupies many hours a day, and gets placed at the same level as work and duties, instead of being considered as one way of occupying one's free time, so now the free time seems to be only starting after all this leisure consumption has be done, thus it appears extremely reduced.
Also, going from 8 hrs of sleep a night + 1 hr of intensive sport a day to 4-5 hrs of sleep a night and 1 hr of sport a year is an absolute mind killer.
When I was younger I could never imagine going into management, as I'm "not a multitasker". Turns out all I needed to do was to never focus on anything for more than 1 minute..
I've had to stop coding because of it; finally admitted defeat (I love coding) and have essentially 10x'd my effectiveness. So there's that.
Before COVID my screen time with the kids was when sitting waiting for them to go to sleep, or feeding during the night (or staying up with them).
It got back after a while and effort, but social media were not to blame.
did you make this tradeoff by choice( vs religious reasons ect) . I've never been that active but you sound like someone who enjoyed sports and being active.
Luckily once the youngest kid starts school is gets 100x easier. Only two more years to go :)
Honestly it wouldn't have been much different if I had been on a normal project; with the COVID measures the kids were at home (so no day sport) and by the time they're asleep the gym is closed. We moved during COVID - I even built my house gym - but it's covered in boxes which we've not had time to sort out (and they're from my wife's crap, so I can't touch them).
My wife owns a group of pharmacies and has been as busy as I have been - they've been running on emergency mode for almost two years, same thing as in most of the medical industry.
A requirement for changing habits is changing the physical world. Picking a device with no internet browsing capabilities, like an e-reader or a physical book. Or going for a walk where you physically don't have your phone. Even putting a phone in the next room isn't enough, you have to be somewhere where you physically can't access the phone.
Humans are not capable of fixing attention habits in which the physical world is set up to make it feasible to lose your attention.
James Clear talks about this in Atomic Habits [0][1], explaining that to break a bad habit, you must invert the first law of good habits ("Make it Obvious") so that the bad habit is "invisible". To do this, as you say, you must change your environment: "Reduce exposure. Remove the cues of your bad habits from your environment."
[0] This Atomic Habits summary was posted on HN recently: https://www.chrisbehan.ca/posts/atomic-habits [1] https://s3.amazonaws.com/jamesclear/Atomic+Habits/Habits+Che...
Ad blockers and other such tools are just as essential for ADHD users as ramps are for wheelchair users. Their continued existence and unhindered operation should be legally protected.
Google's plans to take away this last line of defence are absolutely disastrous, especially for people who lack the knowledge or means to implement and maintain workarounds.
It is physically impossible on a biochemical or neurological level for us ADHD invalids to ignore whatever it is that triggers us. Removing these potential triggers as much as possible is therefore essential to prevent/reduce disorder-specific self-harmful behaviour, and to get anything done on today's internet.
Most attention grabbing platforms are designed to use a variety of reward mechanisns to reinforce the politics of the platform.
Some easily botted platforms (like reddit) will constantly bombard people with anti-civilizational content promoting "anti-work" or very toxic identity politics that further isolates the users, and, in turn, strengthens their addiction to reddit because they will have no friends or family.
I wonder if the platforms are complicit in this or if they are passively incompetent and this terribleness is just being exacerbated by foreign adversaries trying to poison western dialogues and minds.
A particularly striking example for me recently was when I happened to compare the content on my TikTok feed to the content on my 60 year old parents. There were completely different sets of propaganda being peddled to both of us that were essentially incompatible with each other.
We are all drowning in so much propaganda on these platforms its almost impossible to separate fact from fiction or to find a perspective that has the proper level of nuance. Its no wonder everyone is so divided.
It is also very similar to an organic movement from China that got banned and censored just before it suddenly became a top three thread on reddit every day for all of this year.
I suspect movements and divisions that are studied and analyzed in (adversarial nation) are then exported, translated, and weaponized by their information warriors.
What I have noticed about anti-work is that the insane opinions are amplified and encouraged. They promote and advocate for digital sabotage of your own work places.
This all has numerous effects down stream that would slightly benefit an adversary.
Bingo.
>A particularly striking example for me recently was when I happened to compare the content on my TikTok feed to the content on my 60 year old parents. There were completely different sets of propaganda being peddled to both of us that were essentially incompatible with each other.
This is kinda scary and makes me glad I've never had a TikTok account. Also kinda makes me think that you and your parents shouldn't have one either. But hey, "to each their phone"...
>We are all drowning in so much propaganda on these platforms its almost impossible to separate fact from fiction or to find a perspective that has the proper level of nuance. Its no wonder everyone is so divided.
Isn't that the way ""they"" want it though? Divide and conquer? So busy fighting each other that we can't see the real enemy? Or is that just some crazy shit I picked up somewhere?
As for the possibility that the movement is being bolstered by some foreign nation for nefarious purposes, maybe. I have only checked it semi-regularly in the first half of 2021 and it wasn't that popular then, whereas I often see it on the frontpage nowadays. However, even if that was the case, it doesn't mean that the sentiments at the heart of it aren't genuine. Rebellion against capitalism's unsustainability has been a long time coming.
I also found that lack of energy plays a role. Whenever dealing with a difficult topic (e.g. studying something difficult), my energy level drops fast and in maybe 20-30 minutes it's totally gone and I cannot force my eye balls to fall on the reading material any more.
As mentioned in another comment, I believe I also fell victim of "juggling", whenever I'm learning online (i.e. without a book), I tend to multitask if the material is not very challenging (i.e. does not need focus). That brings me the conclusion that modern web learning platforms such as edX and modern course designers tend to simplify/gamify the material by cutting the material into very small chunks (most of the videos are sub-5 minutes). I would like to fall back to the traditional learning experience in which we read physical books, working on real electronic components and have to make appointments to ask questions (or grind in library for hours, even days for one single issue).
Personally I also prefer books and written articles for learning, but for some reason, many people seem to prefer videos.
> Meditation is a useful tool – but we actually need to stop the people who are pouring itching powder on us. We need to band together to take on the forces stealing our attention and take it back.
I'd argue the 'attention stealing' -- the 'itching powder', as the article called it -- is all in your head. It does exist, concretely, of course, in the form of social media, video games, etc. but their power over you -- the itchiness -- is something I find is seen for what it is through mindfulness. If we teach people proper control over their own minds, we put the power in their hands to evaluate new technologies and services mindfully.
I would sooner fight for teaching proper mental hygiene to people than trying to regulate every possible idea under the sun (as it suggests at the end). You DO own your own mind, as TFA says at the very end -- so take control of it!
> When you first start meditation, once a day is enough. If you feel like meditating more, that's fine, but don't overdo it. There's a burn-out phenomenon we often see in new meditators. They dive right into the practice fifteen hours a day for a couple of weeks, and then the real world catches up with them. They decide that this meditation business just takes too much time. Too many sacrifices are required. They haven't got time for all of this. Don't fall into that trap. Don't burn yourself out the first week. Make haste slowly. Make your effort consistent and steady. Give yourself time to incorporate the meditation practice into your life, and let your practice grow gradually and gently.
The way 'mindfulness' is taught and the business of retreats and training gets in the way of the real work, which takes place every day and in normal life, a little at a time. It doesn't need to be complicated.
It's amazing how far the ideology of the unfettered market economy has seeped into our lives to the point that the idea that we should retrain the entire human species to fend off media manipulation seems somehow more practical than simply putting an end to the unethical business practices of an industry.
Imagine if a local company was pouring waste into the river and someone argued the solution was to offer anti-poison resilience training rather than stopping the problem at the source.
> retrain the entire human species to fend off media manipulation
Mindfulness assisting in opening one's eyes to media manipulation is just one of the benefits, not the only one. There are many benefits to teaching it to all.
The Buddha had a lot of great ideas, but it was over 2000 years ago. If, perhaps, we can teach mindfulness in a way that is more consistent and available to all (like a focus-detection feature in devices), I would definitely support it if it results in the same changes in the brain. Since changes induced by meditation (both acute and long-term) are detectable with brain scans, this seems like something easy to test and compare with traditional mindfulness teachings and practices.
I suspect that no, constant nagging wouldn't improve “mental hygiene”, in any useful definition of that term.
I also suspect it wouldn’t improve productivity, only stress.
I have an ex who was so hooked on instagram that she would even pull it up to browse during red lights driving. We can’t handle downtime anymore without our phones.
When you feel yourself getting bothered, angry and you have to prove someone wrong on the internet, step away. Or if you are wasting too much time on it. You are taking valuable time from your own projects and quality of life.
People can have different opinions and that is ok, your ideas and opinions are what make you, see that as your unique tool to success. On top of that many "organic opinions" are actually astroturfing and PR designed to promote or get you to "engage".
Everyone, please do this. Time is basically the only resource you can't get more of.
[1] Yeonmi Park: North Korea | Lex Fridman Podcast #196 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usDqSEKDVsA
Sounds like early social media. Hanging out without parents was the crucial feature.
I’m 34 now and having parents on social media still feels like an odd concept
Oh. Have I missed “the flow”.
I have been trying to get back into the mode from a while, with lot of self doubt in mind, “ you are just lazy”, “you are too distracted by Twitter “, “were you like this all along”..
It hit me hard when I realised that.. it’s been a decade and I still not able to achieve this.
But I'm also a strong believer that raw willpower is a poor substitute for a supportive environment. I've had great results the last 15 years from identifying rough edges in my computing workflows and sanding them off with scripts and OS tweaks. Between the rise of the Internet attention ecosystem and my own higher bar for focus as I get older, more and more of this iteration loop has been consumed by optimizations to improve focus and prevent distraction. "Automating willpower" like this has borne some pretty fantastic results when it comes to my ability to focus and thus both my productivity and mental health.
Sadly, most people don't use a proper general-purpose OS like a Linux distro[1], and are locked out of the ability to change much of their environment. Mobile devices remain a stubborn challenge: While I'm considering getting back into rooting my devices after a decade, this is a pretty poor substitute for a proper OS, so I'm also trying to build habits that shift usage from my phone to my laptop.
In the event that you haven't tried scripting up guardrails against attention hazards (or are still using an OS that prohibits you from using your computer fully), I strongly recommend taking a serious look at this approach.
[1] I'm explicitly excluding Windows due to my familiarity with the severe limitations it puts on the user, all smartphone OSes are the most egregious offenders, and my familiarity with OS X is lower but I gather that it falls between Windows and a Linux distro in terms of how much it babies/limits the user.
Can you get into it while playing a game?
The 21st century will be about learning to live in a world of infinite information.
We will all have to be mindful of whether we are consuming the mental equivalent of broccoli, donuts or anthrax.
Infotainment is a good one, but we will need many more!
Wants are a means to an end. They are not the end itself. That is, wants are evolutionarily-derived (or sometimes culturally-instilled) drives or motivators which should result in improved fitness.
Think of these in terms of emotional drives, tastes and our responses to them, favouring aesthetics (symmetry, balance, smoothness, etc.) Those evolved in an environment which was itself not counterevolving to feed those drives faster than they could emerge.
That's not to say that there isn't co-evolution occurring: fruits, say, evolve to be sweet to attract animals which will eat it and spread seeds. But *there is no "fruit sector" specifically engineering high-sugar fruits with a response cycle of days or weeks or months. Even human breeders typically take years or decades, and natural selection generally takes much longer.
Motivators evolved to find things in the environment which improved overall fitness.
"Give them what they want" is engineering rapidly to appeal to psychological behaviours in ways that exploit them specifically to the interests of the engineer. (Or more likely: the investors / shareholders / VC behind them.)
If you're gaming the want itself directly, you lose the argument that what you're providing is at the choice of the target, because you've coopted that choice to your own interests.
Also liked the manipulation point you made. It’s why you have things from the 20th century like soda companies and McDonalds and all the other organizations just “giving people what they want”.
Now in the 21st century we have Facebook, Instagram and the like similarly low-level poisoning people.
Even without a smartphone, however... there are things that I got sucked into while being a system administrator with far too much time to surf. It's now apparent to me that I need to schedule time for myself with no computer in the same room.
I don't think this is the most accurate analogy.
The most attention draining parts of the web/internet are some kind of social platform. I needn't list them, you know what they are... they are not analogous to air. Perhaps they seem that way when you've fully integrated them into your life, but they are not.
Keep your phone, your laptop, and keep the tools you need to create and work. But whatsface and spacechat are not part of that toolkit, those types of platforms are psychological crack cocaine.
Taking a full break from all tech can be good, but when you return to it, make sure you delete those accounts or uninstall those apps. Don't worry about friends, the ones that count will be happy to communicate with you through less toxic channels - the rest aren't really your friends anyway.
Social media --- those site which we don't need to name because we all know what they are --- surround us socially. I don't use the F, or the T, or the IG, or the YT, or the TT. But I sure as heck live in the world they create. In most of the West they've permeate politics and culture. It's often difficult to engage with businesses, or governments, or your own job, without having a presence on these systems. And in parts of the world they've played a major role in insurrection, revolution, and genocide. Sometimes celebrated for that role, increasingly looked on with a sense that something's gone horrifically wrong.
So no, disconnecting personally is not the solution.
However what I meant (but failed to say explicitly), is that it is unlike breathing air (which is impossible to avoid), because partaking in these platforms personally is still optional for most people in the world - Maybe it's different in the US but you certainly don't need any of it for your job or government purposes in the UK and I expect most of the EU, and of course none of the east.
* companies can much more easily weaponize their services and tailor them to get individuals addicted, than individual video games ever could. And the feedback loop happens much faster.
* it was easier to moderate video games, because they had a single purpose: entertainment. since you can be in a device for any number of reasons: gaming, studying, catching up, reading,... and _everyone_ is on their devices _all the time_ (both kids and parents), it's much harder to establish good boundaries.
It's not my fault, if in God's plan
He made the devil so much stronger than a manThis used to be common for mailing lists and web forums with email notification systems. I could get an email daily or weekly with the replies to my posts and subscriptions instead of real-time. The temptation to poll manually was reduced because I knew I'd be notified eventually.
I want to be able to tell my phone to do the same with its notifications, preferably with fine-grained control. For messaging apps, it would be extra nice if the sender could mark a suggested priority so I could let certain people I trust not to abuse the privilege interrupt me when they think it's urgent enough.
You don't need to read this article, it's adding nothing new to the conversation except for a whole bunch of "i'm so smart, use my wisdom" type stories dotted neatly around the "i don't like that i'm getting old" lamentation going on.
> Some scientists say these worries about attention are a moral panic, comparable to the anxieties in the past about comic books or rap music, and that the evidence is shaky
Who gives us a toss what some scientists say? What does the friggen data say?
Is this really what passes for higher tier journalism these days? Pathetic
Return yourself to the 1990s: Keep your mobile phone plugged in at all times when at home. Make it like a home phone line - turn on phone / texting notifs and disable all else. If you want to / need to check it, force yourself to walk to it to see that text or look something up. Print out things you need (like recipes, etc). Similarly, dock your laptop, and keep it docked when at home.
Not 100% possible, but it is a way to try and reduce the temptation to always check.
It's really exhausting and progress is extremely slow. It's not a matter of skill or knowledge as I've been doing design, front end, and general programming for 20 years. At first I thought it was because I was on my own, so the workload was tripled, but then realized a major factor is really the cognitive cost of having it all in my mind. The db, the platform, the backend logic, the API, the frontend code, the design, the UX, etc.
Now I try to not work on the whole thing at once. I focus on the backend for a couple of days, then on the front end for a couple of days, etc. This works, but there are many times where something doesn't work as expected and I need to switch between multiple projects (front, API, some other service, etc) during the same hour.
I really don't have a solution to this problem, but I wanted to share my experience. Hopefully someone who has been doing this juggling has some wisdom to share.
Most solo devs/founders don't do this because they feel that an employee will only slow them down and degrade the quality of the product. However, this isn't true. You will wake up more motivated every day, learn about communicating needs, and you will often receive very important feedback (like when a feature makes no sense).
If you can't afford to pay a junior dev (even off-shore), you should assess your business strategy because this means you are likely to be financially precarious or dangerously risky
The most effective thing has just been taking better notes. If i know i take good notes, and i write something down and know i will go back and read it, my brain knows it's "allowed" to forget about it, and that greatly lessons the load. Sounds obvious and simple but sometimes it's not obvious that spending time to write down a mix of both really basic and really complicated stuff can make it so much easier to get stuff done.
In reality, it never quite works out that way - but I still maintain it is a good way to start. Like many have said, it is essential to identify the path by which you multiply engineering as demanded by the needs of the thing you are building.
Many projects can keep that factor to 1, but it has to be about the love of doing it, not the outcome. The minute the outcome is more important, hire, scale and delegate!
What I meant is that when working on certain features you will need to understand it all to implement it.
It's like when you're working on some code and you need to understand all the classes and abstractions involved to make it work.
It is my place to be asked questions throughout the day and I'd rather be asked questions than not. It takes me out of the zone and Sometimes it feels as though my mind is juggling 3+ tasks at once because of the questions I've been asked. I've learned through interaction with reality that some programmers need a bit more guidance when it comes to tasks, some will dig down the correct paths, some will dig down the incorrect paths, and some will just stop and wait for help (which is ok). I feel that at times I've done a poor job of guiding some people.
There have been days where I might actually start work on my individual tasks 5-6 hours into the day and staying late after everyone leaves is key to getting back in the zone and solving a problem.
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.
Allowing my brain to follow the dopamine - essentially auto rotate when attention goes off the rails - has finally helped me to implement some of the other ADHD tricks. All that to say, I think dopamine plays a significant role in attention and wish this article explored that a little. Social media is a dopamine spike. I think it's why we swipe, we're in a Skinner Box of sorts. Swipe. Reward. Swipe. Reward...
Psychologically addictive substances are real, and they can be digital, and they can wreck our lives just as well as psychologically addictive drugs.
This sounds very similar to multi-threaded programming :-)
Joking aside, great article!
Reading (books, not short articles) a lot also helps, I believe.
The author also seems to be very "unlucky" to have a relative who supposedly can't cope with normal live because of all the distractions.
I bought a second-hand copy of 'The Shallows' by Nicholas G. Carr a few years ago.
To be honest I bought it to read it and laugh at it, but he made his point very powerfully and convincingly.
The data collection needed to provide such feedback is inherently prone to privacy violations and exposes safety risks (see what China is doing to monitor social media activity.) Secondly, these feedback algorithms can pull people into echo chambers of disinformation and amplify all sorts of negative feelings and behavior.
Not sure throwing more technology and regulation at the problem is a solution. In the end it will probably require a social shift; a realization that "social media" makes us less social at a deep level while providing the illusion of being social. Paying attention to the person in front of you used to be considered polite. Now it's considered old-fashioned?
That may never happen.
> the attention of other human beings will be the last, zero-sum scarce resource
It doesn't have to wait for it to be last for that battle to get underway.
> And the competition over it will be no less intense and brutal than historical conflicts over the basics of life
Depending on where you live, you may already be there. It's the downside of the future not being equally distributed, you also get the downsides of that future early.
We were given a present of increasing inequality and supply chain shortages where internet thought leaders fight it out for likes, subscribes, and RT’s.