Comment by bloggie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bloggie | Hacker News Reader

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After many years in research science I had an opportunity to work in applied sciences in the petroleum industry. This is an industry that knows that the writing is on the wall for them. Resources are finite and peak demand may well be behind us. (Almost everyone I worked with drove electric cars.) That does not stop the petroleum industry (drug dealers) from responding to economic demand (addicts). When I was younger I saw the petroleum industry as evil, but if there was no demand there would be no supply. Who is to blame? Working in this industry changed my perspective on addiction, drinking, gambling, infinite scrolling. I used to believe that the pushers were solely at fault, and some of them certainly are. But I find it hard to blame only Facebook for their practices.

When the entire world has been built around requiring you to use petroleum to go places and build certain things, and requires you to use certain software to interact with everyone, I have sympathy for users whose hands are often tied from the get-go. I can't blame them when "the system" (a reductive phrase, but it works for this response) is setup as such.

That there's demand isn't necessarily the fault of the user, in many cases it's the fault of industry. At this point, at least for petroleum, it's a feedback loop - we built infrastructure around it, people became dependent upon it because alternatives are limited, the dependence creates demand, and that demand is used to justify continued production.

The petroluem industry then just has to work hard to squash alternatives, as it very much has, thereby leaving the user with little to no choice.

> Working in this industry changed my perspective on addiction, drinking, gambling, infinite scrolling. I used to believe that the pushers were solely at fault, and some of them certainly are. But I find it hard to blame only Facebook for their practices.

So you changed your beliefs to ease some cognitive dissonance and help yourself sleep at night. Seems normal and expected to me, people do that all the time. These companies actively advertise and lobby to get their product into more peoples hands and quash alternatives.

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