The problem came about after platforms with ad-based revenue decided to optimize for eyeballs glued to screens and discovered that serving up extreme and/or hateful content was an effective way to hold people's attention longer.
danparsonson · 12h ago
Indeed. My smartphone is a very useful tool when it isn't trying to stimulate my amygdala.
chneu · 12h ago
Really it's advertising. It's just much worse online because it's deceptive and sneaky.
Advertising is a privacy and social health nightmare. It pressures people to do things we shouldn't be doing. It normalizes unhealthy behavior for profit. Among a ton of other issues.
Society has suffered immensely since advertising really took off in the 70s. Especially when the US started to allow advertising towards children. That's when US propaganda(and extreme capitalism) REALLY went into overdrive. Then with the advent of social media in your pocket it became constant to the point people hardly recognize how influencial/manipulative it is.
I block advertisements on all my devices. The difference is massive. I cannot overstate how different the online world is when you don't see advertisements.
eesmith · 10h ago
Yes. The essay puts it this way:
"Until such time as smartphones and social media can be democratically governed or nationalized — liberated from the imperative to profit off our attention indefinitely — a ban may be the most realistic path to reclaiming our lives."
hagbard_c · 6h ago
Right, so now the same people who have for decades been running all those government programs into the ground should get control over our pocket computers as well? No and no and no thanks either, just simply no. I am far better at controlling the thing than whatever the commissars at the state would be able to do. The real problem as said is advertising and all the 'social' (but really the opposite) guff around it so you won't find any of that on my devices. No Google, No MF-book, no nothin'. I run my own services on the server-under-the-stairs which are used by my family - daughters included - and am not waiting for the 'democratically governed' alternative which no doubt will insist on propagansiding whatever trendy nonsense is coming out of the social studies academies at the moment and will block the use of private servers 'to protect the vulnerable' or some such nonsense.
Pocket computers - which these devices are - are useful and handy devices, just make sure not to pollute them with advertising and social nonsense and keep away from those data-hungry megacorpps and similar startup wannabees.
eesmith · 1h ago
I'm pretty sure the writers at the Jacobin would say that the US is far from "democratic."
If you don't need governance then of course it doesn't matter to you.
Running your own services is not easy. Most people cannot. You cannot seriously think only those who can run their own services should be online.
Who then should they trust?
tom89999 · 12h ago
I switch of my phone every evening after 20:00 hrs. Nobody has to disturb me except my moms house is on fire. My landline number is known around relatives etc.
I never answered or reacted that late on the same day.
Its my fucking free time, nothing can be so important i have to give up that personal time.
Unluckily i have to use my own personal phone for my job. I receive emails and texts when my teamleader is working late. Thats annoying.
A couple of years ago my company handed me a work cell phone, but those days are long gone.
When i commute to work, early in the morning, i look outside the window of the tram, look at the sun rising or whats going on on the streets.
The entire wagon is just staring on senseless Whatsapps, texts or videos.
I dont get why the people dont wanna be bothered that early in the morning and making them ready for work or just enjoy a beautiful sunrise.
You cant make friends with them anymore, they dont look around, dont start chatting with the person next to them.
Zombies they are.
If all those people would hold a bottle of beer and sip on it frequently, we would call them alcoholics and addicts.
And those people are addicts, needing treatment. Urgently.
But the common reception of phone users is that they are in touch with someone and the social tradegy is hidden behind the manner of use of such devices.
One does not see if the user is watching stupid videos or is caught in a bubble.
But holding a bottle of beer will bring the people to contempting the blue collar worker after a long working day, talking to real people, earning his wage and returning to his real existing family that evening.
What i ask myself the entire time is, how are kids raised by parents working for or owning cellphone providers and manufacturers?
What do such people tell their kids how or not to use social media?
Do they raise them ascetic when it comes to gadgets?
Tell them: Daddy is going to work, selling stuff for stupid people?
chneu · 6h ago
Everyone has their faces buried in their phones and then claims to have social anxiety, or that everyone is mean so they don't interact.
Humans do best when we are faced with uncomfortable situations on a regular basis; this is how we grow. Nowadays everyone can throw in an earbud and ignore the rest of the world.
Being bored is a good thing. Having nothing to do encourages creativity and creation. Being alone with your thoughts is a good thing to be able to do. Having a constant soundtrack, audiobook or podcast in your head is not good.
We do this to ourselves. Then we complain about it.
ergonaught · 13h ago
I do believe that smartphones will eventually be recognized as one of the worst things the species did to itself, though it isn't the fault of the phones, "obviously".
theamk · 11h ago
I hope not, I love knowing when the bus comes, as well as being able to walk in the random direction in the unfamiliar location without worrying about being lost. Being able to point to a tree (or a flower) and knowing what is its name is also nice.
How about you ban social networks instead? I couldn't care less about them.
whatevaa · 10h ago
Wait until climate change really bites hard, then you will consider this just a minor inconvenience.
Mistletoe · 13h ago
This is a nice time lapse. The last two photos aren't healthy for a society. We are all withdrawing inside ourselves and into a cyberspace which isn't real and is so easily manipulated.
Of all the times and places where I'd say using your phone for distraction is not problematic, the subway would be near top of the list. What are else are you going to do? Enjoy the sounds, sights, and smells? It's not a great place for conversation even if you are with other people, and it's not a great place for meditation or reflection if you're alone.
tom89999 · 12h ago
Then just read a book or magazine. Or just take that boring time, its life that is not always funny, entertaining and colorful.
Most people have the problem of being under pressure to spend even their free time productive.
But for whom?
Boredom is healthy, spinning down your engine from constantly reving up at the street lights in life.
When i commute to work, i got an old Walkman, ancient cassette player with me, listening to an entire album of music where i cant hear the phone ringing, no notification popping up and letting me get distracted from listening to people that spent years of work to create an album of fantastic music.
esperent · 9h ago
> read a book or magazine
Assuming that reading a physical book/printed magazine is inherently better than using your phone in the same situation is just a kind of snobbiness.
Someone in those photos could have been watching a veritasium video, or studying their college notes on their phone. Someone in the earlier years with a book could have been reading Mills and Boone.
But either way, who cares? Why are we judging what people do to pass a few minutes of their day in an inherently boring place like the subway?
As to the value of boredom, sure. But environment matters too. I think there's very little value to boredom on a subway. If you want to make a personal choice to be bored on the subway, go for it. But I don't see any valid reason to judge other people for choosing otherwise.
theamk · 11h ago
Been there, done that. Boring time in subway is totally not worth it, if you want to relax, take a walk, ideally next to the river.
As for reading a book or a magazine - this only works for the most common topics. The internet brought up significantly more interesting things - can you remeber any printed publication that was as good as danluu's essays for example?
komali2 · 12h ago
Could read a book or a paper, though of you have your smartphone set up to not be allowed to deliver unwanted distractions from that kind of media then yeah I agree with you, there's not shit else to do on a subway. People watching is only fun to a point.
This is part of why I much prefer above ground trains, at least you get a view then.
mindslight · 12h ago
The approach that works for me is to get more devices. I'm not really attracted to my phone, because it sucks as a computer. I can tap out maybe 10wpm as opposed to 140 at a desktop. One tiny screen. Swipe pinch zoom blah instead of a mouse. I only use the web browser on that if I'm actually needing to view something while mobile. Most of the apps I have on it are libre communications apps, and a few things like grocery store etc. Nothing I'm ever wanting to poll, and I don't even really pay attention to notifications.
Surveillance industry crapps go on a separate device I just leave at home. I don't disable notifications or even swipe to dismiss them - just ignore. The whole thing is perma-silent and generally forgtten until I want to actually do something that requires a mobile app.
The majority of my usage is on a desktop computer. Surveillance industry websites definitely make themselves harder to use so you waste more time and never quite get your full fix, but you still somewhat do hit a natural satiation limit, much more than you would through a tiny porthole that fits in your pocket.
I haven't done the sit-on-couch-and-watch-TV thing for a year, but obviously I use a real laptop for that rather than falling into the "tablet" (aka big phone) trap.
komali2 · 12h ago
> It’s hard to imagine a socialist order run by device-addicted zombies, increasingly disconnected and semi-literate
I agree that smartphones are harming us. I also agree that capitalism has at best served out its purpose and needs to be replaced with another means of organizing society and distributing material and labor.
However, the Soviet Union banned blue jeans and rock and roll and a very resentful population thus smuggled these things and associated them with counter culture and revolutionary mindedness, basically the opposite of what a socialist would want - we're supposed to be freeing you from the company that wants to wage enslave you and reward you with a drip feed of treats you don't really need, not making you want the treats even more!
Banning doesn't seem to work. I banned myself from reddit and got addicted to twitter, banned myself from Twitter and got myself addicted to Hacker News, then YouTube, then BlueSky, then nextdoor... Clearly there's a root issue I should be targeting instead, similar to how all my exercise is for naught if I can't get my diet in order. I think these kinds of behaviors are similar to the things that plague a capitalist society - we seem to know that smartphones and doom scrolling are bad for us, but we seem unable to stop. Some of us are trying dumb phones, or apps that limit time on certain apps. The best solutions we can come up with exist within the system we're addicted to - we need a company or app developer to save us from ourselves, and by the way the new Light phone is 600$. The incentives will never be aligned - the best (under capitalism) dumb phone manufacturer will be the one that can have the highest sales volume through addicting people to their phones and building in enough obsolescence to require people to get new ones. Or Light phone will just get cannibalized by a trillion dollar company it has no resources to resist at some point.
I think one of the key things leftists (using the global definition, not the Americanized version) need to figure out this century to accomplish our goals is how to help people empower themselves to escape the things they know are bad for them, or enjoy these things to a certain point but not be dragged beyond that point by profit-minded capitalist entities.
I see efforts on this front in the FOSS/fediverse space. Self hosted Instagram that lets you sort new posts by recent and doesn't try to psyop you with boobs blood or rage into staying on the app longer than intended. Alternative clients for YouTube that let you aggregate creators from other platforms and block channels you never want to see (did you know this isn't possible on YouTube?).Music sharing platforms that give the majority of revenue to the artists.
I think these efforts are good and might be the solution. I like Cory Doctorow's anarchist-aligned philosophy in "Walkaway" that basically amounts to "build alternative ways to be for people that make them ask why'd they bother with the capitalist mode at all."
I still think there's some more fundamental psychological angle we need to figure out, a human-centric something that doesn't need any distribution other than word of mouth that can help people resist the psychofauna capitalist entities use to ensnare people. Maybe I just have utopian thinking or maybe I read Snow Crash too many times have have magical thinking about the power of language and ideas. I certainly would love some magical way to finally solve my addictions and maladaptive behaviors.
cyberax · 10h ago
For all that is good about mankind, ban whiny socialists and their propaganda rags.
hagbard_c · 5h ago
They should not be banned but countered with all the reasons why their pie-in-the-sky ideologies always end up in failure when implemented at large scale and succeed only in making or keeping the majority of society poor with a small veneer of comparatively less poor Party people floating on top. Time and time again, and again and again. And then some because 'those earlier versions were not real socialism but this time it will work'.
It won't. It can only work at a small scale, up to the number of people a person has in his personal circle of family/friend/clan members. As soon as the circle grows larger it will fall prey to parasites who leech off it and be taken over by power-hungry individuals who use the 'socialist' paradigm to push themselves to the top of the hierarchy. Once there they do their best to stay on top, creating a cadre of bootlickers. They are the thin layer of fat on top of the watery soup that socialism produces.
I run my family as a communist, by those according to their means to those according to their needs. We run our friend circles as socialists, supporting those who are in need. We run our country as capitalists with some government oversight to keep the excesses to a minimum. Just like running a family as capitalists does not make sense - how is your toddler going to pay for her dinner I wonder - it does not make sense to run a country as if it is one big happy family because it isn't.
cyberax · 4h ago
Yes, I was being facetious. If anybody asks to silence the voices they don't like, that should be read as "our propaganda is too weak to compete, please ban others".
The problem came about after platforms with ad-based revenue decided to optimize for eyeballs glued to screens and discovered that serving up extreme and/or hateful content was an effective way to hold people's attention longer.
Advertising is a privacy and social health nightmare. It pressures people to do things we shouldn't be doing. It normalizes unhealthy behavior for profit. Among a ton of other issues.
Society has suffered immensely since advertising really took off in the 70s. Especially when the US started to allow advertising towards children. That's when US propaganda(and extreme capitalism) REALLY went into overdrive. Then with the advent of social media in your pocket it became constant to the point people hardly recognize how influencial/manipulative it is.
I block advertisements on all my devices. The difference is massive. I cannot overstate how different the online world is when you don't see advertisements.
"Until such time as smartphones and social media can be democratically governed or nationalized — liberated from the imperative to profit off our attention indefinitely — a ban may be the most realistic path to reclaiming our lives."
Pocket computers - which these devices are - are useful and handy devices, just make sure not to pollute them with advertising and social nonsense and keep away from those data-hungry megacorpps and similar startup wannabees.
If you don't need governance then of course it doesn't matter to you.
Running your own services is not easy. Most people cannot. You cannot seriously think only those who can run their own services should be online.
Who then should they trust?
Humans do best when we are faced with uncomfortable situations on a regular basis; this is how we grow. Nowadays everyone can throw in an earbud and ignore the rest of the world.
Being bored is a good thing. Having nothing to do encourages creativity and creation. Being alone with your thoughts is a good thing to be able to do. Having a constant soundtrack, audiobook or podcast in your head is not good.
We do this to ourselves. Then we complain about it.
How about you ban social networks instead? I couldn't care less about them.
https://www.reddit.com/r/decadeology/comments/1hmcl3c/nyc_su...
Assuming that reading a physical book/printed magazine is inherently better than using your phone in the same situation is just a kind of snobbiness.
Someone in those photos could have been watching a veritasium video, or studying their college notes on their phone. Someone in the earlier years with a book could have been reading Mills and Boone.
But either way, who cares? Why are we judging what people do to pass a few minutes of their day in an inherently boring place like the subway?
As to the value of boredom, sure. But environment matters too. I think there's very little value to boredom on a subway. If you want to make a personal choice to be bored on the subway, go for it. But I don't see any valid reason to judge other people for choosing otherwise.
As for reading a book or a magazine - this only works for the most common topics. The internet brought up significantly more interesting things - can you remeber any printed publication that was as good as danluu's essays for example?
This is part of why I much prefer above ground trains, at least you get a view then.
Surveillance industry crapps go on a separate device I just leave at home. I don't disable notifications or even swipe to dismiss them - just ignore. The whole thing is perma-silent and generally forgtten until I want to actually do something that requires a mobile app.
The majority of my usage is on a desktop computer. Surveillance industry websites definitely make themselves harder to use so you waste more time and never quite get your full fix, but you still somewhat do hit a natural satiation limit, much more than you would through a tiny porthole that fits in your pocket.
I haven't done the sit-on-couch-and-watch-TV thing for a year, but obviously I use a real laptop for that rather than falling into the "tablet" (aka big phone) trap.
I agree that smartphones are harming us. I also agree that capitalism has at best served out its purpose and needs to be replaced with another means of organizing society and distributing material and labor.
However, the Soviet Union banned blue jeans and rock and roll and a very resentful population thus smuggled these things and associated them with counter culture and revolutionary mindedness, basically the opposite of what a socialist would want - we're supposed to be freeing you from the company that wants to wage enslave you and reward you with a drip feed of treats you don't really need, not making you want the treats even more!
Banning doesn't seem to work. I banned myself from reddit and got addicted to twitter, banned myself from Twitter and got myself addicted to Hacker News, then YouTube, then BlueSky, then nextdoor... Clearly there's a root issue I should be targeting instead, similar to how all my exercise is for naught if I can't get my diet in order. I think these kinds of behaviors are similar to the things that plague a capitalist society - we seem to know that smartphones and doom scrolling are bad for us, but we seem unable to stop. Some of us are trying dumb phones, or apps that limit time on certain apps. The best solutions we can come up with exist within the system we're addicted to - we need a company or app developer to save us from ourselves, and by the way the new Light phone is 600$. The incentives will never be aligned - the best (under capitalism) dumb phone manufacturer will be the one that can have the highest sales volume through addicting people to their phones and building in enough obsolescence to require people to get new ones. Or Light phone will just get cannibalized by a trillion dollar company it has no resources to resist at some point.
I think one of the key things leftists (using the global definition, not the Americanized version) need to figure out this century to accomplish our goals is how to help people empower themselves to escape the things they know are bad for them, or enjoy these things to a certain point but not be dragged beyond that point by profit-minded capitalist entities.
I see efforts on this front in the FOSS/fediverse space. Self hosted Instagram that lets you sort new posts by recent and doesn't try to psyop you with boobs blood or rage into staying on the app longer than intended. Alternative clients for YouTube that let you aggregate creators from other platforms and block channels you never want to see (did you know this isn't possible on YouTube?).Music sharing platforms that give the majority of revenue to the artists.
I think these efforts are good and might be the solution. I like Cory Doctorow's anarchist-aligned philosophy in "Walkaway" that basically amounts to "build alternative ways to be for people that make them ask why'd they bother with the capitalist mode at all."
I still think there's some more fundamental psychological angle we need to figure out, a human-centric something that doesn't need any distribution other than word of mouth that can help people resist the psychofauna capitalist entities use to ensnare people. Maybe I just have utopian thinking or maybe I read Snow Crash too many times have have magical thinking about the power of language and ideas. I certainly would love some magical way to finally solve my addictions and maladaptive behaviors.
It won't. It can only work at a small scale, up to the number of people a person has in his personal circle of family/friend/clan members. As soon as the circle grows larger it will fall prey to parasites who leech off it and be taken over by power-hungry individuals who use the 'socialist' paradigm to push themselves to the top of the hierarchy. Once there they do their best to stay on top, creating a cadre of bootlickers. They are the thin layer of fat on top of the watery soup that socialism produces.
I run my family as a communist, by those according to their means to those according to their needs. We run our friend circles as socialists, supporting those who are in need. We run our country as capitalists with some government oversight to keep the excesses to a minimum. Just like running a family as capitalists does not make sense - how is your toddler going to pay for her dinner I wonder - it does not make sense to run a country as if it is one big happy family because it isn't.