Because every single person designing apps and websites is incentivised to try and win 100% of your attention. Reed Hoffmann put it nicely — "We're competing with sleep, on the margin."
The default apps, browser excluded, are pretty harmless - their incentive is to create a device you decide to welcome into your home. I don't see children spending 4 hours doomscrolling the calculator.
The challenge is to think of another model for creating apps and content — one that retains most of the innovation without the harm
If chair designers were paid based on the number of hours you sat in the chair, I expect we'd see some very different chairs. Probably not better ones for anyone whose life ambitions involve getting up out of a chair.
They also don’t have free rein over iPads and maybe they get access to once a week in the car or something. They are 6 and under so I’ll probably tweak rules as needed.
At least Facebook and Youtube are default apps nowadays
The original content model was sustainable for centuries.
Customer pays per viewing, and experiences entertainment for an hour or so.
Then another model emerged after the printing press and record player.
Customer pays once and experiences the same thing as many times as they want.
Now we have a model where a customer pays constantly for no specific entertainment in particular and has no control over when they lose access to some entertainment.
Maybe we just go back to people paying for just what they want…
The issue is the addiction to growth and VC money tech has. We can’t have simple transactions in tech. It needs to be recurring or predatory.
This is impossible! You missed the whole point of the article! Like sugar is addictive because it is extracted from the fruit that carries all the nutrients, the apps are addictive because they are extracted from the challenge of imagination and boredom.
The last line of that essay: "You don’t win by keeping up. You win by stepping out."
An invention comes as the solution to a problem. The qualities of the solution depend on the parameters of the problem.
Many/most technologies have not scaled to the point where their negative externalities outgrow their benefits: GPS, Cordless power tools, OLED TVs, Contactless payments. Of course all have some negatives.
We're learning that if the problem is 'make as much ad revenue as possible for the inventor', the solution is going scale harmfully
The guy sitting in a 4 hour commute every day is doing it for a reason. It's a cost he's willing to pay for some benefit.
Either way, for occasional driving to be pleasant it’s necessary for most travel to happen by public transport, so it has to be the most convenient option for most journeys.
The "easier and faster" is only facilitated by an unseen debt. You cannot have "easier" without a "harder". The harder will always follow, as sure as the night follows the day. The simplicity of technology is a facade.
So yes, I agree; "You don’t win by keeping up. You win by stepping out."
I am happy to see the Dao making itself visible again.
What good would fasting or these extreme temps do and how would we prove it if not for evidence.
Scientists are NOT the problem here.
And how did the feasts of large religions develop? Things like iftar, where you communally share lots of food with both people you know and strangers, including the impoverished and disadvantaged? There ought to be quite a bit of violence involved to make such practices palatable if you're correct about this.
Such an interesting take
- The premise is that there is a social problem
- There are some examples of this repeating through history
- It always plays out this way
- Therefore we will conclude that it is technological determinism
- Bonus: Argue that this is fundamentally human nature-determinism by evoking Darwin, Buddhism or Stoicism
- Since this is Determinism (tech. or human) it can’t be solved
- You have now achieved the end-goal: “Explaining” the problem, which gives you smartness cred
- Bonus: Argue that technologists were already in the know. (Steve Jobs once admitted that his kids weren’t allowed to use the iPad.)
That this is a hopeless attitude is revealed in the conclusion:
> You don’t win by keeping up. You win by stepping out.
Because you cannot step out. You can’t rewind the clock. This is reactionary in the political sense since it aspires to go back to the past—but you can’t.[1]
We have made these technological dependencies for ourselves, or fetters. Now we need to deal with them. We need to make them work for us. What we don’t need is to stick our heads in the snad and proclaim that the best we can do is to take timeouts from technology, to create smartphone-free zones or whatever. Really? You advance these gadgets to the point where you need them (or a laptop/desktop) to minimally function in society... and then you become scared of them? No.[2]
What’s the incentive for technology companies? To prey on your attention, your time, and erode your self-worth. This is already known. Where’s the technological determinism here? Just look at the Wizard, pulling the strings—is this your technological determinism?
You (or we) are just complicit in making shitty technology. Don’t blame technological determinism or human nature. Blame yourself.
Commutes don’t expand. Home prices go up into stratosphere near any place people have to work. And the car industry lobbies against public transport. These are all human-made problems. There is nothing deterministic about them.
Your Dilbert-style laws are a crutch. Try to expand your focus beyond your narrow expertise. Then you’ll see that something better is possible.
[1] Try to become a hermit. Civilization (modernity) will eventually encroach on your little hermitland.
I’m already happy with a lot of software that I use that interfaces with the governmnet. The government wants to do less work. I want to do less work. The software ends up being less work than the prior technology was.
Why are you supposed to rely on Facebook for communicating with your local volunteer group? Why isn’t there a viable option (according to network effects)? Nothing says that we need predatory social media companies that sell people’s data in order to operate local volunteer groups. That’s absurd and and a falsehood that Bit Tech simply wants to convince people of.
