Technology

Have we collectively forgotten that Facebook tested manipulating users emotional states all the way back in 2014?

Where they tested to see if people with depression can be even more depressed if their social media feeds are manipulated to take away positive interaction.

Don't forget the cycle of buying up all patents and shelving them if they are a threat to their goals. What a future we've wasted.

Reminds me of a part I've recently read on The Dawn of Everything, comparing the Great Lakes natives' freedoms to our corporate owned "freedoms": while we're busy with the "possibility of freedom", they cared about the exercise of their freedoms.

Before the colonization, they were free to visit other places because they almost always had someone that belonged to their clan living there and who would receive them with open arms. They didn't have to pay anything for the travel proper, but obviously needed to take some supplies to spend the days on the wilderness. For us, if we don't have money, we don't have freedoms: gotta pay for the car+gas (or plane or ship ticket), food, housing.

Great callback. I haven't thought of Thank You For Smoking in ages.

That is a prescient little film from my teenage years back in earlly 00's. The film was a nice stab at the culture of "spin" and how lobbying was gonna dig us into the hell we are now.

Hmmm, Thank You For Posting would be an actual relevant sequel in the time of endless sequels. Backdropping it with the lobbying for the Turd Reich and the ascension of Fascism and you got something there...

Thank you for reminding me of Thank You For Smoking.

asbestos at least was the best option until a couple years ago for numerous applications.

it's an analogy; the author is drawing parallels between them. Obviously Tobacco companies were not "defeated" but they were regulated to hell, and I'm sure the author would say that's what we need to do with social media too.

Muted in the English world. I argue junk food commercials draw a lot of parallels with cigarette commercials of the past. For some reason obesity isn't worth prevention so the advertisements are pretty gross.

Soft drinks. Coca Cola especially really loves to tie emotions and sports/holidays to sugar water.

They were never defeated.

When you say "defeated", what exactly do you mean? You mean that they should cease to exist to be considered as such? If that's the case then I would say it's an unrealistic expectation.

I would say that they've been largely contained. If I remember correctly, back in the '50s almost half of the American population used to smoke. The percentage of people smoking has been consistently decreasing over the years thanks to regulation and increased taxation. Tobacco companies are definetly not as influential as they once were.

i'm curious, what exactly is the advantage of getting a dumbphone vs just uninstalling social media apps from your existing phone, or just disabling internet access all together? doesn't that achieve pretty much the same thing while still being able to keep things like navigation and being able to see when public transport is delayed

I got an e-ink e-reader in the pocketable form factor of a phone (Bigme Hibreak Color). Instead of doomscrolling social media, I read a couple paragraphs of the Oppenheimer biography. Next I’ll reread Neuromancer. It’s life-changing. 10/10 highly recommended.

ok but like if I don't have music and noise cancelling earbuds I will explode

People tend to interact with technology on a default permit basis, which is partly why they have weather-vane attention spans and obliterated focusing capacity. They're like Pavlov's dog, responding to every notification and ping and service update; and social media is treated as the default use state until something else yells for their attention.

I have notifications denied by default. Notifications are lame and a known privacy threat. No one needs to be bothered because someone responded in a group chat or a new post surfaced on a Lemmy comm or a 'deal alert' got pushed by some marketing dipshit on the other side of the planet. That they exist at all for email is ludicrous. Email is an asychronous protocol - delayed responses are a feature.

Stop giving this stuff attention on demand and start allocating attention windows where it will get seen to. Email that gets in front of your eyes is 99 per cent transaction stubs if you're doing it right; there is no more reason to pay it any attention outside 7pm for 10 or 15 minutes (say). Similar treatment should apply to most messaging to be honest.

It's not very wild when you realize you're talking to addicts. The whole world is addicted.