I'd encourage you to read Clay Shirky's essay "Gin, Television, and Social Surplus":

http://web.archive.org/web/20080708220257/http://www.shirky....

His observation is that for basically a generation after the industrial revolution began, all those folks who were forced out of a job by rising mechanization had nothing better to do but drink themselves into a stupor. It wasn't until they all died off (the essay says "woke up from that collective bender", but realistically, most drank themselves to death) that we got all the institutional structures of modernity - universities, nation-states, stable 9-5 jobs, labor unions, civic engagement, democracy, public education, etc.

And then once we did that, society went on another bender with TV and spent all the time surplus from their 40-hour work week watching MASH and Gilligan's Island. It's interesting to watch re-runs of Gilligan's Island on YouTube today, because the production quality & scriptwriting is basically on par with a YouTube webseries that a few college film students could put together with iMovie today.

People will remain people regardless of what toys you give them, and most are not going to do anything useful with those toys. But it's amazing today just how much creative output has increased, on all levels, relative to the world I entered in the 80s. I think the stat, when I was at Google, was that for every second of real-time that passes, 9 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube. Even if much of that consists of unboxing videos and pirated movies and music collections and gaming streams, that's still such a huge increase over the creative output of the TV-centric world of the 70s and 80s.

I really like your comment. Thanks!

I find myself in agreement and in strong disagreement at the same time. My fear is your thesis is just an extended form of whistling in the graveyard.

Yes, these patterns you mention hold true, and we'd be fools not to acknowledge them, but there's another pattern that you're missing out on: each generation of distraction devices is more engaging and more adaptive. Don't like what's playing in the symphony hall? Go down the street. Painful but doable. Don't like what's on the radio? Twist the dial. Much easier.

So it's not simply that mankind invents some cool new whizbang and then an entire generation zonks out, it's that mankind gets better and better at inventing Whizbangs that are more difficult to zonk out from. So let's assume, and I really hope you're right, that the pattern holds and 40 years from now we see some new rebirth in institutions and inventions. This round was more painful than the last. Much more painful. And the next round will be worse still. As AI slowly grows, it's going to go after the youth; the old folks are already hosed. So really it's game over once we find a way to hook new generations as they come along and keep them hooked.

Those other waves didn't work like this. I'd argue we're either already there -- or within 100 years of it happening. So yes, it's a beautiful thought and I wish you the best. I just can't find it in me to think of this as being a winning argument overall. In fact, your examples like Gilligan's Island are actually reverse examples. Cost of production of niche entertainment content means fewer people make less money targeting smaller audience segments. Doesn't take a genius to figure out that we're headed for machine-created custom content geared to the individual. Things automate. Digital things automate faster. This cyclical thing where new stuff comes along and distracts a generation will become continuous. The only question is when.

Is it actually getting more painful? The last round ended with a worldwide depression and the deaths of 60 million people, including two atom bombs. (I'm counting TV & radio as part of this round; the distractions in the last one included rum-running, flapper girls & jazz.) And as a percentage of population, even that was a fair bit less severe than crises of years past; even including WW2, there's a clear downward trend in number of war deaths per capita [1].

I think what you're describing is the hedonic treadmill. Happiness isn't designed, evolutionarily, to make us happy. It's designed to make us repeat the behaviors that led to our ancestors passing on their genes. So TV holds our attention because in our ancestral past, paying attention to moving objects was critical to our survival. Alcohol holds our attention because in the slightly-more-recent-past, drinking alcohol-laced water was a good way to ensure that pathogens in the water were killed. Sex & porn hold our attention because...well, self-explanatory. Nowadays, mindlessly clicking through Buzzfeed & HN holds our attention because in recent years paying attention to social trends has been critical for survival.

On a personal level, the way to achieve enlightenment is to realize that happiness is a construct of our genes & environment, and to decide to be happy regardless. Whistling in the graveyard, in other words. On a societal level, those addictive behaviors that don't actually lead to better survival will get flushed out of the gene/meme pool in the next major crisis, much like how past pasttimes like jousting, duels, and blood-feuds (and soon tobacco & fast food) became passe when they no longer led to status or survival.

[1] https://www.quora.com/What-was-the-most-devastating-war-in-h...

  It's interesting to watch re-runs of Gilligan's 
  Island on YouTube today, because the production 
  quality & scriptwriting is basically on par with 
  a YouTube webseries that a few college film students 
  could put together with iMovie today.

Ha ha! Woah, woah, woah, there. Hold on a second. You are biting off a chunk of effort and talent there, and throwing it in the trash, without considering some of the huge, huge, huge barriers to television production back in 1960's & 1970's. (...not Gilligan's Island, but MASH, kind of)

Film making used to be so absolutely and drastically different from the way it is now, and there was a lot of sacrificed wastage both in time and material, due to the level of technology and it's reliability back then.

Just to do things like little title sequences and animation, or audio production that didn't look horribly dubbed and poorly lip-synced required careful dedication and the effort of multiple people. All because of poor technology in general, a poverty of integrated circuitry, no software at all, and most post production being performed optically, in-camera and with practical effects. Indoor lighting alone was painfully costly, and doubly so, due to the level of technology of the day. The undertaking of some examples of matte paintings and set design of the era (again, not Gilligan's Island...) are kind of mind-blowing to read about.

There were also political aspects such as centralized access to broadcast networks, which were also subject to high technological overhead, dealing with analog signals and the limited reach of syndication across geographic regions.

You can't credit today's undergrad capabilities visible on youtube, and trash what used to require an army of people doing new things for the very first time, with the boon that off-the-shelf appliances and downloadable software make possible these days. It was a drastically different world 40+ years ago.

Sorry for the rant. This was an XKCD:386 moment for me. [0]

[0] https://www.xkcd.com/386

That's my point. Technology has advanced dramatically since the 60s and 70s. You used to need huge teams of highly-skilled technicians just to handle the mechanics of editing, lighting, sound-recording, special effects, etc. Now you need: iMovie and a cell phone. That's allowed small groups of college students to put out creative works on par with what a major studio could do 40 years ago.

Or to tie it back to the Facebook example that started this thread: I regularly have political discussions with my friends on Facebook (or with folks here on HN, for that matter). If I say something interesting, there's the chance for that to go viral through reshares. When I was a kid, my favorite part of the newspaper was the Op-Ed section, and I always wondered what you had to do to get featured in the Op-Eds. Now everybody has their own personal Op-Ed section, with their own audience, and the type of discourse that was previously reserved for institutionalized publications now happens routinely on the Internet.

It's just that standards have risen correspondingly, so instead of this seeming amazing, it just seems like everybody is shooting their mouth off. Which it is, of course, but people fail to realize just how huge an achievement everybody being able to shoot their mouth off is.

Ha ha, yes, or to put it another way, pretty much everyone can have their own personal Gilligan's Island.

I think GPS has progressed to the point that it would be difficult to stray far enough to get lost, or marooned for that matter, on a 3 hour cruise. That said, the likelihood you would not be able to communicate the boats location or be found by the massive influx in boat traffic would be low.

I think the point was that these days technology has made things so efficient and cheap that even college students can make a big production.

Of course it was harder and more expensive back in the day...but that also meant less competition and a smaller pool of talent.

What's interesting is that most (all?) do not. Everyone has the resources, for the most part, to produce high quality content, but most simply do not. We have all this potentially productive tech, and we waste it on mindless entertainment. Sadly, I think this is one of those moments which decide the winners and losers of tomorrow. If you, or your family, are sucked into entertainment, you (or they) are highly unlikely to discover or invent anything, or start a successful business.

Well it still takes quite a lot of work and skill to produce high quality content. It's just more accessible now than it was. You have to write scripts, gather people, find the location, do makeup and costumes, have all the equipment(lights, cameras, audio, etc) and know how to use it, manage how you get paid through ads and sponsors, manage fans, and editing is huge time killer.

Entertainment can be mixed with education, and even the most successful people are not robots and do not work 24/7. How many times have you seen education gamified just here on HN? Did you see how popular the recent "Hidden Figures" historical drama got? There are countless books that have made huge changes on society, and it would have been hard to do that if they weren't at least somewhat entertaining.

I get that there's a lot of mindless media though. The Endless Scroll on Facebook is notorious for being a time suck.

All literate people are capable of writing books, too. But most do not.

The march of technology only changes the things that are not being created -- not the fact itself.

I mean, somebody has to consume all that entertainment (which you call "mindless")

We can't all be creators

This is a fallacy. Creation and consumption are not mutually exclusive. We can all be creators. We can't all be creators with global reach, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't all try. And the more people try, the higher the bar will raise.

Not to mention that all the "creators" I know also consume a way above average amount of 'entertainment'.

The essay you linked is amazing. And it is a direct counter to grandparent's comment:

> And I'm willing to raise that to a general principle. It's better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation. When you see a lolcat, one of the things it says to the viewer is, "If you have some sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can play this game, too." And that's message--I can do that, too--is a big change.

This is a great essay

Long time deleted FB account holder here.

I don't miss it at all. Not one bit. It amazes me how much time my wife spends mindlessly looking though stuff on it and the negative feelings that sometimes flow out from it.

I recently read a truly fantastic speech by Charlie Munger, which imparted so much clear & concise information in an easily digestible way that I could instantly relate to, it made me realise just how little I know. Specifically, he mentioned that you really need to notice when technology is going to help you and when it's going to kill you. It's made me re-evaluate my current relationship with technology and how negative it can be at (most?) times. I hope over time, people start to question their relationship with technology a lot more. I already see hints of this with mainstream media in things like Black Mirror.

I am amazed at the quantity and quality of some of the content on something like Kahn Academy that I have no idea why I haven't made more of an effort to try and grasp topics that otherwise are completely alien to me. Many of these will probably help hugely in my day to day life as well.

Recently I listened to an interview with a UK fund manager called Terry Smith, who said they don't invest in tech shares like FB, Netflix, etc. as they are such new areas which are still open to such massive change. Long term (decades) they probably aren't safe bets i.e. Netflix is great now, but once upon a time so was Blockbuster.

I do wonder if "peak" Facebook is over. There's already a large generational shift happening in younger demographics to things like Snapchat, etc.

I do hope that whatever may or may not replace it has a better balance towards positivity.

Yup, deleted my account a while ago, haven't used it in years. Don't miss it one bit.

At home, we are starting to have a 'problem' because my wife is constantly on FB. In the car, on trips, in restaurants, at the dinner table. It's fucking ridiculous. I have said a few times "what can be more important on fb than what's going on in the present moment with your family?". Behavior hasn't changed much.

What is starting to freak me out is the generations coming up. I have two young kids - pre-fb age - and they already have some questionable habits on my wife's iPhone - as soon as it comes out, they wanna look at pictures, go on youtube and fight over it. The second they see it...

I've been programming since I was 13 - a long time ago. Back then, you sat down at a table/desk to use your computer and then when you left, you did other things. You went out to play with friends. Ride bikes around. Go swimming. Go look at bugs. Eat something.

Nowadays, things are different. Different though because we let them be that way. Most parents I know are helicopter and at meet ups I'm always hearing about some bad thing that happened to someone they don't even know or is half way around the world. I'm not saying we embrace ignorance, but unless you can do something about that - and you're willing - then I don't see the point of fb and the news cycle.

As a parent (and developer), I have to be proactive and get the family back into the world. I'm not against tech in general (I'm teaching my son Basic right now), but the pendulum has clearly swung a little too far in one direction and fb/snapchat/etc, with their addictive behaviors, in my mind, are not good things for society.

People, to me, just seem happier when they're not inundated with gossip and negative news. I'ld love to see fb lose its dominance on the people who have their faces buried in their phones constantly. But, I don't think that will happen anytime soon. As long as people are checked out of the real world around them, it will be that much easier for them to get sucked in to fb and the like.

My grandfather was a waterman on the Chesapeake Bay. Didn't graduate high school, didn't go to college. Worked on the water until a few months before he died.

After his death, my family went through his belongings to sort out what people wanted and what should be included in the estate sale.

In the living room, there was the obligatory wall-sized, floor-to-ceiling bookshelf. You probably know the one from your grandparent's house. Filled with the kind of books you'd expect: encyclopedia, book of the month, condensed versions of great books, random novels, et cetera.

Rifling through the first book, I noticed there were notes written in the margins. About every 5-20 pages. Sometimes short, sometimes longer. I smiled and carefully set the book aside.

But the next one had notes too. And the next. And the next. Almost every book in the entire bookshelf.

My grandfather was a quiet man by the time I knew him. Of the ten words over dinner sort. But whenever I find myself reflexively going through Facebook or whatever other quick fix the internet affords me, I imagine him coming in after a long day of physical work, opening a book to his bookmark, and reading and noting a few more pages. Every day.

Then I try to be more like that person.

This is nice story but how is this any different than looking at wikipedia for a bit, reading and making notes on a kindle, etc. Your grandpa sounds like the type to use tools for personal enrichment so shouldn't the tools not matter?

Wikipedia is a mile wide and an inch deep. Most of the world's useful knowledge isn't online (IMO.)

IMHO, Wikipedia is mile wide and half a mile deep. Apart from knowledge special to a particular thing, it contains pretty much everything. If you ever think it is not the case, it is certainly the place to put your additions to instead of your private bookmark.

I'll grant that Wikipedia has certainly gotten better. (And continues to do so!)

But it still tends to have large blind spots where the source is (a) pre-digital or (b) of interest to a relatively small total number of people.

Try heading to your local library or a used book store (Goodwill works in the US), find a technical or history book older than ~1980, then attempt to find the content in Wikipedia. Especially in history, the hit rate isn't good.

> the place to put your additions to instead of your private bookmark

My private bookmarks won't get deleted by a zealous reviewer five minutes later.

It can be hard to contribute to Wikipedia without enmeshing yourself in the politics of it to protect your contributions from deletionists. This gets covered every few months on HN.

I really value Wikipedia but I have to agree. Also I agree that most of the world's useful knowledge isn't directly accessible online - though most of it may now be said to exist in some digital format, somewhere.

In the late 19th century there was a strong drive in academic history towards the idea of "total history": comprehensive accounts of everything that mattered from the beginning of recorded history to the current day. All these incredibly well educated German historians started outputting 20 volume world histories.

And no-one except a historiographical specialist would read them now.

They drank an ocean and pissed a cup.

So where do you suggest this most useful knowledge lies?

These days most books have a copy online.

Most misses out on an enormous number (at least half the books on my shelves, and I'm no bibliophile.) Google's got them, even though they can't let us see them.

Check out Library Genesis [1]. Personally, the only thing I've trouble finding online are books written in other languages than English.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Genesis

Because the interface influences the way your brain processes the information.

Reading a book != reading Wikipedia != watching an educational film

Judging by most of the comments on this article I'd say that people feel like we've lost something in the latter two.

I think that this an overstated case. Back in the "dawn" of online education I worked for a university where one school was swapping to using iPads for all their reading. You sign up you get and iPad with all your textbooks on it.

Initial polling was that students hated it from the get go. They wanted, needed textbooks. At the end of the first semester they did the polls again and, surprise, nobody wanted to go back to dead trees. Books are expensive and text search is amazing.

We switched to laptops for every student when I was in high school. I'd say that, even pre-Facebook, it was a boon to increasing computer knowledge, a decrease to attention span, and about equal on educational outcome.

I loved being able to play ROMs during class, but the difference between looking at information on the screen and in a book? Not fundamentally different.

I'd say where digital information shines is in post-secondary education where you're beginning to perform self-directed research, for the reasons you mentioned. And some students have a modicum of self control by then... ;)

Hyperlinks. You need self-discipline to stay on one page.

It matters when the tool you're using doesn't respect your privacy, yea.

Long time facebook addict. I was the kinda person that would check FB every 10 minutes -- yeah, it was a huge issue for me. I could tell it was effecting my work and job.

6 weeks ago I had my wife change my facebook password and log me out of everything. There was a genuine feeling of loss and withdrawal for the first 2 weeks. I felt very disconnected and felt like I was missing out. I asked my wife to sign me in on Sunday. I had 100+ notifications and a few messages. Only 1 direct message and 1 direct post - both from the same person about the same topic. Everything else was just junk.

It turns out that Facebook was providing nothing of value to me. It wasn't even connecting me to friends in a meaningful way. 2 messages relevant to me in 6 weeks. It is mind blowing how much time I was spending reading status and linked articles and looking at photos. Just wasting time and energy.

I'm not on FB, and haven't been for years. My problems are Netflix/Prime and news (Google News feed and Hacker News primarily). I'd literally LOVE a smartphone which limited me to maps/navigation, camera, minimal search (for looking up crucial info on the go), email, SMS, and Slack. Oh, and Kindle. I HATE that my damn smartphone makes it so easy to fritter my life away. And that the only alternative seems to be completely dumb phones and carrying around a separate camera and GPS device. Ugh. I don't want a dumb phone, or a feature phone, I just want a dumber smartphone. And hell, I'd pay what I paid for my Pixel (unlocked) for one. I want something which values my time, privacy, and life as much as I objectively do...But am, apparently, too weak to govern myself.

My issues suck because I can't simply have my wife reset my password. I can't remove the Google News feed. And as long as I have a browser I can see Hacker News. Sigh.

I have a love-hate relationship with the crappy smartphone i do have. Like you, i often read HN in dead moments but don't have FB, but find the smartphone useful for directions or quick picture snapping. I'm however still strongly considering going back to a dumb phone (although i've been saying that for about the full 1.5 years i've owned this smartphone) and to hell with the random pictures. Our grandparents seemed perfectly happy and could only capture a 24 roll of family photos every now and then (unless they were journalists or whatever, but you get my drift). I don't know. Part of me does fear i'd miss out on social events or get lost or not be able to take that one picture or...

Probably i should just have more self-control...

Maybe something like FocusMe to dumb your phone down by blocking things? It says the app is free. I haven't used this particular blocker but I've used a different one and it's great. No willpower needed.

https://focusme.com/

I am the same way with HN, Reddit, or news sites. Every day I don't check the site, I feel like I am missing out on some important indispensable news and information.

If I may ask, have you stopped using Facebook / changed how you use it now? Asked your wife to keep you logged out maybe?

I know what you mean with the irrelevant notifications. Lots of tweaking which notifications I get--still more than I'd like but it's an improvement. No games, no groups, no pages.

I've mostly stopped using Facebook. Besides that last check on Sunday, I haven't used it since. I still have an account, but I don't know the password. I could easily reset it myself, but its just enough friction to make it a pain. I also now have someone accountable to (my wife) and that helps a lot as well.

> I have two young kids - pre-fb age - and they already have some questionable habits on my wife's iPhone - as soon as it comes out, they wanna look at pictures, go on youtube and fight over it. The second they see it...

This is also 100% true of my dogs. As soon as there's a new dog toy in the house and one shows interest the other will begin to fight over it. There are some deeply-ingrained mammalian social behaviors that have nothing to do with technology, and won't change anytime soon. I'd be wary of blaming a phone ahead of instinct (though blaming businesses for exploiting those instincts is a bit different).

That said, I commend your efforts to try to maintain a happy medium for your family, that's really the best way to address these sorts of issues.

I'd be careful of making any conclusions of behavior if you remove the animals from the natural environment.

I've semi-wild street dogs in that really are not that interested in any new toys that are around the house, but they are clearly following and learning from each other on other things. I'd say this is one of the traits they have in common with us.

What they are mostly concerned is food, sex and fighting over territory with other dogs. When the puppies play the main function of it seems very clear to me (future battles). The dogs belonging to the same pack do not often fight each other since the established hierarchy is rather clear.

a) The biggest instigator by far is a dog we adopted at the age of 3 who was abandoned in the street and then spent another 9 months in the dog shelter. Each dog's mileage will vary.

b) I've worked with kids for years, and many display the exact same behavior, regardless of the particulars of the "shiny object". Fighting does not necessarily mean a physical altercation.

c) I've studied animal behavioral psychology, and have yet to find anything I learned that fails to apply to humans. We vary by degree, not kind.

I've noticed largely the same thing. I tried to purge it by unfollowing / hiding every major news source without blocking friends because MOST of the negative stuff in my feed was attached to links in those news sources.

The algorithm knows how to make you engage though. I'd get lost in really good debates with people over topics that we've discussed a before...and it just struck me about what a time sink it is because no matter how much we discuss things, nothing changes. All I'm doing it generating ad traffic for Facebook because they're keeping me engaged.

It's a lot easier to like a baby picture and walk away than it is to walk away from a topic you like discussing (and there are a lot of political topics that I like discussing). One of my good friends is a teacher and at some point in our discussion I made an observation that I'd never really thought of before (that had some negative implications)...and he did not take it well and got really, really upset with me. I apologized by phone, we cleared it up...

But at that point it really just finally hit the "enough is enough" point where nothing good is coming from this activity anymore...and I was done. And it's been great...except that now I notice how much time other people spend on it a lot more.

Regarding the observation point of contention, we were discussing the limits of current attempts at implementing school choice where schools had to opt in rather than giving people the money to go wherever they wanted. I realized that by including any type of religious name in a school, it basically legalized discrimination against poorer families since government funds wouldn't allow them to attend those schools. Struck me as an angle of the discussion I hadn't considered before and he took it as implying that he endorsed discrimination against those families - which would understandably upset anyone.

Yeah, I stopped using facebook completely, because I suddenly realised I was in the habit of checking it absolutely everywhere, no matter what I was doing. It was a habit, whenever my hands were free I would open my phone and go on facebook, even though it was always the same re-shuffled crap, negative news that were making me feel like shit, I'm normally a very positive and optimistic person, but I realised that absolutely nothing coming out of facebook was positive. Not a single thing. So I just said to myself - show some strong will, and stop using it. And I did. But god, it was hard for the first 2 weeks, then the compulsion started to go away.

And yes, I was exactly same as you - started programming around 12-13 years old, but when you stopped using the computer you would go and do other things. Now it seems to be literally everywhere.

I wonder about what my toddler thinks of my/my wife's smartphone habits, and the extent that we can permanently shape her attitudes toward technology before she reaches school age.

Children learn some things from peers, no matter what their parents do. For example, kids whose peers speak Standard American English will do the same, and will generally not have an accent — even if their parents do. In this case, it is probably a 'good' thing that kids are picking up skills from friends instead of parents.

But consider smartphone usage. Even if I could, by words and actions, impart to my toddler that technology is a tool and not a master to be heeded, does this attitude stand a chance of sticking once she starts school and sees older/richer kids with smartphones? What are effective strategies for inoculating against influences that you know will be coming?

I wrote an essay 8 or 9 years ago about how technology in general is eating us alive. I specifically mentioned Facebook.

The comments on HN at that time were quite interesting. "Oh, you don't understand. Facebook is just a fad", "I know what I'm doing, dammit!" and so forth.

Eight years later, guys. Facebook still a fad? Related HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=471353

ADD: Wow. It's one thing reading the usual noise in the comments today on this article. It's quite another thing to look at HN eight years ago and see the same kind of response. Doesn't reflect so well on us. I would much rather have been wrong.

Enlightenment is a curse.

Make no mistake about it -- enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or becoming happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It's seeing through the facade of pretense. It's the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true.

-- Adyashanti

(An ancient^WCupertino mystic.)

In alternative phrasing: the truth hurts.

Your paraphrasing still misses the point: enlightenment is not a curse, and enlightenment does not hurt. But nobody actually wants to be enlightened.

I'd argue it that does hurt (a lot) to let go of what you belive in, and that is why people do not desire englightenment.

As far as I can tell, the thing about enlightenment is that once it's happpened, it causes this very strange change in you...

There's a very strong similarity in the meanings and origins of the words "enlightenment", "catastrophe", "revelation", and "apocalypse". Most of them have a sense of an overturning or of a revealing. There's the similar terms and expressions "the scales fell from my eyes", "I saw clearly", "flash of insight". They're not unrelated to concepts of creativity, genius, or intelligence. And there's the sense of the world "prophet" as "one who receives a message" (usually with a connotation of divinity).

In almost all of these, you might substitute a modern psychological concept: that of a dramatically changed world-view. The things you once believed, they are no longer true.

I watched the 1950s version of the RMS Titanic story some months back (I've not seen Cameron's remake), A Night to Remember. One lens through which to view that film is of the gradual revealing, the enlightenment, if you will, or lack of same, of various characters to the plight and fate of the ship, including that of several of those not aboard (and ultimately the world via headlines and news reports).

The first to clearly grasp the situation (as portrayed in the film) was the ship's designer, aboard for final adjustments as a shake-down. Then the captain and members of the crew. The contrast between the observers on the Californian and Carpathia, remote to the Titanic, struck me particularly (the first being utterly ublivious, the latter understanding, and also understanding that despite their own best efforts, there was no way to reach the ship in time).

Some passengers responded with denial, some with anger, some with outrage, some, assessing the situation and recognising their fate, with equanimity.

It's quite the film.

Enlightenment can be devastating.

That's a big part of it, yes,

I don't know about "enlightenment" as that means different things to different people, but there are models of the world you can arrive at that appear more truthful to you than the models of other people that can be... very, very painful.

And that's another big part of it.

Enlightenment is basically just being woke on a much larger scale.

Really good piece. I've touched on a similar theme, a couple of years ago:

https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/240xss/the_dop...

NB: the direct blog link to yours appears dead, though I turned up the essay at the Internet Archive.

The url for the essay appears to have changed. It's now at http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2009/02/technology-is...

I go on Facebook a few times per month. I think that's a healthy amount.

> It amazes me how much time my wife spends mindlessly looking though stuff on it and the negative feelings that sometimes flow out from it.

I felt like that, so I started unfollowing things/people that made me feel negative emotions and now my feed is full of Synthesizers and Dog Memes. My own little echo chamber!

Got a link to the munger speech?

Not OP, but:

Recently, this: https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2017/02/charlie-munger-wisd... (posted to HN)

There's a very long (~250 pages) collection of wisdom here: http://www.valueplays.net/wp-content/uploads/The-Best-of-Cha...

I've run across a shorter (~15 - 45 pages or so) compilation or speech a ways back, but it's not turning up. He covers a certain set of ground fairly frequently though.

It was this one:

http://ritholtz.com/2012/02/a-lesson-on-elementary-worldly-w...

I can really see myself starting to try and get deeper into his mindset, especially building up a lattice of mental models.

but you're on HN. Is it really that much better?

Did you actually see people playing facebook quiz games or did you just assume that? You literally don't know anything else about those people. You're just assuming they're not intellectuals because they were on their phones. Lol. I hate this uppity assumption that everyone has to be an intellectual, know 5 different languages, study quantum mechanics, and whatever else in order to be seen as worthy of being alive in this age.

Seriously. Anyone who saw me out in public on my phone would see me messing around on Twitter. They don't see me later talking bioethics in Star Trek with my friend, who does the same thing on his phone in public.

People who reduce others to what they can observe in public spaces are probably not as obnoxiously stupid as they seem, but I wouldn't know that by their public behavior.

"Bioethics in Star Trek" is not a high bar.

look at you, judging other people for using science fiction as a vessel for discussing deeper philosophical topics.

Relevant early xkcd: https://xkcd.com/610/

Television went the exact same way. From 'a university in every home' to a continuous stream of entertainment.

There is some choice but how many re-runs of Discovery channel content can you watch (and most of that is infotainment, not actual stuff you'd want to learn).

The one great thing about the internet is that it is many-to-many rather than one-to-many in it's foundations so we do have a lot more choice than on TV and that university is there as long as you want to look for it.

There is some romanticisation of the past going on when you dismiss the Discovery channel as infotainment. I don't mean that it isn't infotainment, but what's wrong with that. TV has worked as an educator though it doesn't resemble University.

Ordinary TV watching people have a much broader mental scope -- spanning the globe than their ancestors did. They do better on IQ tests. The TV shows they watch are more complex than the Vauderville shows of old.

> There is some romanticisation of the past going on when you dismiss the Discovery channel as infotainment.

Today's Discovery Channel (and History Channel, and TLC, etc) - are vastly different than what they were when they started. All have definitely "dumbed down" to the LCD.

I understand that this is normal change for a business, especially one centered around TV entertainment. I also know that even in their prime, these channels were never as educational as, say, PBS and the like. But compared to today's programming, their earlier incarnation was vastly superior.

But that is just my (probably biased) opinion...

> Today's Discovery Channel (and History Channel, and TLC, etc) - are vastly different than what they were when they started. All have definitely "dumbed down" to the LCD.

While with "educational" channels it.comes off as dumbing down, there's a broader effect of appealing to narrow groups that drive popularity and then moving on to appeal to the masses. Outside of TLC/Discovery/History you can see this in Food Network (where the cooking slowly migrated to the Cooking Channel -- typically on more expensive cable tiers) while Food Network was taken over by food tourism shows, advertorial series, and reality/competition shows; MTV, where the music keot migrating to subordinate channels while the main channel was taken over by non-music reality/competition programming, and lots of other outlets.

"Challenge them with idiotic trivial tasks, then reward them with blinky lights, sound effects..."

I was once speaking to a dev who worked on slot machines video 'games'. He mentioned that making such games had a lot more to do with psychology and exploiting certain 'addiction' traits and less about game and level design concepts used in mainstream video games.

But the line is getting very blurred these days when I look at mobile games. At least you have the remote possibility of making some money in slot machines, as opposed to pay-to-play mobile games.

Oh yes, so I once worked on online poker games, and as part of the training material we all learned about variable schedules [2] and operant conditioning [1].

It's hard for me to use Facebook or play Candy Crush after being exposed to that material. On the other hand, the real heroin, loot-dropping Action RPGs, for some reason I can stand to play those in short spurts before losing interest. I'm not sure why, perhaps there's something wrong with their scheduling...

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber

[2]http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Variable_ratio

Addiction by Design by Natasha Dow Schüll is an excellent book about the video slots industry in the US, its behavioral engineering principles, and the effects it has on the lives of the people it hooks into pointless and expensive dopamine grinding.

Second this rec! I only play poker/blackjack at casinos but after reading Addiction by Design I'm almost scared of even trying a slot machine. The addiction extends to the casinos and politicians who become addicted to the profits generated by the addicts and it swallows the entire industry.

Is it a problem? If people are happy with that status quo, who are we to challenge them? It might not be the original intent, or the hopes of some (and only some), but if people are content with this outcome, there's little debate to be had.

The question presented here, though, is whether or not allowing Facebook to monopolize the industry is a threat to society. Services provided are irrelevant. This is a matter of centralization.

>If people are happy with that status quo, who are we to challenge them?

Don't mistake addiction for contentment. How many of those people would like to be doing something else, but just can't pull themselves away from the slot machine?

and how many people tell themselves they'd like to do something else (say, learn a language or instrument) as a form of ego-protection because it's "what sophisticated people do"? The underlying assumption that we should all want to learn Latin and to play the Cello seems to have been roundly invalidated, despite continuing to be played out in the public sphere.

Probably not very many people tell themselves that. Seems more like something cynical and judgmental people assume other people tell themselves.

But I can tell you almost anything creative / productive / self-developmental feels more rewarding than the time I fritter away doing nothing on the internet, like idly scrolling Reddit.

I'm not content that my default mode is to do things that never feel rewarding. So any minute I can reclaim for something more self-developmental, like a Duolingo Spanish exercise, makes my life a little better and satisfying in my own eyes.

But _why_ do you want to learn Spanish? Is it because you are planning an extended stay in a Spanish-speaking country, or have Spanish-speaking friends, or is it because you have a romantic conception of multilingualism?

My point was that people often seem to romanticise fairly arbitrary personal development goals as being a lofty intent, but when push comes to shove you'll find them in front of the TV or playing a game. What does that say about our internal reward system and the value of forcing yourself to do something that you tell yourself you'll enjoy over something you genuinely enjoy? The idea that entertainment is a "lower pursuit" and learning arbitrary skills is a "higher pursuit" smacks of social construction.

Could you substitute "eating healthy" and "exercise" into this line of thinking? Or other alternatives that you yourself might agree are "better" while maybe being difficult to choose to do, and not as "enjoyable" as some less ideal alternative action?

That something is "enjoyable" in the short-term does not mean that it is beneficial in the long term.

Doing drugs, getting high, gambling, any other short-term dopamine hit is easy, and feels good in the moment, yet can pretty easily be characterized as bad in the long term, and objectively worse than alternative actions that in the short term are not as pleasurable and enjoyable. I use obviously extreme examples to illustrate the logic.

Figuring out which pursuits and behaviors fit into which bucket certainly is not quite so straight forward. But I think the OP you are responding to has something right when they describe it challenging to escape the easy/addictive and replace it with the difficult/beneficial.

If you only characterized exercise as "practicing picking up a heavy weight and putting it over there. Why do you need to do this? etc." then certainly the benefits can seem ridiculous.

That there is no direct practical need to learn Spanish, doesn't mean learning to speak it doesn't garner ancillary benefits.

There's a balance to be had here. I've tried to "be creative" all the time and it just doesn't work. You need those moments idly scrolling Reddit or HN (or going for a walk outside, or vegging out with TV or videogames) for your brain to a.) have new stimulus to process and b.) have time to process it.

I'd be terribly unhappy if all I did was surf Reddit, but I was also equally unhappy when I just tried to work, produce, and learn all the time.

> If people are happy with that status quo, who are we to challenge them?

Engineers who have identified a systemic risk to society.

Couldn't your argument apply all the same to heroin?

And why shouldn't it?

You seem to be suggesting that a heroin epidemic would be in no way problematic and that no one should take any steps against it.

I believe the word you're looking for is technocrats.

> Is it a problem? If people are happy with that status quo, who are we to challenge them?

If people are happy doing heroin all day, who are we to challenge them?

I mean, if you really want to take it to that extreme, why is the argument against facebook videogames and not videogame culture as a whole? Seems like in this case, Facebook is just a scapegoat.

I completely disagree that videogames are bad (in moderation, of course, as all things). Games often involve problem solving, learning systems, practice and continual improvement. Compare this to other forms of entertainment media and games look good. There are vapid videogames on mobile and social which are little more than slot machines, but that doesn't mean all or most games are fruitless wastes of time. And even in mobile, if you get deeply into many of the top performing games, there is a lot of thinking and strategy involved. It's far from idle, passive, worthless entertainment.

What's more, games often help people connect to others, sometimes from around the world, in a shared interest. For people who are socially stressed or are going through a rough time without enough support in real life, this can be extremely helpful. And even for those who have plenty of social life, it's often fun to meet people in game.

In my opinion, this is the most dangerous aspect of games, though - they can fulfill that feeling of achievement that would otherwise belong to creative work, and satiate the need for that kind of work. The problem is that the achievements aren't helpful in the same way that eg building a company/invention/coffee table are.

I say this as a lifelong game player, and it's not to discount their positive effects - I think I'm a much better strategist and planner as a result of playing games as a kid.

My brother has health problems that prevent him from finding fulfillment in the same ways that an entrepreneur might.

It's precisely this property of videogames that allows so many people with similar problems to feel achievement.

Thank you! I very much agree with this. Most claims I see made against video games (as a whole or phone-based) tend to be made from atop a pedestal, and usually with very little willingness to open one's mind to the plausible benefits (visible or otherwise).

Video games covers a very broad market, but the race to the bottom in price in some segments seems to have been followed by unproductive time sink mechanics made by people who didn't realise (or perhaps didn't care) that Cow Clicker was a parody.

I've had to put the kongregate minigames site into my own /etc/hosts file as 0.0.0.0 to stop myself playing the "Idle"/"Clicker" genre.

Positive games do exist, but they are thinner on the ground than they used to be. I think.

> Games often involve problem solving, learning systems, practice and continual improvement.

A lot of videogames focus on instant gratification and variable time rewards. There have been some games focused on problem solving - games where instead of simply playing you'd find yourself spending 20 minutes looking over your handwritten notes trying to puzzle something out - but they're a minority.

Yeah, I find I enjoy video games for many of the same reasons I enjoy programming.

Many things that are harmful in large doses but beneficial in moderation. Alcohol has many beneficial effects when used in moderation, but too much is both immediately a problem and can cause systemic problems. Drugs (of the legal/medical sort) are specifically used because of their beneficial nature, but most of them cause harm when used in excess.

The problems come when something has a feedback loop which promotes more usage beyond normal usage. Alcohol has this, and so does heroin. Different games have this to different degrees. Like most things I've mentioned, different people are susceptible to this to different degrees, which complicates the issue.

I think most of those who've responded to you recognize the argument is against Facebook, videogames, tv, etc and in general all vapid time sucks designed to keep the user in an unenlightened state

I'm not sure I agree there. I think most of the responses were in the same vein as "look at these mindless sheep who can't lift their heads from their phones".

Who indeed? Can you judge how people should live their lives better than they can? Most heroin addicts are far from happy though

(btw what you have said is basically the Godwin's Law of talking about happiness)

> Can you judge how people should live their lives better than they can?

Me personally? No. We as a society in which that person lives? Yes, to the degree that it affects us. That's why we have public education and vaccination.

If you want to retire to a remote cabin in the woods with a ton of heroin and finish out your days, I have no complaints. If you want to do it such that others need to clean up after you (whether that be garbage on the street or an unpaid hospital bill from an emergency room visit), then you are subject to their desires to a greater or lesser degree. You aren't allowed to have the benefits of society without the drawbacks. That's what civilization is.

Oddly, most of the garbage that accumulates on the streets where I live consists of empty cigarette packs/butts, coffee cups, beer and soda cans, junk food and fast food wrappers, etc. And the hospitals are full of people suffering the consequences of recklessly consuming those things.

It's not all that odd. What society deems is beneficial as a whole is not necessarily what is beneficial for an individual. It's not necessarily beneficial even, it's just what's been decided is. A society without caffeine might be better off, but we've decided we don't believe so for a multitude of reasons. That doesn't mean we are correct, it just means we've made a choice.

Cogs that don't fit get ground down. That's not meant as some dig against modern society, all human groups feature this to some degree. Your prototypical small native american tribe is no different.

Why would I? They are probably happy.

>If people are happy with that status quo, who are we to challenge them?

Because that happiness is an illusion. One that prevents them from seeing the seriousness of their situation. Whether it's texting-and-driving, or climate-change-denial. This "tool" is going to do us more harm than good.

Can you qualify that real quick by providing evidence that you are more capable than others at identifying degrees of reality vs illusion in activities?

Children are generally not happy at school, yet we force them to attend.

I think that says more about how we run our school systems than the schooling kids being a problem.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/why-are-finlands-sc...

Great example of this.

It is mandatory. Maybe they don't need that much schooling.

what is "needed" seems more like a post-facto rationalization for each individual. everyone's future is uncertain. extra education generally provides more options and flexibility, while the same doesn't really apply to a more limited education.

Excellent point about centralisation. I can't help but feel many people either misunderstood or didn't read the article. In my view, the power Zuckerberg wields is staggering, although I've seen many postings here with contrasting views on that level of power.

The article is excellent. It's well structured and insightful. It also leads us to ask excellent questions and provides relevant content to mull over. As an example, Zuckerberg's message was fascinating in what it didn't say.

My superficial value add to truthhawk's article is as follows.

1. How much sway does Facebook actually have? Do most people seek information outside of Facebook? If they hear/see something enough, does it become truth?

2. Would Zuckerberg want to be president? I've always viewed the President as being a servant to power brokers behind the scenes. Wouldn't Zuckerberg have more influence by striking deals with potential candidates and hold leverage through Facebook profile analysis? Does Zuckerberg have the power to be more than a president?

3. Does anyone actually have the power to take on Facebook? Might that person be subjected to extra criticism (eg. during the next election) if they don't play ball?

4. Facebook exists and it is particularly powerful. If you were to decentralise the leadership (as discussed by truthhawk), would that add benefit? How? I see potential for a fragmented committee, or worse. Could Zuckerberg be like Jobs was to Apple?

5. Long term, assuming Facebook and Zuckerberg survive the test of time, who takes over? What sort of people would gravitate to that role? What might that mean for this wealth of information on many citizens of the world? Even if Zuckerberg is a benevolent dictator, the potential vacuum of power that will be created horrifies me, especially thinking about the personalities that may fight for it.

I don't believe Facebook will disappear any time soon. There are serious questions around Facebook that we desperately need to consider. This article is excellent as it helps focus us on this goal.

This is why I (mostly) love HN. It really makes me think about the world around me in so many interesting and meaningful ways. I may have given up on MSM and once-brilliant sites like Ars Technica (who now thrust biased gender and governmental politics down our throats). I hope HN can keep its secret sauce flowing.

Thanks truthhawk

Thank you, rustynails! Happy to see the post prompting thought. Great questions, and ones we will have to keep an eye on in the coming months/years.

Side note: the user who submitted this to HN is an Ars Technica co-founder!

The best aspect of social media is social cohesion, and Facebook is decent at it. Being able to maintain, develop or otherwise keep in touch with people has a huge impact on quality of life.

The tragedy of Facebook is that it has integrated my ability to connect with friends and random people with 'news' using perverse solicitous internet marketing.

Of course, most of these temptations I've requested, essentially forcing myself to scroll through a Reddit-like waste of time just to see what my cousins or friends are up to. Yet the inertia of bad decisions is hard to steer against.

I'd view more ads or pay $100/month if Facebook was purely about individuals, had no brands or influencers, and it was just a way to maximize social cohesion.

If Facebook introduced a big "No News" button as an easy way to opt out of the noise, would it make the world a better place? Zuckerburg is making the world a better place through philanthropy but in business he's in the unique position of being able to magnify human ideals and spark a type of social enlightenment and cultural renaissance.

> taking quizzes where any moron with the ability to type would get 90% correct -- and then sharing the results with their friends.

This bothers me so much for some reason. Title a kindergarden math quiz "Only people with an IQ of 150 can pass this test! 90% of people cant!" and when people get a 100% on it, they will inevitably share it, to show off. And then another person sees it and says "there's no way cousin Sally could get that good of an IQ score! I've got to try this to prove that I'm better!"

It's clickbait that appeals to pride.

I had this realization recently. The web is undoubtedly a great thing. Computers have obviously made our lives unbelievably better. But I'm starting to seriously question if the smartphone will ultimately be seen as a positive development for humanity. To be sure, we need modern telecommunications. Late 90's MMS phones covered this use case completely. But this world where everyone has an attention stealing machine in their pocket that feeds them nonsense 24/7 is seriously starting to affect us.

Add to this the economic absurdity of having multicore 64b, HD display, wireless, Gigs of ram and 10H of battery life; just to do a high res version of the 80s television/teletext. And don't forget to upgrade with the new model, because you clearly need an octocore to swipe right.

I'm cynical but I liked that race at first. A smartphone was cool, but I agree that it's not the result I planned.

It's even a little more absurd, because it seems that society aggregates issues, and try to develop solutions, but the solution just replace the other sources of problems, so on and so forth. Moving target.

I'm sure soon some people will pay to have disconnected areas to relive how it was before.

ps: the easiest way to get smarter is to avoid relying on society, and solve problems on your own. For that reading an old book with a pencil nearby is probably more than enough. society and tech are religions somehow; distortion field.

In your opinion its a problem. The arrogance to say you know better than everyone else in such absolute terms is astounding.

I would counter that it is completely fair for someone to want to escape reality and grab simplistic rewards to avoid the absolute drudgery of being crammed into a plane with noisy, rude, and smelly strangers for an extended period of time. What kind of deep thought is possible in this environment?

Right?! They're on a plane--excuse me, commercial air traveling mass transportation vehicle--and they're expecting to see people studying Ulysses and learning Latin.

I really can't expand anymore on the article itself, so I'll just respond to your expressed sentiment. I'm interpreting you as feeling that the core problem with FB is that there is no one there "who gives a shit whether the guy on the other end is learning to be a better person."

I contend both that that is not the case, and that that concern is the precise inversion of what a developer's goals should be. FB is scrambling to ensure its users get the "correct" news on their feed, and every feature rollout has been intended to increase the social harmony among its user graphs. However, making those the focus requires the psychological manipulation you touch upon in your post. FB's product ends up not being a general purpose forum where people can express their social selves, but rather a precisely crafted echo chamber whose interface is a general purpose forum.

Don't have any contempt for the FB users you see at the airport, they're just as human as you and me. Somehow though, I've recently been able to get actual fun and satisfaction from FB. Turns out when you use it to just post links you like, or to write out and discuss ideas you have, or to check the latest Hegel memes, or show off something you've made, or to play meta games with people, or to just chat, you can have a good time without almost any of the addicting BS.

+1 for the Hegel memes

On a more serious note, I feel this is the right attitude towards the kinds of things. I've never had a problem with my feed and if something is uninteresting I just block it, period. The feed always ends up being a mirror of the users curiosities and interests so if you have a problem with it it's up to you to change it. Technology is a gateway to knowledge and self actualization, but you can't force those things into people, it's their journey.

I'll play devil's advocate. Humans are social, no way around that. It'd be much simpler if we weren't but then we wouldn't be human. Social media is what you make of it: it's a tool, or if you let it be, a game.

For Facebook, 95% of the time I only use Facebook Messenger and Events. Both of these things are only as intrusive and distracting as you choose for them to be, and are very efficient for communicating and organizing events. The other 5% I scroll through the news feed and unfollow anything non-wholesome or people that I don't keep in touch with anymore, which leads to a trimmed, much less populated feed.

Snapchat I find redeemable because it's a much more honest representation of people's lives, since they can have greater control of who sees their content and the knowledge that it is impermanent. Instagram and Facebook have both carbon copied the app's functionality in a testament to that value.

Instagram is definitely more on the side of the video game, but I use it as creative inspiration. There are some incredibly talented photographers on Instagram, and I also follow a lot of motorcycle photoblogs for build inspiration.

Reddit has helped me solve so many problems and has given me so much helpful advice that I can forgive the time I've wasted there.

tl;dr use social media productively and this vilification won't be necessary.

> tl;dr use social media productively and this vilification won't be necessary.

But that doesn't address that problem of Facebook acting as an intermediary for an increasing amount of our communication. Using Facebook "productively" still provides the company with an opportunity to aggregate and use your personal information to further its financial goals.

True, but I didn't because the OP didn't either. It is a problem that hasn't been solved yet, and for me, so far it's been an worthy compromise. I avoid putting anything truly personal on my Facebook - it doesn't have my home address, I turn location settings off, I never send sensitive information over Facebook messenger, etc. I try to minimize what they have, and I think that's an acceptable tradeoff.

I agree with this. Perhaps the 'it's a problem' for me is defined more as 'This is a problem, it just goes to show how much humanity has these wonderful innovations and most people never seem to use them to better themselves'. I bet people said the same thing about books when they first showed up en masse.

In fact, there was mass hysteria around Dime Novels once:

https://timeline.com/from-comic-books-to-video-games-new-for...

I generally agree with the idea though. It seems as if the better we get at sharing honest to god information, learning materials, and the like, the more the technologies to deliver that inevitably get used to deliver entertainment over substance.

> Were they learning foreign languages? Becoming experts at symbolic logic or global politics?

I'll bet some of them were doing these things or things equally meaningful. Probably in roughly the same proportion as they would have been 40 or even 400 years ago.

Most people don't spend significant portions of their lives learning things or challenging themselves. From what I can tell this has always been true.

Yup. Right now I could be working on a useful and interesting side project. Instead I'm rolling through HN comments. Dang social media.

It speaks more to you as an individual that you believe the people around you should be pursuing things like "symbolic logic" or "global politics" rather than mindless games. Who are you to indict others for their hobbies, and on what authority can you judge their hobbies' value?

Look, HN is becoming a self-parody with this anti-Facebook circlejerk. People are allowed to have different lifestyles, and despite the inane comparisons to heroin that are being tossed around this thread, it's really not indicative of a systemic societal failure that people rather play Candy Crush on their phone than whatever noble pursuit you'd have them do while waiting to take off.

Take a look at that old photo of people reading newspapers on the train sometime. People thought the sky was falling with "new media" then, too. Every new media goes through an initial renaissance before it proceeds to mainstream appeal and accessibility. Not everyone wants to be like that kid you read about who built his own computer.

> Contrast that to my trip the other day by commercial air travel. Everywhere I went, people were on their phones. Were they learning foreign languages? Becoming experts at symbolic logic or global politics?

> They were not.

I am currently using my phone to learn mandarin using the "Hello Chinese" app [1]. It doesn't require internet connection for lessons that you have already downloaded, so it is perfect for long trips and such.

my first foreign language was rather obscure (Pashto) so I had to learn it in a classroom without any apps or other programs to help with self study. Learning using the hello chinese app is so much better compared to classroom learning it just boggles my mind. I can go at my own pace, it uses sound recognition to grade my pronunciation, I can study words and phrases, everything. It is a wonderful tool

[1] http://www.hellochinese.cc/

Ironic the the apex of decades of some of the greatest mental achievements of the last century (Von Neumann, transistor, IC, compiler design, nuclear war survivalable networking protocols, etc) has been coopted to create a planet of Eloi. You can't make this stuff up.

Steve Jobs, tellingly, did not let his children use the Ipad.

Lmao! We get, what, around 20 years of a social networking boom and you take it to mean that thousands of years of amazing work has been coopted? Sorry, I don't know what world you're living in. The world I'm in has this Facebook crap, sure. But we're also getting into very advanced genetic engineering, we're starting to develop a yearning for space travel, we're starting to worry about advanced AI/robotics taking over our jobs, we're beginning to think about climate change and what we can do about it, etc. Kids are learning programming. Private space industry. Large Hadron Collider. Dark matter and dark energy. Exoplanets.

Some people just love overreacting and arrogant intellectualism.

The hell do exoplanets have to do with anything in this thread? Half your "points" are just stream-of-consciousness Scientific American covers. Blah blah, exciting times, whatever. Irrelevant.

The other half, your societal analyses, are 50 years out of date. Climate change, space yearning, AI fear - you'll find it all in 60s and 70s sci fi.

None of which even remotely addresses the "planet of Eloi" assertion. You may as well have just pasted the lyrics to "We Didn't Start The Fire".

I have indeed trafficked in overreaction and arrogance masquerading as intellectualism in my days. Probably will again. Such is life.

Is this a pessimistic view of Facebook or of people?

The answer is "yes". It's both.

The argument I made in my essay eight or nine years ago is still true, it's just gotten worse: technology continues to evolve to hack into the human brain in order to commandeer its attention, not assist it.

If you want to look at it in terms of predator-prey relationships, right now we have a predator evolving to eat the most valuable finite resource on the planet, the attention span of the apex lifeforms. So far it looks to be running the tables.

http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2009/02/technology-is...

The computers are programming the humans.

Humans are using computers to program other humans. Used to be humans using TV to program other humans.

Awww so optimistic. Haven't you seen that tshirt with the caveman nobley striding followed by the hunched computer programmer?

The problem is not technology, but people. They are not as interested in these high minded pursuits as everyone imagined.

Before it was FB/Internet/Phone games, it was TV, so we're perhaps just continuing further down a well worn path.

See Roger Water's underrated Amused to Death album or the book that inspired it Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Showbusiness.

Yes. Despite the potential, the most profitable/frequently used applications seem to appeal to the most basic parts of our brains, and thrive off of providing the dopamine hit. And just like heroin addicts, we've become slaves to getting that next high.

Facebook is the only tech company I feel very reluctant to work for. It feels so dystopian.

The propaganda posters all over their walls are impressive.

http://hillaryfox.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/IMG_7782.jp...

Since then they've added a few more which are basically "remember not to be racist".

Open your eyes, if you dare.

As opposed to Google that does the same? I am kinda surprised facebook has not given out free email ids yet.

they tried. It failed.

http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/24/5443454/facebook-retires-i...

On the other end of the spectrum, my wife participates in a medical research group within Facebook, because the group creator and that community find Facebook more natural to use.

I share your concern but we can extend the problem to mobile phones.

> It's a problem.

You 're talking about people, right?

>... then reward them with blinky lights, sound effects, and the imagined praise of their peers. They'll do that shit all day long.

Upvoted.

Maybe all it really did is show us that >90% of people in society are not and never will be intellectually curious.

that is such a bleak zero sum view. I can distract myself and improve myself at two different times. I've maintained and made some great relationships using facebook. I know people that still self improve using computers. I find it greatly amusing that people can have this opinion.

The problem lies not in the product but its customers. This is what people are like, on average.

As another top level comment notes, Adlous Huxley nailed it 85 years ago.

Brilliant take.