Stoicism will fix things in the west? I assume you mean the USA, but as a person in the USA, I have to say that we are about as stoic as you can get. We lean on personal responsibility for every little thing.
"Oh, you went bankrupt from cancer. Why didn't you plan for that? Don't you know around 50% of folks get that?"
"Oh, you went to college for a useless degree? Why didn't you have someone in your life teach you that was a mistake? Why didn't you reject the counselors in public schools who encouraged you down that path?"
"Oh, you eat too much sugar? Why didn't you reject the industry sponsored studies that downplayed their health effects?"
"Oh, you got covid? Why didn't you stay at home? What do you mean you're an essential worker? Why didn't you take care of your health so you weren't predisposed to it?"
It's not stoicism the west needs, but a dire injection of empathy and community.
Or the long list of fucking stupid moral panics oriented around children from people trying to get reelected and everything "satanic" which ironically enough many children could have told them was just plain dumb. While empathy would be good emotions alone aren't enough as even "a desire to protect one's offspring" may be twisted horrifically. Community I am deeply skeptical of as a value in itself given how often it winds up something deeply toxic and stupid from acting like dumb herd animals. Sure internal investment would be good but given their record community itself can piss off.
Why stop people from laying out the traps? They're just trying to make a living, it's perfectly fine!
How do you fight that? With a bigger group of people. Since they are so large, that means a nation or state (if you're a big one, as if you're small they probably won't care, that's how big they are).
If there's a pride of man-eating lions roaming about, you don't set out by yourself to fix the problem. That's just an imaginative attempt at suicide. You get a large group of people. That's why regulation is what we need, because that's what it means when you get a really large group of people to impose their will in the modern age.
They are the ones acting in bad faith and trying to extract resources from you via subversion.
Early on, the U.S. Congress adopted the Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act of 1965 and the Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act of 1969. These laws—
* Required a health warning on cigarette packages
* Banned cigarette advertising in the broadcasting media
* Called for an annual report on the health consequences of smoking
This should of course not replace taking personal responsibility, but humans are way to easy to influence / hack to leave it entirely to market forces. Some common ground and basic rules is at the very core of any healthy society or community.
Speed limits, traffic lights and bike lanes creates great conditions for a healthy marketplace. An absence of regulations benefits only the biggest and meanest, and usually ends up creating unsustainable systems that is crushed under it's own weight.
Any specific ones? I personally can't think of any at all that would work.
1. That, because you are unable to think of rules and regulations that would work, there must not be any.
2. That, in order for anyone to legitimately suggest that something might be worth attempting, they must already have a working solution.
Is it one of those two, or something else?
A large part of the problem is that social media companies algorithmically serve content to serve their purposes, but are not liable for the consequences of algorithmically served content.
To me, using an algorithm to select what content to show a user is exactly the same thing newspapers do: editorializing. I don't understand why its treated any differently.
The entire mutually exclusive division between platform and publisher is a zombie propaganda lie that won't stay dead.
This rhetorical technique is called 'poisoning the well,' preemptively injecting doubt into whatever follows. The GP gave several examples of regulatory mechanisms that already work to some degree, and an argument for why, but you chose to ignore that completely for some reason.
That is, what are traffic lights and safety lanes for social networks? How do we enforce those for private products when generally they are things why apply to our public spaces? A social network is much more of a mall than a public park, so what restraints are we willing to make towards a private property, and what will actually work? I think those are very valid questions, and while the argument from blueterminal may have gotten there in a roundabout way (and in a way that some consider not in good faith), I they are well worth considering in detail.
To me it's blatantly obvious something needs to be done, I'm just not sure what that is, and am slightly afraid we'll implement a fix that if not as bad as the problem, is still much worse than it needs to be unless we consider it carefully.
I would personally reduce the private property privileges substantially since a social network by definition derives its value from the number and variety of people that use it. I'd like if FB were at least as searchable to its users as to advertisers, for example; arguably FB knows more about many of its users than they know about themselves.
That does make sense, and also fits with how private property can't entirely be viewed in isolation if it has negative externalities. I.e. You should be able to pollute the air immediately above your land as much as you want because that doesn't just stay on your land.
> I'd like if FB were at least as searchable to its users as to advertisers, for example; arguably FB knows more about many of its users than they know about themselves.
That might help in some small amount (and as long as people people actually reviewed info and requested removal, and that had to be honored, it would help), but I'm not sure the companies in question wouldn't just turn their neuroscience divisions to the task of making people want to allow the data for some reason.
To me this feels more like a drunk driving type situation, or age of consent, or ability to sign away your rights. We believe some things should be disallowed because the combined cost to society pf allowing it is much greater than the sum of the individual costs for disallowing it added up. But even if that can be sold as a good idea for this, I'm not sure what specific things we would do to block it that aren't nebulous and can be gamed. Maybe disallowing advertising, but that seems to be targeting one industry, and I suspect something else with a similar negative and the same incentives might take its place for this area.
The irony is that such regulations would ultimately benefit the companies that are currently being criticized, making long term survival more likely. Regular people would be better of too, and I would not need to discuss movies like The Social Dilemma on HN.
What kind of regulations would you impose? Any specifics?
I would purpose that Google in particular be broken into many different companies. The fact that they own such a large part of mobile, browser, search, video, email, news aggregation, online office products is hugely problematic. I believe one of the issues that was not highlighted is the overall reach of these companies, they focus in on the mobile aspect, but there are huge swathes of data being collected via other means. Search in particular should not have a bias in the autocomplete - search should be agnostic, like Wikipedia. When I search it should show the same results as when you search. Next there should be a requirement that these companies provide access to a users data back to them, along with the analytical output that creates their digital avatar. There should be the ability to FULLY delete the data per a request. Next there should be a requirement that the sites provide ability to utilize their services with browser anonymity enabled. Much of the data leakage is harvested automatically from the mobile device or browser, the ability to slow the trickle of information should be required by law. Perhaps a requirement that a price that an advertiser paid for each ad should show up, and an opportunity for the user to opt-out and pay for the service instead at the same rates in truly anonymized fashion. More extreme options - restrictions on access based on age, we do this for cigarettes and alcohol, perhaps this should be applied to social media as well. Perhaps there should be a throttle on data gathering or hard limits placed on how much data can be pulled in and kept. Require maximum data retention periods on this data to make the models dumber. We have data retention periods set for health data - why not restrict it for social media.
Never mind that you will have been exposed to tens of thousands of hours of literal behaviour modification programming. You should somehow magically still have the personal, emotional, and cultural resources to override it. And if you don't - it's your fault.
But curiously it's not the fault of the corporations, because there is no equivalent requirement on them to control themselves, or to take corporate-personal responsibility for the consequences of their actions.
Cigarettes might be a more apt analogy IMHO. It's extraordinarily hard to quit, but at least we've come to a point where there is enormous social pressure to do so. And not just for health reasons: it's widely considered an unattractive habit.
Contrast that with the 50's where it was not only accepted by society but considered "glamorous". That's (sort of) where social media is today. Its image needs to go from fun and youthful to gross and harmful in the popular perception (barring that, the entire model needs to be re-invented).
Educating people on the long-term harms is the primary (perhaps only?) way forward at this point. This movie does that very well but it will be a long slog.
I'm not even sure this war can be won, but we must try.
Of course, different people deal with these kinds of issues differently, but it's also important to recognize the vast differences between consuming too much alcohol vs consuming too much tv. Firstly, if you've spent any significant amount of time around a recovering alcoholic and discussed the issue openly with them, you realize pretty quickly that it's usually not just a raw craving. A lot of alcoholics drink in response to trauma of various kinds, and your backstory as an alcoholic plays a fairly significant role in how to seek the best recovery strategy. There isn't a one-size-fits-all solution there.
TV is much different for several reasons. First, there's not a universal societal acknowledgement that TV is addictive like alcohol. The US went through prohibition because alcoholism was rampant in society, TV hasn't disrupted society in the same way. That's not to say that TV isn't addictive or capable of being abused, it's simply that TV is much more passive in terms of how it's consumed, and it's higher order effects on people who consume too much. This is also true of social media.
Social media and TV don't usually force people between feeding their families or consuming endlessly the way that alcohol did in the 19th century, but it does encourage us to spend more time on autopilot and less time consciously thinking and being present.
I highly recommend David Foster Wallace's talks on entertainment addiction[0]. He predicted the genesis of a lot of these issues 20 years ago, and his commentary is still so relevant today, years after his death.
That's a distinct question from "How would you try to reduce the prevalence of alcoholism in your country?".
When considering a particular individual, yes you need to get them medical and therapeutic help, some kind of life coaching/counseling program etc.
When considering the whole population, you do need to think about regulation of selling, advertising, public health campaigns for prevention etc.
Similar with sugary junk food. You can tax it at higher levels, ban advertising to children etc. Be strict on forbidding misleading claims. Perhaps pub highly visible "high sugar content" warnings on the product etc.
Yes, all this stuff is very un-American and too "socialist" I guess, which leaves you with the other option of being the most obese developed nation and having a substantial proportion of people be obese at a level of it becoming a legit disability. Which is fine for most people I guess, because it's not themselves, so who cares about other people anyway.
I definitely understand your argument of "leave it to the parents" but why add to their ever growing pile of worries? What if they don't know any better b/c of technical illiteracy? This issue of an unregulated media line has been seen and dealt with before yet we're hesitant in doing anything about it.
Fuck the parents - they should be adults and taking responsibility for their life's direction if they have kids.
While "unregulated media" may have become leading edge in LGBT presentation in the years since, it's also become leading edge in reactionary backlash, from Fox to internet media to the right-wing propaganda pushed by Sinclair Broadcasting to their local TV stations -- which in many markets they wouldn't have been able to own if local TV markets were still more tightly regulated.
I'm not suggesting regulation is a failsafe panacea by any stretch -- I'm just suggesting that deregulation isn't, either. There is probably a balance to be struck, and it is not at all clear to me that the balance we have now is correct.
On the other end of the contact Internet contact is a later one and although nothing concrete it seems very non-coincidental that generations where straight people could watch gay or lesbian porn, and fanfics being ubiquitous enough that Draco and Harry ships were well known even among people who never read a single one due to lack of interestm
The "balance" is a golden mean fallacy. Best illustrated by a rhetorical question that sounds like a death threat: Is there a balance to be struck between you being alive and unharmed and stone dead?
So, to answer that last rhetorical question with the way I'm intending "balance" to be used: I'm not at all opposed to regulations in food safety, wiring standards, water treatment, etc., that shift the balance of likely outcomes for me toward "alive and unharmed" and away from "stone dead." :)
Additionally, we also know that it is possible to make something addictive by spacing out dopamine hits in such a way that can be designed to cause a person to pursue this over other necessary duties. Pairing this with people who are more vulnerable to addiction through no factors they could've possibly controlled essentially takes advantage of people.
That being said, I believe that social responsibility also has to play a role. If companies were simply interested in making a product appealing, they would look at how well it is received. When companies start employing psychology, there is a strong possibility that they are doing so to override people's judgment (thus their ability to take personal responsibility).
Totally agree. Movies like these or like "That Sugar Film" are extremely important.
> That being said, I believe that social responsibility also has to play a role. If companies were simply interested in making a product appealing, they would look at how well it is received. When companies start employing psychology, there is a strong possibility that they are doing so to override people's judgment (thus their ability to take personal responsibility).
They are going to inevitably do that, and that's what we should expect them to do. I don't think there are any solutions to that except building some new services / protocols.
The trouble is interoperability. Creating open social media platforms has been tried before, yet the uptake seems to be those with strong ideological views. You would pretty much have to compel new and existing social media networks to support the services/protocols in order to give people a viable option. I'm not sure that many people are ready for that type of legislation, and I'm not even sure it is a good thing. At least existing social media services have some incentive, may that be the company's reputation or the value of the data itself, to offer some degree of privacy protection.
We do have regulatory protections around food. We don't think it's pragmatic for everyone to run their own home lab to determine if there's poison in their food. It may also not be pragmatic to expect everyone to check sources or even be able to locate the truth of a source (I sure can't most of the time!).
People who mal-consume social media contribute to cancel culture, spreading lies and propaganda, and providing the fuel for negative power-seeking behavior in political and business realms. These have very real consequences for those innocent parties that don't mal-consume social media.
Aligning with your libertarian pattern, you can say "Well it's up to the people who can control themselves to defend themselves from the people who can't", and then that's precisely why we would introduce laws/regulations limiting things.
Same goes with fast food, TV shows etc. It's your responsibility to not over-consume anything; and if you have children, teach them to not do that as well. The problem is not with FB, Google etc. The problem (which is over-consumption of everything) is cultural. Blaming some specific corporations is easy but it won't lead to any positive solutions. We desperately need stoicism in the west.