att-throw

What do you mean by "what is happening"? I definitely agree that there's a type of person or group of people further from having attention sold to advertisers, but I don't know what they would be like.

I had a similar thought listening to the radio yesterday: there are some lyrics and themes on public airwaves (like lauding adultery, cooking crack cocaine, etc.) that would have at least generated a little outrage even 15 years ago. But my guess is that many of the people who normally would have gotten on Parents Television Council and written angry letters to the FTC have now just stopped consuming mainstream media broadcasting altogether.

Anything with a non-transparent recommender system (including most digital stores) is still vulnerable to tracking, attention harvesting and paid placements, even if you aren't seeing straight up soap ads. For example, how do you know that the TV producer isn't paying Vudu or whoever to put shows on your front page because you watched show X?

There were claims last year that "leisure demand" has increased: https://www.nber.org/papers/w23552 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/03/upshot/why-some-men-dont-... I can't speak to the study's method, though.

At first read, this article says something like: non-top-tier men lack access to social belonging, partly because social media creates a status signaling arms race unattainable by many, therefore they play video games instead of working to achieve status, therefore we should tax their video games.

This seemed like dealing with the effects rather than the causes of the problem. But if you include social media like Instagram in the tax, and not just Xbox FPSes, you could disincentivize the status broadcasting that, according to the authors, leads the men to say "f it" and stop working in the first place.

I think you would have to tax a lot more than is obvious to discourage use of digital media -- like at least $3 or $4 an hour. Taxing status signaling is harder; you'd probably have to factor in the number of followers. I would welcome the chance to read more books, but this thought experiment is never going to happen.