Hacker News Reader

Comment by al2o3cr | Hacker News Reader

An alternate take from the earlier time:

    Now it’s eighth grade and Mark has become addicted to
    making smaller kids afraid.  Sure, he needs a lot more
    ‘victims’ to get the same feeling, but that’s okay.

    Now it’s eighth grade and Mark has become addicted to
    alcohol.  Sure, he needs a lot more
    ‘drinks’ to get the same feeling, but that’s okay.

Pretending that "the old days" weren't full of kids doing whatever it took to hit the dopamine joy-buzzer is stupid.

    Smartphones and social media have transformed students into
    creatures craving one thing: content.

The author's phone must be a truly remarkable device, what with being able to mind-control people all on its own. Here in the real world, people have transformed THEMSELVES into those creatures...

    Childhood is fleeting. It shouldn’t be spent staring at a screen.

It shouldn't be spent warehoused in a school either, but here we are.

View on HN

No one is talking about the phone as a physical device. The "phone" is the multibillion-dollar industry dedicated to indiscriminately making every human spend every possible second of their day 'engaging' with media out of a simple paperclip-maximizing business imperative.

This industry doesn't need to make users happy anymore than the tobacco industry makes its own customers happy - as long as the dopamine is within arm's reach they've got most people hooked so much more than tobacco ever could. But unlike cigarettes, no one can cut open a slice of your social media lungs and show you that your mind is covered in tar. And since no one dies directly of exposure, we're left trying to convey how life could have been better without the second-order effects of using the product. If your lungs don't function with all that tar, you avoid physical activity because 'you don't like exercise' (when you can't breathe anymore). And if your brain has been trained to seek fulfillment from your phone that's because 'you like using your phone more than doing other things' (when you can't think of anything else you like to do anymore).

It's not really same at all though and I think the article does a good job of illustrating how social media can coerce a normal kid into doing something that normally a bully would do without ever actually feeling like he did something wrong.

There is no "bully" moment, there's no confrontation of your perpetrator, it simply feels that everyone is against you. The enemy isn't a single person making you feel bad. It's everyone.

I know I didn't face the threat of that kind of stress at school. Embarrassing moments were allowed to pass in a few days and did become enshrined documentation attached to your identity.

> Pretending that "the old days" weren't full of kids doing whatever it took to hit the dopamine joy-buzzer is stupid.

They were, but now we have a device which can massively amplify shame. Worse, evidence of bad, stupid, or shameful behavior is archived forever for later judgement by people in your professional and personal life. This is not mentioned by the article but it should have been. People do dumb and embarrassing things when they are young (childhood up through college), and they used to have the ability to leave their past behind them when they became adults. Now that privilege has been taken away from them and they have to police their behavior and speech or some asshole might post it without their consent on Instagram. I am so glad camera phones were garbage when I was a kid and that social media was in its infancy when I was in college.

Sigh. Please don't use indented text to quote. It's unreadable on mobile.

HN please fix this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com