Technology Is Heroin | Hacker News Reader

Technology Is Heroin

tiny-giant-books.com

54 pointssigna1118 comments

This is just another generic, pretentious piece warning of the dangers of technology (is this about video games? the internet? who cares, it's all technology) that gets even the basic facts wrong.

Some highlights:

- Physical book sales are up (https://qz.com/1510303/book-sales/), not down, as the author claims.

-"World of Warcraft beats Wikipedia hands down." -- what does this even mean? Wikipedia get billions of page views and has hundreds of millions of unique users every month, while WoW subscribers have been hovering around 10 million for the past few years.

-"Now that sight and sound are covered, new internet appliances promise to offer touch, smell." What website promises to have a smell-o-vision feature?

Overall, lots of fear mongering and little facts, with a click-bait title.

To be fair, physical book sales were down in 2009, when this was written.

Though I wonder how relevant such a statistic is in the context of this discussion. Is there really a difference between me reading some long-form piece online (like this one) - in terms of, for example, the concentration requirement (which this piece seems to care deeply about) - and reading it in a newspaper (other than probably fewer typos)? The same could be said for reading a novel I found on https://www.gutenberg.org compared to reading the equivalent physical book. Except that reading it online is free, and at least equally (possibly more) accessible.

There's something to be said about reading focus, with Twitter and online articles giving us content faster than ever, and finding time and energy to read takes more effort, but why do we have to discuss it through the lens a horribly outdated article with no clear thesis?

I understand that. My point is given equivalent pieces of writing (say the https://www.gutenberg.org version of "Pride and Prejudice" compared to a physical version) what is the difference in terms of value (in this case, using the author's value-system)? And, if there is a difference, are they worth the numerous advantages of the online version, such as its cost and its accessibility? "Technology" has not just given us Twitter, and to reduce "technology" to Twitter or World of Warcraft is naive at best (which, I agree, is one of the primary failings of this piece).

I believe that the premise is that when you use a multifunction device it is too easy for people to get distracted from the task at hand. But in that case, something like a Kindle would still fit the bill perfectly, as it is a single purpose device. Well, it can access thousands of other books, so I guess you could get distracted by constantly going to something else, but you have the same issue reading at the library.

Author here. Previous two discussions on HN:

2009 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=471353

2013 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6349447

It's interesting to look at the pushback from my fellow HN'ers when this first came out. I'm quite interested to know if many of them still feel that way.

The essay does not have any answers. The thesis is that the main problem is that most people don't understand that there is a problem or why it exists. That may have changed over the last ten years.

Back then I was quite concerned that I didn't have any good recommendations. The best I had was some version of "We need to develop a new set of personal values before they're programmed into us."

I still feel this way. As software continues to eat everything, I feel that the programming community is going to drug into morals, ethics, law, and philosophy whether we want to go there or not. We're at the heart of most everything now.

> In 2019 multiple studies are showing that prolonged screen time has a damaging -- and perhaps permanent -- effect on developing brains

Hi! I'd like to read those studies. Where should I look?

First time reader. The definition of technology seems very narrow --- almost exclusive to the entertainment. I don't think e.g. an optimized GEMM on GPUs or SQL query would be covered in this article.

That's a great point. You're absolutely right.

For context, initially HackerNews was a site for startups, so the topics were generally along the lines of "using tech to make something people want" (People will debate what the site was about. I came here for startup stuff 2-4 months after it started. Ask PG)

Later on it switched to the more generic "Things hackers are interested in" (Once again, I'm generalizing)

So at the time, we were all swimming around in the question "How do we build things that people use a lot?" After a few years of that, I started wondering what would happen if we got what we wanted -- people using our stuff a lot without, perhaps, being able to look back years later and feel like they had spent their time wisely.

I think the comparison to heroin is unhelpful for a start. People who are inclined to dismiss your concerns are given ammunition from the title alone, because it is after all, wildly hyperbolic. Then the first half of your piece is equal parts ahistoric and overly dramatic. Trying to associate social media with heroin and cocaine is a bad idea, it’s easily dismissed. While social media can be addictive, it’s nothing compared to either drug mentioned. People are not dropping out of life and into homelessness, crime, and an early grave because of FaceBook.

Facebook is a good thing to avoid, it monetizes you, abuses you, and wastes your time. It’s still nothing like heroin or cocaine. Facebook and social media are unpleasant and lead to some really bizarre behavior, but I’m yet to hear of people losing their families and lives over it on anything like the regularity you’d expect from a peer of hard drugs. Social media, imo, tends to lead to a more homogenous and boring type of interaction, but again if that’s all you got from heroin it wouldn’t be the problem it is.

Beyond that you lionize a time you clearly don’t know much about. Music went from being something where you actively paid close attention to a complex piece of art to just another sound in your environment. Music is all around us now – though we take it completely for granted.

This may shock you, but there was never this time period of attentive bliss you describe. There was a lot of shitty music, ubiquitous and talentless buskers and amateurs, and the equivalent of pop music. Of course very little of that survives today, because we’ve selected for the most virtuoso, most entertaining and most memorable pieces of music from the past. Many people also really appreciate music today, and you simply gloss over them as if they didn’t exist. Reading your piece reminds me of people who think that disposable crap is a new invention, instead of realizing the survivorship bias inherent in that perspective. The disposable crap was disposed of while the bulletproof appliances and such, remain. That doesn’t mean that cheap blenders or clothing was just invented however, far from it.

Instead of pearl clutching about a past that never existed as a motivation to discover a conscience, there are more pressing issues with tech. The immense amount of trash production and wasted energy is a problem, along with planned obsolescence. Something like Bitcoin which exists to enrich a few at the expense of burning energy wastefully is a problem. Treating people like guinea pigs for fun and profit, marketing gambling for children, hoovering up every iota of personal information and then storing it until it inevitably leaks is a problem. The transition of manned to unmanned combat is a huge problem.

There are so many real, pressing concerns that require programmers to grow a conscience and some empathy, that histrionics about a lost past that never was feels like a self-serving distraction.

You put a lot of effort into this. Thank you. I think it's a great slam: it's got the right tone, covers things in a fairly linear format, leads to a nice conclusion.

As you can imagine, I think it's totally whack, but you tried. And it holds together.

I'm not going to defend a ten-year-old essay here. I love the way it holds up and I'm happy with my editorial choices. If you'd like to talk over email, if this subject truly bothers you this much, hit me up. I like seeing this much passion in a rebuttal.

Any other readers interested in talking about whether this piece is well-grounded in history or not, please give me a chance to provide sources. A comment thread on your own article is just much-too-confrontational of a place to get into that, as it would confuse the historical part of the essay with its thesis and conclusion. It's quite possible to agree with the historical stuff and disagree with the thesis -- and vice-versa.

Thanks for taking the time. (Pearl-clutching, eh? Nicely done!)

Some interesting thinking hints, but I believe, as others have pointed out, that the title and the comparison are quite forced and small talk, with a uncientific approach. Heroin and technology are different fields with different benefits and problems. If you take heroin as a metaphor you can apply it to about everything.

Might not be heroin but who can argue addictive technology is bad for the business that brings it to market. In another lens I see now what it takes to make profitable technology for entertainment at least.

I'm working on an article about neurodiversity and why I think the forces of capitalism, technology, and complex cascading social dynamics are increasing its dispersion. I.e., breadth is going up (extremes getting more extreme) and variance (less of the population is close to the mean).

That "Technology is Heroin" might be true at the immediate level, but the real question is what are the secondary effects. Evolution doesn't require fitness in a physical sense, but in an algorithmic (survival and reproduction) sense, which technology enables if you have the money to pay for it.

If anyone else is looking into this, please reach out.

I am working on something similar using a Marxist analysis. I'm very critical of the "chemical imbalance" model for analyzing mental health issues. Much of how we define neurodiversity is related to someone's ability to work, and is culturally specific. Culture also heavily influences how a neurodivergent person experiences their symptoms (https://news.stanford.edu/2014/07/16/voices-culture-luhrmann...).

There's definitely a lot of different factors in play that are caused by capitalism - social norms, individualism/isolation, trauma/stress, additional distractions from technology, etc. I'll shoot you an email, but just in case I forget mine is fatimaraj@protonmail.com.

Very poorly written.

What an ignorant article, technology addiction is nothing like heroin or other drug addiction and does a disservice to those who are actually addicted to substances.

When was the last time someone died because of technology withdrawals? Please get a sense of perspective before posting such uninformed drivel.

You're absolutely right. This recent trend of calling everything addictive and normalizing this misuse is not only stupid but also dangerous to society at large. Addiction is a serious thing with a well defined meaning. By applying it to things that are just rewarding, as opposed to things that hijack the reward system via direct manipulation to skew responses to predicted reward, it creates a perception of danger.

This perception of danger then allows for the conversation about real issues that need solutions (usually education) to bottom out and begin calls for the use of government violence to prevent people from doing what they want. Encouraging the use of force against people who haven't done any violence or fraud themselves is a very bad thing.

The circumstances have to justify it. Misuse of the word addiction helps that false justification.

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