It doesn’t take a long hard look at ourselves to acknowledge that we are quite vulnerable to manipulation or addiction.
Those vulnerabilities are not going anywhere.
I suggest that there is no value in somehow blaming ourselves for them and that what we need to do is make good decisions about how we shape our world to support humans as we are rather than to maximize exploitation of our weaknesses.
It’s quite straightforward to acknowledge that things like holy wars based on ideology have been with us for a long time.
It’s a straw man to suggest that anyone is saying “let’s abolish the tech giants and everything will be great”.
You say: “I believe that our unwillingness to face the deeper problem will prevent it from being solved.”
Can you articulate what this deeper problem actually is?
I'm not sure what I said is a straw man. I was being a little flip, but I think it's a normal human impulse to blame "that thing" or "those people" and to feel that a problem can be fixed by just eliminating whatever that is. Maybe nobody is explicitly saying "if we eliminate Facebook the problem will go away," but I do think some people implicitly feel that way.
The deeper problem, in my view, is that network technologies encourage our tendencies toward runaway group think and villainization due to their effect of disinhibition (making us react to something more quickly than we can rationally think about it).
What I’m not sure about is how we are not being honest about the problem?
I agree with this: “network technologies encourage our tendencies toward runaway group think and villainization due to their effect of disinhibition (making us react to something more quickly than we can rationally think about it)”
Except that it seems over-general. I think this is feature of some social network designs, but I don’t see how we can say it applies to all ‘network technogies’.
To me that just leads back to there being a problem with how Facebook is designed.
It is designed to maximize engagement so they can sell ads - I.e. they profit from this disinhibition.
I think we largely agree on what’s happening, but what I don’t yet understand is how you conclude that Facebook is a scapegoat.
Honestly that doesn’t really clarify it for me.
If the broader problem is:
“network technologies encourage our tendencies toward runaway group think and villainization due to their effect of disinhibition”
Then Facebook is by far the most significant manifestation of that, followed by YouTube and Twitter who are also criticized a great deal.
What would it look like to address this broader problem without actually focussing on where it is manifest?
I think I might be able to see more easily what you are getting at if you could give an example of something you see as beyond Facebook’s control, but for which they are catching flak?
It seems like most of the stuff they do has been provided by competitors at one time or another, or could be done better outside of the constraints of facebook’s ‘engagement’ model.
Perhaps some of the things Facebook does can be done better by other companies.
They don’t need to ‘beat’ Facebook as a whole, and if the engineers motivations are the features they work on, perhaps they can get more satisfaction elsewhere.
But when you say we should start using alternative tools in parallel to FB so that we contribute to grow these networks and reduce our dependence, then it's suddenly a huge cumbersome task.
Let's admit that the vast majority of users is actually ok with what FB does with their data. Showing concerns about privacy without actually doing anything is a cheap way of looking good.