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Comment by rafale | Hacker News Reader

The way I read it is that each generation is pushing the limit of freedoms. Sounds good if we stop right there...

But is it? When does it become bad? Should a parent be accepting that their daughter opens an OF when she turns 18? Should society be accepting of it as a side "gig economy" kind of job? How about the boys who are usually on the consumers/payers end?

We are monetizing intimacy and sex at a level like nothing before. Sure, it's always consenting adults exercising their constitutional rights and freedoms. But it feels wrong. Like the parent said, maybe I am just getting old.

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"We are monetizing intimacy and sex at a level like nothing before. Sure, it's always consenting adults exercising their constitutional rights and freedoms. But it feels wrong. Like the parent said, maybe I am just getting old."

Unpopular view in this day and age but maybe you're getting wise. Whatever the thing you're out of touch with, gig economy prostitution essentially, isn't worth being that in touch with. Maybe I'm just an old man too, but this sort of hyper-commodification of sex mixed with the nightmare that is social media just seems like a dystopic nightmare on so many levels. This sort of thing is not a good direction for society. The obvious emotional emptiness and moral bankruptcy that underlies this is stark.

For the sake of completeness: there isn't really a big necessity in pushing that limit, it's not that it earns us, the society, something, while its risks are unclear.

I remember someone being enthusiastic that "our young are exploring their sexuality". What will happen if they don't? Nothing. They will explore something else and be fine.

> The way I read it is that each generation is pushing the limit of freedoms. [..] But is it? When does it become bad?

Every generation since the history of time in this situation has asked this question themselves and has consistently answered wrong. Nothing good has ever come from a previous generation suppressing a later generation's right to self-determination.

> Like the parent said, maybe I am just getting old.

It really is just this. Our formative years are when we are young, and human nature is to simply reject what we're not used to.

But that’s really a gross view of human behavior. Commodification is what allows us to build functional societies, and I am glad we discovered it, but it is absolutely antithetical to the things which sit at the core of human experience.

Love, joy, excitement, mourning, creating art, singing and dancing… All of these are unconditional, intimate, and creative acts.

When they are turned into slot machines and side hustles they lose their humanity. There is nothing creative about the 50,000th “influencer” joining social media platforms to shill their low-grade reaction videos or porn or other entertainment cruft.

Most of the 60’s era liberation was a matter of being free to create in one’s chosen way, or with one’s desired people. Commodification, OTOH, is about extracting value from lonely people to enrich a vanishingly small minority of platform builders and “content creators”.

Commodification is an extremely alien form of “liberation” when compared with drug legalization or interracial marriage or what have you.

Yes, yes, the same old story. The exact same things has been said by the previous generations about books, comic strips, radio, television, computer games, etc...

Ok..? In the case of computer games, I don't think unfettered use is a good thing.

This isn't "juvenoia", I was born in and am living in this generation.

The vast universe of freely available junk and time wasters available now is a radical shift from even my early childhood, when there were distractions, but they were not purposely made addictive by teams of psychologists and programmers to increase the profits of huge corporate advertising behemoths (à la TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, etc.).

> The vast universe of freely available junk and time wasters available now is a radical shift from even my early childhood, when there were distractions, but they were not purposely made addictive by teams of psychologists and programmers to increase the profits of huge corporate advertising behemoths

If you were born in and living in this generation, for any living generation younger than maybe the Baby Boomers, that's only even potentially technically true because the teams optimizing stickiness of entertainment of all kinds including youth entertainment, didn't involve programmers (in the computing sense) until fairly recently. But they absolutely have for a long time included psychologists, and the have been serving the intereste of corporate behemoths including in the advertising field.

The point I'm making is that the scale of this is unprecedented. If you wanted to read comic books or watch TV or smoke cigarettes, there were effective physical limits. Yes, people ruined themselves with addictions then, too. But now, every person I know has a slot machine in their pocket they can pop out and get a dopamine hit by using. And it is never-ending.

You can binge watch or binge on social media or binge on anything, with unlimited supply. It's completely unprecedented.

I notice little compulsive ticks in myself now too — they're hard to escape. I have many friends I only contact through WhatsApp or Instagram. That pulls me into my phone and a nightmarish sea of influencer garbage every time I want to talk to someone. It sucks!

> and has consistently answered wrong

"Consistently" is too strong a word. We have ended up where we are today, but let's not pretend societies didn't explore a lot of dead ends along the way. Sometimes very destructive dead ends, with many dead.

Nor can we state that today is the "best of all possible worlds", and that we wouldn't have ended up somewhere better had the advice of elders been heeded more often.

This is a case of survivorship bias.

> Should society be accepting of it as a side "gig economy" kind of job?

No, because in a "good" society, people should be able to find work that they're happy/willing to do that pays well enough that they don't need a "side hustle" to survive.

> We are monetizing intimacy and sex at a level like nothing before.

No, we’re divorcing the monetization of feigned intimacy and sex from pretense into more honest exchange like nothing before, and (arguably) moving it more from a pre-capitalist patron-servant model to a capitalist market exchange model.

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