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Comment by Liquix | Hacker News Reader

Excellently written. A nitpick on your final point:

> Phones are an extension of our organ senses now. How will a world in which Things Come to Us and We Dont Go to Things anymore affect us cognitively long-term?

This may be looking at it backwards. Rampant smartphone addiction and overuse begins to shape all things in a "medium is the message" type of effect. The less need there is to physically "Go to the Thing" - whether the thing is the television room, office, movie theater, mailbox, rental store, newsstand, grocer, etc - the more natural it becomes to sit in place and let Things Come to You. If we accept everyone using their phone all the time as "the way things are now", the vicious cycle will continue.

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So you're saying we're allowing ourselves to be victimized by it via laziness ?

That's certainly true, if that is what you mean.

I guess the part I didn't speak about was: some people value independent thought more than others, and I think for those that do, the Things Come to You paradigm is even more frustrating.

My concern is that children are growing up in the Come to You dynamic. Flip side: they can generate content and release it in the wild, something that couldn't be done even in the 90's prior to IG, TikTok, YouTube, etc.

Maps. We had FPS maps.

Laziness is poor framing. Can the masses be "lazy" or is it pointless moralizing in the face of unfettered propaganda and behaviour manipulation?

That's a pretty interesting question, the tough as nails salesman closing deals everyday would consider nearly the entire population is lazy as all heck, whereas the hermit fisherman would consider the opposite, that nearly all are needlessly agitated.

Placing the bar at the 50th percentile isn't very inspiring for the passing reader though.

Is this not the nature of all social problems?

If you have X problem, that is your problem.

If Y% of population has X problem, as X grows large enough, eventually everybody is affected by the side effects of said problem.

Yes but roughly half the population will always be below average in terms of laziness, assuming it's normally distributed. So saying that is just a tautology.

>they can generate content and release it in the wild, something that couldn't be done even in the 90's prior to IG, TikTok, YouTube, etc.

In the mid-90s I was creating content and releasing it to the wild on my own website that was hosted for free on one of the myriad free website hosting platforms back then. Frankly, the website sucked, but it was my content.

I've watched Nirvana perform on local public access TV (ironically on Youtube) in 1989, so some level of public distribution was possible.

Similarly 50 Cent sold mixtapes of his music out of his car trunk to get the word out in the pre-Soundcloud era.

In the mid-00s, Kevin Hart (comedian) would maintain his own email lists when he toured, and would send out email blasts when he returned to those towns College bands used to do this as well, especially as email was adopted earlier there.

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