Comment by josephg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by josephg | Hacker News Reader

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I don't think thats it. Its not the part where we interact with digital devices that is the problem, exactly. Maybe its the part where we stop interacting with other people as people as well.

I watched a wild video[1] the other day which really gave me a new perspective on the Apple Vision Pro. Casey Neistat walks around NYC with an apple vision strapped on his head and chats with people in the street. I was arrested by it - part of the reason is how he "effortlessly" interacts with a bunch of strangers in the video. He exists in the city, even with the headset on. Despite how nobody can actually see his face. I'd find that pretty scary to do!

I suspect part of the problem might be that devices give as an emotional excuse to avoid real human to human interactions. They enable us to turtle away. Talking to people online feels like the real thing, but better because its less scary. We don't have to be quite as vulnerable when we do it. And maybe thats the problem with this stuff - the more we enable "social junk food" we use it as a substitute for real, scary, intimate human interactions. The technology isn't the problem per se. The problem is how we choose to hide behind it.

[1] https://youtu.be/UvkgmyfMPks . Definitely worth a watch.

It's not even starting or stopping interacting with people. Its being fed what we want and what we are comfortable with. The algorithmic firehose freezes us into a comfortable, unchanging state. We don't update our beliefs because its easier to confirm them.

It's also a bit that compulsatory education ends at 18, and we switch to entercation. The top priority of the news is to captivate attention and entertain.

The black mirror about muting people and not seeing them anymore is the future. Living in one physical space occupied by multiple tribes, who merely see otherselves as apparitions.

Any time it is applicable, i have to post my favorite article on the internt https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/78691781-c9b7... Ironic that im stuck on it.

There's an interesting set of conflicting forces where people are tempted through selfish interests to be lazy interacting with humans and prefer to stay home connected while also craving intimate human interaction. I think this laziness is encouraging us to stay home while also causing all us to feel more isolated and lonely. Like you said, "social junk food", but it's also video games, TV, etc. We've invented more ways to avoid social interaction which causes a feedback-loop of sorts. We're becoming more anti-social but also more lonely.

Having nothing to do is a great driver to force people out of their holes and interacting with other humans. We've made it too easy to stay home

> There's an interesting set of conflicting forces where people are tempted through selfish interests to be lazy interacting with humans and prefer to stay home connected while also craving intimate human interaction.

Counterpoint: when genuine human interaction does start to happen online, there's often an incentive to monetize it. It's the monetization that turns it into junk food. Spam, clickbait, infinite algorithmic feeds - they're all symptoms of the need to make money. I wonder if a true public space will ever emerge online.

See also this post that makes roughly the same point: https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other...

I don't believe virtual interaction covers the same basic needs that physical interaction does but this is completely my own opinion. I'm sure everyone is different. That said, the nice thing about physical interaction is that you can always find free spaces to join. Makes me wonder if the state should create an online equivalent of a public park.

Online spaces cost a lot of money and manpower to run. Half the people on this site could put one up in a day, but who would pay to scale it if it wasn't monetized? And as soon as it is, you have an opaque corporate hierarchy directly MITMiddling discourse.

Wikipedia and Archive.org provide clues to other ways this could be addressed, through nonprofit donations, but then you have a somewhat opaque and unelected priesthood moderating things.

HN gets around it by basically being niche enough to rely on one overworked person to moderate. Scaling up the HN model would mean many individual small sites acting independently as a patchwork of public commons.

And all the other workarounds to this problem - and I agree it's a huge social problem and a drain on society - turn out to involve some technical hack to tie patchworks together, like Mastodon.

One thing that hasn't really been tried (by a democracy), at least that I know of, is a social network for citizens run by elected committees. And this may be the worst idea of all, since it would become a natural competitor for power with all other branches of government, and would run the risk of directly corrupting national politics in any number of ways...

Basically all this is to say that running any kind of mediation at scale between random members of society is dangerous, and not just because of the profit motive, but more basically because power corrupts.

Casey Neistat is used to interacting with people while wearing Ray bans. People are used to not seeing his eyes.

I would never walk down the street wearing a headset as I would EXPECT to be punched in the face.

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