We're moving to a post-entertainment society
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I noticed myself doing this years ago and when I really reflected on it, I felt very unsettled by what was happening to me.
And meanwhile most of us have people (partner, kids, friends) you'll have (hopefully) a lifetime with, and pursuing some kind of deeper connection with them instead in those moments actually would result in some kind of meaningful reward. Yet you keep on scrolling and seeking out another kind of reward which invariably never really comes. Disturbing stuff when you break it down. But most of us kind of shrug it off. No big deal.
Host something more interactive like board games, or have a faraday cage ready at the entrance for the phones and everyone has agreed to put them in there, or both! We’re all addicted and suffocated by our devices so we have to start carving out air pockets somewhere.
I don't warn people as they enter, but if they start using it in the home I'll say something like "hey, I didn't mention it but we keep our phones in this space by our entrance. Do you mind keeping it over there/not using it/whatever while you're here?". Depending on who it is and the context, I'll add that it's for the kids and/or to keep a certain ambiance or ethos for what's going on (like watching a movie together).
It probably sounds extreme. It keeps people from doing what you're describing though. Most people like it, too. Younger people (teenage friends of our kids) tend to find it extremely invasive and unwelcome, which is a bit funny because they don't recognize their insistence to bring things into our home as converse to what we're doing, yet within a space where we should be able to decide. That's fine, though. It's okay not to agree with people. Especially teenagers(1), haha.
You might find some rules or guidance around device use in your home helpful, anyway. Just tell people you don't do that at your place. Keep that stuff at the door, let your home have some sacredness or inviolability (so to speak).
1. I don't mean this is a "teenagers are dumb" thing at all. Where I am they tend to live in settings where they make the decisions about their devices and their usage, and these are both very personal parts of their daily operations and personal property which they strongly dislike being parted with. There are usually both good and bad reasons behind this. But yeah, a lot of kids talk to our kids like we're militant despots trying to oppress a normal way of life, haha. There is a lot of sneaking contraband into our place. I totally get it.
Someone could flatly refuse (some kids have), and I don't kick them out or anything. I don't appreciate it, but I'm not going to militantly enforce the rule. I just make my preferences known and try to explain them so it doesn't seem arbitrary.
edit: I should add that if someone needs to be in touch with their kids or something, I really don't mind. I'll keep my phone on hand if I'm expecting an important call or I know my kids are out and might try to get in touch for a ride home or something. In those cases though, not using the phone for other reasons is still a known preference. That's good enough for me.
> It probably sounds extreme. It keeps people from doing what you're describing though.
Sounds like you are.
Do you tell them not to break furniture, or swear in-front of children, or leave trash out?
This is the person's home. I also have no issues with setting limits on guests.
It means that my home is a safe place and everyone within it knows how to act. It also means everyone is welcome as long as they abide by the rules; no matter what their background is.
or to put another way; guests are not above the house.
Alcohol and other drugs were at least fairly nonspecific and generic; very few people could afford tailoring their drug experiences, but the engagement platforms will helpfully find the individually most addictive stimulus and then helpfully switch to a new category as tolerance builds.
The good news is that the robots can't manufacture things yet and so the economy can't literally produce the Wall-E universe yet. Give it 5 or 10 years maybe.
Unless it's particularly evocative, I don't see what's arousing about text formatting otherwise.
I am very sympathetic to these points, but it's also slightly amusing to me that a decade and a half post-Web 2.0, they aren't simply agreed-upon points and common knowledge for everyone.
>How can pursuing pleasure lead to less pleasure? But that’s how our brains are wired (perhaps as a protective mechanism). At a certain point, addicts still pursue the stimulus, but more to avoid the pain of dopamine deprivation. People addicted to painkillers have the same experience. Beyond a certain level, opioid dependence actually makes the pain worse.
This is simply incorrect when it comes to opioids. With opioids, at some point tolerance hits a limit and the chronic pain patient (or heroin user) can keep taking opioids and continue to have a desired effect. For some people it is crucial for them to keep taking it and it really enhances their life by reducing pain. Anti-opioid propaganda has really gone too far.
Somewhat problematic for what the author is trying to argue.
One thing I think was missing is a note about evolution's role.
I think many of these traits are evolutionary; they trigger dopamine responses because at some point they were helpful. Sugary foods have calories so you don't starve. Boredom is painful so people invent.
Modern society is frankly too good at satisfying these evolutionary cravings. They've become maladaptive by nature of being artificially satiated. Boredom no longer leads to invention, it leads to addiction. Sugary foods no longer help you survive the winter, they give you diabetes.
Our social evolution has dramatically outpaced our geneologic evolution. Our social evolution is so far along that we can not only manipulate ourselves using our prior geneologic evolution, but also treat maladaptive traits well enough to prevent evolving out of those signals.
Eating too much sugary food gives people diabetes, but modern medicine allows people to survive that and procreate. Social media makes people depressed and anxious, but we have meds to help and online dating to find a partner.
That feedback loop where maladaptive traits are gradually phased out is gone. Society is now the cause of and solution to most of life's problems (insert Homer Simpson "beer is the cause of and solution to life's problems" meme here).
The solutions here kind of suck. One is to let evolution run its course, but that's frankly a thin veil over eugenics and society will just pivot and make some other trait maladaptive. The other is regulation, which is likely to be politically unpopular. The last is the global warming approach where we largely ignore it until nature takes control away from us. That appears to be what we're doing; we hope the issues don't become society-threatening and wait.
It’s not. It’s a theory. The core tenet of evolution is that organisms adapt to their environment.
All organisms are capable of modifying their environment such that they improve their odds of survival. Birds build nests. Beavers build dams. Trees drop seeds in clever ways.
Humans do an upgraded version of all those things.
Technology (in the broadest sense of the term) is really about tweaking the environment to increase our odds of survival. Sometimes, these experiments backfire. It happens to all species. It just happens to be globally-disruptive in the case of humans.
Frankly, all this talk about how “social evolution has hijacked the dopaminergic pathways of the brain” sounds like the ramblings of someone who recently read a pop-science book about the brain.
The book "dopamine nation" is myth-making enterprise, for example, see https://sluggish.substack.com/p/the-myth-making-of-dopamine-...
Moreover, there are many things that counter such arguments. Tik-tok length grows, and some are 10 minutes. There is a lot of edutainment content on tiktok. About physics, astronomy, history etc.
And overall it is pretty weird author making such arguments on the long-read platform that is rapidly growing in popularity.
But I think the bigger issue is that these platforms actually incentivize creators to conform to their formats. Look at the weird little "genres" that have popped out of TikTok / YouTube Shorts / Instagram, like short videos of some (usually stupid) "tool hack". These kinds of things do numbers because they're exactly what the article describes - a 15 second rush of "interesting."
His point about the Sony/Jackson song catalogue deal is a perfect example. He deliberately conflates several different things.
1. Buying an existing catalogue which generates predictable revenue is very different to taking a risky bet on an unknown artist. Music rights are traded like an asset class these days, and there are simple revenue multiples plus some other factors used to determine value. $1.2 billion for one of the most successful collections of songs in history is a good deal.
2. Investing in songs is not the same as investing in an artist - or even investing in recordings. A song pays whenever it is used. If someone records a version of a song written by Michael Jackson then whoever owns the song gets paid quite separate to whoever gets paid for the recording. If Thriller is played on the radio pretty much anywhere in the world the owner of the song gets paid. The owner of the recording only sometimes gets paid.
3. He says “no label would spend a fraction” of $1.2 billion “launching new artists”. And yet in 2022 Warner Music Group spent almost exactly that amount on A&R costs developing and launching new artists. In the same year UMG spent nearly $4 billion.
“Music may be in the worse state of them all. Just consider Sony’s huge move a few days ago—investing in Michael Jackson’s song catalog at a valuation of $1.2 billion. No label would invest even a fraction of that amount in launching new artists.”
The first example is "Playing sports" to "Watching sports" to "Gambling on Sports". All three of these activities have been around for millennia. Same with the "Courtship / Sexual Freedom / Swiping on a Dating App". Courtship was essentially a mechanism that functions not unlike a modern dating app. I was following until he made these claims.