The problem came about after platforms with ad-based revenue decided to optimize for eyeballs glued to screens and discovered that serving up extreme and/or hateful content was an effective way to hold people's attention longer.
Advertising is a privacy and social health nightmare. It pressures people to do things we shouldn't be doing. It normalizes unhealthy behavior for profit. Among a ton of other issues.
Society has suffered immensely since advertising really took off in the 70s. Especially when the US started to allow advertising towards children. That's when US propaganda(and extreme capitalism) REALLY went into overdrive. Then with the advent of social media in your pocket it became constant to the point people hardly recognize how influencial/manipulative it is.
I block advertisements on all my devices. The difference is massive. I cannot overstate how different the online world is when you don't see advertisements.
"Until such time as smartphones and social media can be democratically governed or nationalized — liberated from the imperative to profit off our attention indefinitely — a ban may be the most realistic path to reclaiming our lives."
Pocket computers - which these devices are - are useful and handy devices, just make sure not to pollute them with advertising and social nonsense and keep away from those data-hungry megacorpps and similar startup wannabees.
If you don't need governance then of course it doesn't matter to you.
Running your own services is not easy. Most people cannot. You cannot seriously think only those who can run their own services should be online.
Who then should they trust?
But the problem is equally that right now your phone is controlled by a group of unelected people who absolutely will throw your mental health and well-being under the bus for a few extra clicks and data points.
I don't know how to solve this problem.
This must apply broadly. There must be no need for an app for health care, parking, schools, transit, tolls, package delivery, hotels, restaurants, retirement, banking, and other things which 10 years ago had perfectly reasonable and affordable non-app access.
This analog alternative must be reasonable. It can't be that non-app access is only available, for example, every fifth Monday of the month.
If you think the unelected people who control your phone are doing the wrong thing, then you must be able to boycott them and still live a regular life, perhaps with a few more in-person visits than you expected.
This right applies more broadly.
I read about a blind man in France who wanted to take the train. The local station no longer had ticket service, not even a machine. The app didn't support blind people. He got on the train and ended up having to pay a fee as he had no valid ticket.
A ticket machine, or the ability to pay onboard from staff when coming in from a station without a ticket machine, is a perfectly reasonable analog alternative.
I agree that smartphones are harming us. I also agree that capitalism has at best served out its purpose and needs to be replaced with another means of organizing society and distributing material and labor.
However, the Soviet Union banned blue jeans and rock and roll and a very resentful population thus smuggled these things and associated them with counter culture and revolutionary mindedness, basically the opposite of what a socialist would want - we're supposed to be freeing you from the company that wants to wage enslave you and reward you with a drip feed of treats you don't really need, not making you want the treats even more!
Banning doesn't seem to work. I banned myself from reddit and got addicted to twitter, banned myself from Twitter and got myself addicted to Hacker News, then YouTube, then BlueSky, then nextdoor... Clearly there's a root issue I should be targeting instead, similar to how all my exercise is for naught if I can't get my diet in order. I think these kinds of behaviors are similar to the things that plague a capitalist society - we seem to know that smartphones and doom scrolling are bad for us, but we seem unable to stop. Some of us are trying dumb phones, or apps that limit time on certain apps. The best solutions we can come up with exist within the system we're addicted to - we need a company or app developer to save us from ourselves, and by the way the new Light phone is 600$. The incentives will never be aligned - the best (under capitalism) dumb phone manufacturer will be the one that can have the highest sales volume through addicting people to their phones and building in enough obsolescence to require people to get new ones. Or Light phone will just get cannibalized by a trillion dollar company it has no resources to resist at some point.
I think one of the key things leftists (using the global definition, not the Americanized version) need to figure out this century to accomplish our goals is how to help people empower themselves to escape the things they know are bad for them, or enjoy these things to a certain point but not be dragged beyond that point by profit-minded capitalist entities.
I see efforts on this front in the FOSS/fediverse space. Self hosted Instagram that lets you sort new posts by recent and doesn't try to psyop you with boobs blood or rage into staying on the app longer than intended. Alternative clients for YouTube that let you aggregate creators from other platforms and block channels you never want to see (did you know this isn't possible on YouTube?).Music sharing platforms that give the majority of revenue to the artists.
I think these efforts are good and might be the solution. I like Cory Doctorow's anarchist-aligned philosophy in "Walkaway" that basically amounts to "build alternative ways to be for people that make them ask why'd they bother with the capitalist mode at all."
I still think there's some more fundamental psychological angle we need to figure out, a human-centric something that doesn't need any distribution other than word of mouth that can help people resist the psychofauna capitalist entities use to ensnare people. Maybe I just have utopian thinking or maybe I read Snow Crash too many times have have magical thinking about the power of language and ideas. I certainly would love some magical way to finally solve my addictions and maladaptive behaviors.
Humans do best when we are faced with uncomfortable situations on a regular basis; this is how we grow. Nowadays everyone can throw in an earbud and ignore the rest of the world.
Being bored is a good thing. Having nothing to do encourages creativity and creation. Being alone with your thoughts is a good thing to be able to do. Having a constant soundtrack, audiobook or podcast in your head is not good.
We do this to ourselves. Then we complain about it.
Surveillance industry crapps go on a separate device I just leave at home. I don't disable notifications or even swipe to dismiss them - just ignore. The whole thing is perma-silent and generally forgtten until I want to actually do something that requires a mobile app.
The majority of my usage is on a desktop computer. Surveillance industry websites definitely make themselves harder to use so you waste more time and never quite get your full fix, but you still somewhat do hit a natural satiation limit, much more than you would through a tiny porthole that fits in your pocket.
I haven't done the sit-on-couch-and-watch-TV thing for a year, but obviously I use a real laptop for that rather than falling into the "tablet" (aka big phone) trap.
It won't. It can only work at a small scale, up to the number of people a person has in his personal circle of family/friend/clan members. As soon as the circle grows larger it will fall prey to parasites who leech off it and be taken over by power-hungry individuals who use the 'socialist' paradigm to push themselves to the top of the hierarchy. Once there they do their best to stay on top, creating a cadre of bootlickers. They are the thin layer of fat on top of the watery soup that socialism produces.
I run my family as a communist, by those according to their means to those according to their needs. We run our friend circles as socialists, supporting those who are in need. We run our country as capitalists with some government oversight to keep the excesses to a minimum. Just like running a family as capitalists does not make sense - how is your toddler going to pay for her dinner I wonder - it does not make sense to run a country as if it is one big happy family because it isn't.
ergonaught•6mo ago
Mistletoe•6mo ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/decadeology/comments/1hmcl3c/nyc_su...
esperent•6mo ago
komali2•6mo ago
This is part of why I much prefer above ground trains, at least you get a view then.
tom89999•6mo ago
theamk•6mo ago
As for reading a book or a magazine - this only works for the most common topics. The internet brought up significantly more interesting things - can you remeber any printed publication that was as good as danluu's essays for example?
esperent•6mo ago
Assuming that reading a physical book/printed magazine is inherently better than using your phone in the same situation is just a kind of snobbiness.
Someone in those photos could have been watching a veritasium video, or studying their college notes on their phone. Someone in the earlier years with a book could have been reading Mills and Boone.
But either way, who cares? Why are we judging what people do to pass a few minutes of their day in an inherently boring place like the subway?
As to the value of boredom, sure. But environment matters too. I think there's very little value to boredom on a subway. If you want to make a personal choice to be bored on the subway, go for it. But I don't see any valid reason to judge other people for choosing otherwise.
Mistletoe•5mo ago
theamk•6mo ago
How about you ban social networks instead? I couldn't care less about them.
whatevaa•6mo ago