Comment by kleene_op
13 hours ago
Our whole current civilization could be construed as advanced alien tech servicing a humongous tribe of moronic apes. The fact that one fifth of the internet is dedicated to porn just speaks for itself. Just thinking about all the tech involved, from the capturing of footage using highly sophisticated camera, to the transmission over kilometers of fiber optics, to the stokage into redundant and consistent databases backed by highly optimized hardware and brilliantly engineered file format, to the distribution to your phone device, which is literally a personal computer that fits in your palm.. all of that just to show porn to satisfy your monkey brain.
It seems almost absurd to what length humanity has gone just to satisfy it's primitive needs.
Let's not forget that with both porn AND all the other "junk food" on social media that we waste away on: there are very smart people getting paid a lot of money to make/keep you hooked on them.
IMO this is as much a "we are hopelessly dumb monkeys who just want to satisfy ourselves" as as it is "there's clever monkeys who know and exploit our monkey weaknesses so they can make more money."
This is an issue I've perceived with technology for a while now. Even a lowly ape like myself can gain disproportionate rewards from using computer technology in ways that many people around me can't. I could use it in constructive or exploitative fashions if I chose to, at scales I could never imagine without it. That has never sat well with me because I know there are people smarter than I am with a lot more resources than I have. And they also have no scruples, so exploitation is in their tool box.
I imagine these same types of people with similar tendencies would be regulated and mitigated by their peers more in the past. Say something like 200 years ago, you might be intelligent and cunning enough to gain power in a community, but it would never mean what it can mean today. The scaling factors are literally beyond comprehension. The accumulation of power, the modes of deception or concealment, sheer scale, all of it... It's too much for people to really track anymore, and it can continue largely unfettered in so many cases.
All that is to say yes, I think a tremendous number of people are being unwittingly exploited. The attention land-grab is arguably the most obvious battle field, but there are certainly others.
In the past, entire intercontinental trade routes existed just to get food seasoned, so what you’re pointing out isn’t that unusual. The desire for sensual pleasures drives most things (and not only in humans).
I feel like our whacky world is only made possible by fossil fuels. Like why is it profitable to
- build these vapes and sell them for a few dollars? - tear down an entire house, rebuild a new one from scratch, and sell it? - ship things all the way across the entire freakin ocean instead of manufacturing them locally? - mine cryptocurrency?
To me the answer is always fossil fuels. We stumbled on an energy source so dense (at first, seemingly) infinite that it just wildly increased the amount of energy we can use. For most of human history our greatest constraint was energy, then that constraint was just blown the fuck off.
I feel like our whole society is riding a high of cheap energy. We attribute so much progress to things like science and democracy and great thinkers and revolutionaries. But how much of it was really just fossil fuels and nitrogen fixing??
It's interesting that this is where your mind goes on an unrelated bit of content.
3% of the internet is complaining that 20% of the internet is porn.
--source, my butt.
And yet it utterly fails to satisfy these needs in a real way
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