Comment by bondarchuk
18 days ago
It's also very much an exercise in framing, though. Making your media as engaging as possible is the basic imperative of any media company. But choosing to call this specific instance of it "addictive" has everyone up in arms.
To the framing issue - I can frame an alternate lens through which we balance enrichment against engagement.
Media can enrich people - expose them to new ideas, new stories, different views and opinions. This expands worldview and generally trends in the same direction as education.
Media can also be engaging - Use tools that make it compelling to continue viewing, even when other things might be preferable, on the low end: cliffhangers and suspenseful stories. on the high end: repetitive gambling like tendencies.
I'd argue if we view tiktok through this lens - banning it seems to make sense. Honestly, most short form social media should be highly reviewed for being low value content that is intentionally made addictive.
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It's not society's job to cater to the whims of fucking for-profit, abusive, media companies. It's society's job to enrich and improve the lives of their members. Get the fuck outta here with the lame duck argument that I need to give a shit about some company's unethical profit motives.
I also don't care if meth dealers go bankrupt - who knew!
I fundamentally don't think governments should do a careful cost-benefit analysis of everything in society and then ban it if it falls on the wrong side. Just on basic principles of personal freedom. That's why the "addiction" framing is so important, because it implies that citizens don't have agency, and so justifies the authoritarian intervention.
PS if we apply your analysis to video games they surely would have been banned too.
Edit: by the way I remember back in the day we searched for "addicting flash games" and it was seen as a positive ;p
It is completely unreasonable for a society to do a careful cost-benefit analysis of everything in society - it's completely reasonable for a society to identify highly harmful things (especially those that hijack our brains through direct chemical or emotional addiction) and police those, or, as per Portugal's approach, make available societal supports to allow people to better cope with that addiction. The later isn't very reasonable to expect in a world of rising austerity due to financialization so the former seems more realistic.
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I remember that website, it was called addictinggames.com and I remember finding that bad grammar offensive. (I was obviously a lot of fun at parties.)
With social media, the cost benefit analysis doesn't deliver marginal results, just less stark/concentrated results. Drink driving is self evidently bad even though 99 times out of 100(?) it does no harm, because one time out of a hundred its consequences are catastrophic. Social media on the other hand is harming essentially 100% of the population in initially milder ways - even if you don't use it you're forced to live in a dumbed down society where wealth and power is becoming concentrated in the hands of those who pedal digital dopamine and in a democracy being undermined by disinformation. Of course 'initially milder harm' is step one in frog boiling.
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> Making your media as engaging as possible is the basic imperative of any media company.
Not so. I think your logic is that engagement often leads to dollars, and the "basic imperative of any company" is to make dollars. There are pro- and anti-social ways to do this. You can create better art for your video games, or you can insert gambling mechanisms. You can spend more time designing your cinematic universe, or you can put a cliffhanger after every episode. You can make a funny skit, or you can say, "wait for it... wait for it... you can't believe what's about to happen!" Optimizing for engagement, for the sake of engagement, is necessarily anti-social. It's trying to redirect attention towards your media without actually making the user experience better in any way.
Legally, the basic imperative of any company is to make dollars, as long as it is prosocial. You should not expect the government to turn a blind eye to scam centers or disfunctional products. The same applies to the media landscape.
There's an AI behind the video feed optimized for keeping your attention for as long as possible. That is quite different from making your media more engaging.
The logical endpoint of optimizing AI for viewer retention is something that you literally cannot look away from.
There's billions of dollars of psychology research behind mass entertainment for decades, too.
>* The logical endpoint of optimizing AI for viewer retention is something that you literally cannot look away from. *
Sure, but this was always already the logical endpoint of entertainment media. Infinite Jest was written in the 90s, no tiktok needed.
True, though stochastic gradient descent replaces all that human guesswork with predictable scaling laws. The hyperstimuli of the tomorrow will be nothing like what we recognize today as entertainment.
Everything's on a spectrum, but there's a point where you're so far along on the spectrum that it makes sense to call it something else.
See, "quantity has a quality of its own".
Sometimes you have to leave the theoretical view aside and just look out the window. How are people using this? Is it hurting them? What can we do about it?
I don't like blanket bans, but putting TikTok and, say, a publishing company marketing novels, in the same category because they strive for an audience, doesn't clarify anything. It just confuses the discussion.
I don't know man. It all reminds me very much of people trying to ban rock n roll back in the day.
I hear you, and that's where my mind goes first on this issue too.
But with social media, many of the people most into it, when asked, will say they wish it didn't exist.
A lot of kids feel they have to be on it, but wish it didn't exist.
People sound and behave more like actual drug addicts than just mere fans of a medium around social media.