Comment by TheOtherHobbes
8 hours ago
That's not wrong, but it's a selective take. The entire economy operates like an addiction machine, using proven psychological techniques to modify individual and collective behaviours and beliefs.
It's not just social media. It's gaming, ad tech, marketing, PR, religion, entertainment, the physical design of malls and stores... And many many more.
The difference with social media is that the sharp end is automated and personalised, instead of being analysed by spreadsheet and stats package and broken out by demographics.
But it's just the most obvious poison in a toxic ecosystem.
Every country in the world already does tons of intervention combatting addiction. There are already bans and restrictions on gambling, drugs, alcohol, cigarettes etc… Wether we consider social media addiction to be harmful and how to do it is a good question to be asked, but intervention into harmful addiction is generally uncontroversial.
Though capitalism is to blame for plenty of problems, I don't agree with this take, and I see it repeated quite often.
Economies, capitalist or otherwise, are very much defined by needs and wants. (With this, I presume, you agree already.)
But addiction is another topic altogether from everyday needs and wants like oil, aspirin, or cinema tickets.
Manufactured consent, planned economies, controlled economies, imbalance of wealth or power, tariffs, subsidies, tax breaks, lobbying, ad networks, tracking, algorithmic content delivery, AI generation, asymmetric access to information, social effects, requirements to live despite inaccessible resources for basic needs, government control, private property but no free land available, and international trade laws, are a few things that come to mind which very much go against the idea that we are living in anything like the model of capitalism we learn about in school.
2026 is not based on wants and needs except in isolated situations. We are at the hypernormal point of manufacturing problems to sell solutions, because there's very little rent or work left to extract from assets. Lives of excess are maintained by depriving others of necessities. The intense control and misdirection required to keep this somewhat stable is starting to be felt.
"The entire economy" here being a pseudonym for marketing and advertising?
There's a big difference in terms of frequency and availability.
Physical design of stores gets you when you're shopping, then it's done. Organized religion tends to get its hooks into you once or twice a week. Marketing, PR, ads, all sporadic. Social media is available essentially 24/7 and is something you can jump into with just a few seconds of spare time.
If more traditional addiction machines are a lottery you can play a few times a week, social media is a slot machine that you carry with you everywhere you go.
I don’t know what personal religious experience you’re speaking from, but my church is a little more oriented toward helping people overcome addictions and personal failings. If you’re in Europe, then I think the messaging in the mosques about consuming alcohol are pretty strict. I can’t speak from firsthand knowledge.
> personal failings
I'm sure your specific church is lovely, but depending on the church, "personal failings" may include such gems as "being gay", depression, autism, PTSD, poverty...
Well sure, they don't want the competition. Churches have naturally evolved to use techniques that keep people coming back. The ones that don't do that die out.
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Yup. It's capitalism that's the core problem. Social media is just a particularly nasty outgrowth.
its not necessarily "capitalism". Think about how Myspace was, or early Facebook, that was capitalism but didn't have the same issues.
Its the "lean startup" culture as well as books like "Hooked, how to build habit forming products" - Nir Eyal.
The dark lean startup pattern is where you break down the big picture rationale for the company. You extract metrics that contribute to the company's success (i.e. engagement) and you build a machine that rewards changes to the underlying system that improves those metrics.
If done successfully, you create an unwitting sociopathy, a process that demands the product be as addictive as possible and a culture that is in thrall to the machine that rewards its employees by increasing those metrics. You're no longer thinking about purpose or wondering about what you're doing to your users. You simply realise that if you send this notification at this time, with this colour button, in this place, with this tagline then the machine likes it. Multiple people might contribute a tiny piece of a horrifying and manipulative whole and may never quite realise the true horror of the monster they've helped build, because they're insulated by being behind the A/B test.
> its not necessarily "capitalism". Think about how Myspace was, or early Facebook, that was capitalism but didn't have the same issues.
No thats exactly capitalism, capitalism ensures processes gets more and more efficient over time, as you say previous versions were less efficient at inducing addictive behaviors but capitalism ensured we progressed towards more and more addictive apps and patterns.
Capitalism doesn't mean we start out with the most efficient money extractor, it just moves towards the most efficient money extractor with time unless regulated.
This is well known and a feature, capitalism moves towards efficiency and regulation helps direct that movement so that it helps humanity rather than hurts us. Capitalism would gladly serve you toxic food but regulations ensures they earn more money by giving you nutritious food. Now regulations are lagging a bit there so there is still plenty of toxic food around, but it used to be much worse than now, the main problem with modern food is that people eat too much directly toxic compounds.
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Early Facebook's behavior was what they wanted to do/be. But upon exposure to what others were doing Facebook chose to adopt patterns/techniques that repulsed them originally because Facebook didn't want to be out competed (so Capitalism). Capitalism/competition is what led their behavioral change.
Go back to the recent removal of lead article discussed here. In Capitalism government regulation has to level the playing field or else all players will stoop to poisoning society/the world because if they don't then someone else will gain and advantage. Even hyper rightwing Rayliner agreed Government intervention is the ONLY way to prevent Capitalists from injecting poison into their products if that poison gives a competitive advantage.
What leaded gas was to the boomers brains social media is to current youths' brains.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46865275