Nice piece. At this point I am pretty exasperated at the ~ decade of efforts I've made to reduce my social media usage as a gen-z person.
The greyscale, the turning off notifications, the uninstalling of apps, the screen time blocks. The only things that have had long-term (and yet still incomplete) benefit is physically separating myself from my phone, like leaving it in the car or at home during dinner, as well as maximally delaying phone usage in the morning.
Whats frustrating is that the discourse, like in this essay, usually revolves around summoning discipline or willpower on the part of the user, and usually doesn't discuss the behavior of the tech companies. These apps and technologies are engineered very carefully to exploit the fast, instinctual type 1 side of your brain that, for good reasons, has evolutionary has dominion over the deliberate, thoughtful type 2 thinking that I think most of us would prefer to be doing more of.
Because of this, I just don't see this scourge changing through efforts on the parts of the users. Maybe that's pessimistic.
In the long run, the only way things can get better is through individual action as daunting and hopeless as that might feel in the face of the current system.
I do wonder what AI will do to this dynamic. The generative capabilities will surely turbocharge the existing dynamic (which frankly I don't see how it can get too much worse), but I do wonder about AI applications that can act as a sort of tether to the conscious type 2 thinking.
When conscious, you define how you'd like to spend your time, and that agent/AI can help reel you in when you lapse into unconscious scrolling. Or an AI that curates only topics you'd be happy spending time viewing.
A bunch of very powerful people have a huge vested interest in not letting these things happen, though, so I'm not hopeful.
Nice piece. At this point I am pretty exasperated at the ~ decade of efforts I've made to reduce my social media usage as a gen-z person.
The greyscale, the turning off notifications, the uninstalling of apps, the screen time blocks. The only things that have had long-term (and yet still incomplete) benefit is physically separating myself from my phone, like leaving it in the car or at home during dinner, as well as maximally delaying phone usage in the morning.
Whats frustrating is that the discourse, like in this essay, usually revolves around summoning discipline or willpower on the part of the user, and usually doesn't discuss the behavior of the tech companies. These apps and technologies are engineered very carefully to exploit the fast, instinctual type 1 side of your brain that, for good reasons, has evolutionary has dominion over the deliberate, thoughtful type 2 thinking that I think most of us would prefer to be doing more of.
Because of this, I just don't see this scourge changing through efforts on the parts of the users. Maybe that's pessimistic.
In the long run, the only way things can get better is through individual action as daunting and hopeless as that might feel in the face of the current system.
Uninstall the apps. Only use social media from a desktop. That gives you the physical separation in a sustainable way.
I do wonder what AI will do to this dynamic. The generative capabilities will surely turbocharge the existing dynamic (which frankly I don't see how it can get too much worse), but I do wonder about AI applications that can act as a sort of tether to the conscious type 2 thinking.
When conscious, you define how you'd like to spend your time, and that agent/AI can help reel you in when you lapse into unconscious scrolling. Or an AI that curates only topics you'd be happy spending time viewing.
A bunch of very powerful people have a huge vested interest in not letting these things happen, though, so I'm not hopeful.