When Australia and Norway considered the evidence that social media in its current forms has deleterious effects on the mental health of teenagers, was their answer to demand that the social media companies alter how they function in order to present their services without the deleterious effects?
No.
Their answer was to ban younger teenagers from using social media.
Restrict the freedoms of children--don't actually do anything substantive to force social media to serve them, and society at large, better. That was their answer.
Even in my own country, some provinces have moved to restrict or ban the use of mobile devices in schools, in part to cut down on social media use.
Never mind the autistic child who might have a panic attack and need to call a parent for emotional support. Never mind the kid with a chronic illness who might need to call emergency services if it flares up. (And never mind that the proliferation of mobile phones has led to the removal of payphones that could have been used to call emergency services or make a collect call with a brief message.)
Never mind the teachers who successfully integrated students' use of mobile devices into their lesson plans, having them read about various topics in more depth than the teacher might be able to cover, perhaps even finding sources that provide information of which the teacher was unaware, providing a learning opportunity for everyone in the room.
The answer is never to demand that companies do better by the society in which they exist. The answer is never to say that corporations exist because we allow them to exist, that they can only exist so long as their existence serves the best interests of society.
The answer is always to take away freedoms from the people, and worse, from the most vulnerable among us.
Because it's easier to do that than to demand that rich men do better, because it's easier to do that than confront how past policies led to the current state of affairs, because it's easier to do that than enact actual solutions that enhance human freedom.
"If you end your training now, if you choose the quick and easy path as Vader did, you will become an agent of evil."
"Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny. Consume you it will, as it did Obi-Wan's apprentice."
"If you leave now, help them you could, but you would destroy all for which they have fought and suffered."
“They got exactly what they paid for: governance optimized like their platforms, citizens processed like their users, resistance eliminated like their competition. The attention economy they built to extract profit from human consciousness now serves to extract consent for systematic dehumanization.”
I’m spending this weekend at a destination wedding for my niece. When I speak to family—immediate and cousins, they are not getting the memo.
The MSM has normalized Trump’s behavior and downplaying the significance with every lie, misinformation and in a sense disseminating propaganda on behalf of Dear Leader; even when they report the facts.
In several separate conversations all hear is “if Trump is so bad, why is he so popular?” They have no understanding of the long-term consequences of Trump’s actions, they have no idea what Project 2025 is and sadly, my family is highly educated.
My oldest sister is a top pancreatic cancer researcher and does work with the NIH and CDC. Yet, outside of herself and a few other family members, these people just don’t get it.
Bottom line: we are losing the information war, and personally, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the next election was stolen. These charlatans have managed to destroy the very fabric of American excellence in a New York minute, and no one seems to care.
They believe the stock market speaks for itself, even though all economic indicators point to the contrary, and they can’t even fathom the significance of the Xi, Modi and Putin meeting last week.
Honestly, I’m not sure how we recover at this point, which is leaving me depress led as well as dazed and confused!
I think the stock market dropping will wake people up. Money talks in America. When the tariff impact starts to show in the markets and broader society, there may be a change in sentiment. Of course if you're Trump, that's the perfect time to start a war.
Mike sure seems to be the only one who gets it. Well, at least this aspect, which is the sad reality of how we got here. (with a shoutout to Miles and Lev who bring us the broader picture). And it’s the perfect cure for having a nice day. Frustrating, especially in the face of citizens who still believe we’ll show ‘em in 2026.
Another term for this is "depraved indifference", and it's prosecutable. Like calling "fire" in a crowded theater, there are limits to how you can use the public airwaves. It should be illegal to foist damaging algorithms to pervert public mental health, and especially to cull dollars from advertising such clickbait. Let's get our legal eagles on this one, and be prepared to enact some protections for our vulnerable members of society. Quit protecting perverts!
I wonder what they will think when the right uses their tech to commit genocide. They are already whitewashing Hitler and slavery priming the pump so it's not being hidden. Do we believe they don't know the natural outcome of what they made? I know some who follow Yarvin are all in on Soylent Green, but people like Gates and Cook have to see what they are signing up for right?
Slavery was never abolished. It was rebranded as "wage labour": the employer (master) giving the employee (slave) a share of the value produced in wages to ensure continued survival (room and board, such as it was) and keeping the rest for himself, all while enacting social, societal, and legal means of control to ensure that revolts don't happen, or at least don't succeed.
The expression "wage slave" was, as originally understood, not metaphorical. It was literal.
Slavery is simply too useful a means of wealth accumulation by the landowners to ever actually abolish it. We just gave it a coat of paint, called it "wage labour", and brainwashed people into parroting the line about the "dignity of work"--as if there were anything "dignified" about having a share of the value you produce stolen from you.
As for whitewashing Hitler, we tolerated Franco (and, depending on how you interpret his regime, Salazar; his Portugal was even a founding member of NATO, in part because of the longstanding UK-Portugal mutual defence treaty and in part because he was neutral in the Allies' favour in the Second World War, having predicted that Germany would fail to force Britain to capitulate, that Germany would break the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and attack the Soviet Union, and that the United States would eventually enter the war on the side of the United Kingdom) for decades, simply because he was anti-communist and nobody wanted to try to invade Spain. The capitalist "democratic West" has always had some degree of tolerance for fascism so long as it served their interests.
On your first point I would hold prison labor to be a more accurate depiction of slavery still being accepted in America. Yes working for a wage has backslid in the amount of our share of productivity, but it's a far cry from slavery. If people don't work for a living what do you propose people do to support themselves? I have no desire to homestead or open a business.
For point two my comment was more meant in regard to people who professed liberal values seeing in real time their tech being used on their own people. Was who they were always a lie? Will any speak out?
On the first point, I'm not proposing that people not work for a living if they don't want to homestead or own a business; I'm proposing that the remuneration someone receives for their labour be equal to the full value created by that labour.
I agree that prison labour is closer to chattel slavery, especially when viewed in a broader context, than wage labour, but the economic parallels that I noted are still striking, at least to me.
Also, I specified landowners because of arguments like George's and Smith's:
"The tax upon land values is, therefore, the most just and equal of all taxes. It falls only upon those who receive from society a peculiar and valuable benefit, and upon them in proportion to the benefit they receive. It is the taking by the community, for the use of the community, of that value which is the creation of the community. It is the application of the common property to common uses. When all rent is taken by taxation for the needs of the community, then will the equality ordained by Nature be attained. No citizen will have an advantage over any other citizen save as is given by his industry, skill, and intelligence; and each will obtain what he fairly earns. Then, but not till then, will labor get its full reward, and capital its natural return." (Henry George, "Progress and Poverty")
"Ground-rents are a still more proper subject of taxation than the rent of houses. A tax upon ground-rents would not raise the rents of houses. It would fall altogether upon the owner of the ground-rent, who acts always as a monopolist, and exacts the greatest rent which can be got for the use of his ground. More or less can be got for it according as the competitors happen to be richer or poorer, or can afford to gratify their fancy for a particular spot of ground at a greater or smaller expense. In every country the greatest number of rich competitors is in the capital, and it is there accordingly that the highest ground-rents are always to be found. As the wealth of those competitors would in no respect be increased by a tax upon ground-rents, they would not probably be disposed to pay more for the use of the ground. Whether the tax was to be advanced by the inhabitant, or by the owner of the ground, would be of little importance. The more the inhabitant was obliged to pay for the tax, the less he would incline to pay for the ground; so that the final payment of the tax would fall altogether upon the owner of the ground-rent." (Adam Smith, "The Wealth of Nations")
On the second point, what I was noting is that many (though hardly all) self-professed liberals have always been willing to tolerate fascism to at least some degree. Hitler was tolerated by the liberal politicians because it was better him than Thälmann, and, the fear went, Berlin taking orders from Moscow. (As "Yes, Prime Minister" later put it, "The Morning Star is read by the people who think the country ought to be run by another country, and the Daily Telegraph is read by the people who think it is.") Franco was tolerated because there was no stomach for another war and he was, as I said, anti-communist. (And not anti-Semitic, perhaps his only redeeming quality.) That we are now seeing tech oligarchs (who until recently had been self-professed liberals, with the ideological turn, or reveal, however you prefer to interpret it, coming in part because of the resurgence of unions and organised labour) praising fascism and turning their products toward its ends should therefore not be very surprising.
I have always thought it odd that in their quest for control and the regimes quest to suck up money, why wouldn't they be concerned at the collapsing economy? Harder to suck up money from a poorer economy. Although controlling the assets would improve compliance.
Wouldn't those goals eventually diverge? Unless these are the initial goals and the longer goals are brainwashed military and serfs.
Because they already have so much wealth that they don't (won't) need any more. Thus, it doesn't matter if they have us peons slaving away for their profits. Reducing the population only benefits them.
As a stoic might say, focus on what you can change.
We can personally create our own environment within which our minds can flourish. Enhanced flourishing, even, with wisely used technology. Under our own control.
🔓 The first step is to recognise any surrender monkey in yourself.
Just think what a great book Kafka could have written about this. "The Algorithm.". No trial, no confinement in a castle. Just good, orderly destruction.
It used to be about control of trade routes. Then it was about control of raw materials. Then it was about control of energy sources. Now it's about control of neurological manipulators which in a more benign effect lead to market enrichment and consumerism (which is bad enough). They are malignant, however, and have led to suicide and the terrorization of citizens.
The oligarchs are a lethal, armed mafia and tech is the deadly weapon with which they are armed. Obvious problems have obvious solutions; waiting for history to judge them harshly is not one of them, if there is to be a history.
This is way too important for you to only have 37 likes. So, what to do?
The complicity of other governments in this cannot be overlooked.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c89vjj0lxx9o
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/23/norway-to-increase-minimum-age-limit-on-social-media-to-15-to-protect-children
When Australia and Norway considered the evidence that social media in its current forms has deleterious effects on the mental health of teenagers, was their answer to demand that the social media companies alter how they function in order to present their services without the deleterious effects?
No.
Their answer was to ban younger teenagers from using social media.
Restrict the freedoms of children--don't actually do anything substantive to force social media to serve them, and society at large, better. That was their answer.
https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/education-training/k-12/cellphones-in-schools
Even in my own country, some provinces have moved to restrict or ban the use of mobile devices in schools, in part to cut down on social media use.
Never mind the autistic child who might have a panic attack and need to call a parent for emotional support. Never mind the kid with a chronic illness who might need to call emergency services if it flares up. (And never mind that the proliferation of mobile phones has led to the removal of payphones that could have been used to call emergency services or make a collect call with a brief message.)
Never mind the teachers who successfully integrated students' use of mobile devices into their lesson plans, having them read about various topics in more depth than the teacher might be able to cover, perhaps even finding sources that provide information of which the teacher was unaware, providing a learning opportunity for everyone in the room.
The answer is never to demand that companies do better by the society in which they exist. The answer is never to say that corporations exist because we allow them to exist, that they can only exist so long as their existence serves the best interests of society.
The answer is always to take away freedoms from the people, and worse, from the most vulnerable among us.
Because it's easier to do that than to demand that rich men do better, because it's easier to do that than confront how past policies led to the current state of affairs, because it's easier to do that than enact actual solutions that enhance human freedom.
"If you end your training now, if you choose the quick and easy path as Vader did, you will become an agent of evil."
"Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny. Consume you it will, as it did Obi-Wan's apprentice."
"If you leave now, help them you could, but you would destroy all for which they have fought and suffered."
“They got exactly what they paid for: governance optimized like their platforms, citizens processed like their users, resistance eliminated like their competition. The attention economy they built to extract profit from human consciousness now serves to extract consent for systematic dehumanization.”
I’m spending this weekend at a destination wedding for my niece. When I speak to family—immediate and cousins, they are not getting the memo.
The MSM has normalized Trump’s behavior and downplaying the significance with every lie, misinformation and in a sense disseminating propaganda on behalf of Dear Leader; even when they report the facts.
In several separate conversations all hear is “if Trump is so bad, why is he so popular?” They have no understanding of the long-term consequences of Trump’s actions, they have no idea what Project 2025 is and sadly, my family is highly educated.
My oldest sister is a top pancreatic cancer researcher and does work with the NIH and CDC. Yet, outside of herself and a few other family members, these people just don’t get it.
Bottom line: we are losing the information war, and personally, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the next election was stolen. These charlatans have managed to destroy the very fabric of American excellence in a New York minute, and no one seems to care.
They believe the stock market speaks for itself, even though all economic indicators point to the contrary, and they can’t even fathom the significance of the Xi, Modi and Putin meeting last week.
Honestly, I’m not sure how we recover at this point, which is leaving me depress led as well as dazed and confused!
I think the stock market dropping will wake people up. Money talks in America. When the tariff impact starts to show in the markets and broader society, there may be a change in sentiment. Of course if you're Trump, that's the perfect time to start a war.
Mike sure seems to be the only one who gets it. Well, at least this aspect, which is the sad reality of how we got here. (with a shoutout to Miles and Lev who bring us the broader picture). And it’s the perfect cure for having a nice day. Frustrating, especially in the face of citizens who still believe we’ll show ‘em in 2026.
Now- what are WE going to DO about all of that?
Another term for this is "depraved indifference", and it's prosecutable. Like calling "fire" in a crowded theater, there are limits to how you can use the public airwaves. It should be illegal to foist damaging algorithms to pervert public mental health, and especially to cull dollars from advertising such clickbait. Let's get our legal eagles on this one, and be prepared to enact some protections for our vulnerable members of society. Quit protecting perverts!
I wonder what they will think when the right uses their tech to commit genocide. They are already whitewashing Hitler and slavery priming the pump so it's not being hidden. Do we believe they don't know the natural outcome of what they made? I know some who follow Yarvin are all in on Soylent Green, but people like Gates and Cook have to see what they are signing up for right?
Slavery was never abolished. It was rebranded as "wage labour": the employer (master) giving the employee (slave) a share of the value produced in wages to ensure continued survival (room and board, such as it was) and keeping the rest for himself, all while enacting social, societal, and legal means of control to ensure that revolts don't happen, or at least don't succeed.
The expression "wage slave" was, as originally understood, not metaphorical. It was literal.
Slavery is simply too useful a means of wealth accumulation by the landowners to ever actually abolish it. We just gave it a coat of paint, called it "wage labour", and brainwashed people into parroting the line about the "dignity of work"--as if there were anything "dignified" about having a share of the value you produce stolen from you.
As for whitewashing Hitler, we tolerated Franco (and, depending on how you interpret his regime, Salazar; his Portugal was even a founding member of NATO, in part because of the longstanding UK-Portugal mutual defence treaty and in part because he was neutral in the Allies' favour in the Second World War, having predicted that Germany would fail to force Britain to capitulate, that Germany would break the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and attack the Soviet Union, and that the United States would eventually enter the war on the side of the United Kingdom) for decades, simply because he was anti-communist and nobody wanted to try to invade Spain. The capitalist "democratic West" has always had some degree of tolerance for fascism so long as it served their interests.
On your first point I would hold prison labor to be a more accurate depiction of slavery still being accepted in America. Yes working for a wage has backslid in the amount of our share of productivity, but it's a far cry from slavery. If people don't work for a living what do you propose people do to support themselves? I have no desire to homestead or open a business.
For point two my comment was more meant in regard to people who professed liberal values seeing in real time their tech being used on their own people. Was who they were always a lie? Will any speak out?
On the first point, I'm not proposing that people not work for a living if they don't want to homestead or own a business; I'm proposing that the remuneration someone receives for their labour be equal to the full value created by that labour.
I agree that prison labour is closer to chattel slavery, especially when viewed in a broader context, than wage labour, but the economic parallels that I noted are still striking, at least to me.
Also, I specified landowners because of arguments like George's and Smith's:
"The tax upon land values is, therefore, the most just and equal of all taxes. It falls only upon those who receive from society a peculiar and valuable benefit, and upon them in proportion to the benefit they receive. It is the taking by the community, for the use of the community, of that value which is the creation of the community. It is the application of the common property to common uses. When all rent is taken by taxation for the needs of the community, then will the equality ordained by Nature be attained. No citizen will have an advantage over any other citizen save as is given by his industry, skill, and intelligence; and each will obtain what he fairly earns. Then, but not till then, will labor get its full reward, and capital its natural return." (Henry George, "Progress and Poverty")
"Ground-rents are a still more proper subject of taxation than the rent of houses. A tax upon ground-rents would not raise the rents of houses. It would fall altogether upon the owner of the ground-rent, who acts always as a monopolist, and exacts the greatest rent which can be got for the use of his ground. More or less can be got for it according as the competitors happen to be richer or poorer, or can afford to gratify their fancy for a particular spot of ground at a greater or smaller expense. In every country the greatest number of rich competitors is in the capital, and it is there accordingly that the highest ground-rents are always to be found. As the wealth of those competitors would in no respect be increased by a tax upon ground-rents, they would not probably be disposed to pay more for the use of the ground. Whether the tax was to be advanced by the inhabitant, or by the owner of the ground, would be of little importance. The more the inhabitant was obliged to pay for the tax, the less he would incline to pay for the ground; so that the final payment of the tax would fall altogether upon the owner of the ground-rent." (Adam Smith, "The Wealth of Nations")
On the second point, what I was noting is that many (though hardly all) self-professed liberals have always been willing to tolerate fascism to at least some degree. Hitler was tolerated by the liberal politicians because it was better him than Thälmann, and, the fear went, Berlin taking orders from Moscow. (As "Yes, Prime Minister" later put it, "The Morning Star is read by the people who think the country ought to be run by another country, and the Daily Telegraph is read by the people who think it is.") Franco was tolerated because there was no stomach for another war and he was, as I said, anti-communist. (And not anti-Semitic, perhaps his only redeeming quality.) That we are now seeing tech oligarchs (who until recently had been self-professed liberals, with the ideological turn, or reveal, however you prefer to interpret it, coming in part because of the resurgence of unions and organised labour) praising fascism and turning their products toward its ends should therefore not be very surprising.
Great essay. Thank you.
I have always thought it odd that in their quest for control and the regimes quest to suck up money, why wouldn't they be concerned at the collapsing economy? Harder to suck up money from a poorer economy. Although controlling the assets would improve compliance.
Wouldn't those goals eventually diverge? Unless these are the initial goals and the longer goals are brainwashed military and serfs.
These companies/owners have more money than countries. Many want a collapse so they can hoover up the ashes. Force us into techno states.
Because they already have so much wealth that they don't (won't) need any more. Thus, it doesn't matter if they have us peons slaving away for their profits. Reducing the population only benefits them.
As a stoic might say, focus on what you can change.
We can personally create our own environment within which our minds can flourish. Enhanced flourishing, even, with wisely used technology. Under our own control.
🔓 The first step is to recognise any surrender monkey in yourself.
🔓 The second to progressively take charge.
Too late. Middle America is too busy worrying about Cracker Barrel
Just think what a great book Kafka could have written about this. "The Algorithm.". No trial, no confinement in a castle. Just good, orderly destruction.
It used to be about control of trade routes. Then it was about control of raw materials. Then it was about control of energy sources. Now it's about control of neurological manipulators which in a more benign effect lead to market enrichment and consumerism (which is bad enough). They are malignant, however, and have led to suicide and the terrorization of citizens.
The oligarchs are a lethal, armed mafia and tech is the deadly weapon with which they are armed. Obvious problems have obvious solutions; waiting for history to judge them harshly is not one of them, if there is to be a history.
Can we boycott the internet? Go back to in person interactions? Even if it is just for a week?
Terrifying. Now what???
Great article. I love your work and gigantic contribution. But the Chatgpt writing is unmistakable, maddening, dry and exasperating.
Write your own text. Even if less elegant, as you did before, it will be more genuine, personal