This is a specific example of a more general problem: the ability of capital to manufacture demand and not merely satisfy it. An implicit assumption about supply and demand is that they are largely independent market forces, that demand is an organic and emergent phenomenon arising from the desires and ambitions of free individuals, and that supply reacts to demand. But first mass marketing and now hyper-targeted marketing turn that assumption on its head, and given sufficient capital, you can manipulate consumers into buying something that, left to their own devices, they otherwise would not. The harm that this can cause is most easily seen in the addictive context, but it appears throughout the market as a lost opportunity cost: to what more beneficial use would they have put that money had they not been subject to the manipulation?
How come legislators want to stop social media companies from using their power to manipulate consumers, but aren’t as interested in other industries doing the same? Like imagine how much harm is caused by the luxury fashion industry manipulating people to spend $20,000 on ugly leather bags? Or the jewelry industry in getting people to buy shiny rocks? Or sports gambling companies? That money could have been used for something good.
I’m obviously biased. But my point is that the guy that wrote the linked article had preexisting biases too.
Because of scale. Social media companies manipulate literally billions of people, whereas the luxury fashion industry only manipulates millions of people.
Sports gambling is another example of the issue at scale. When it was at a racetrack, it's naturally limited to those who can go to that physical location. When it moved to OTB, the scale goes up an order of magnitude. When it moves online and to apps, the scale goes up again. And so it's become important to regulate.
I'd call getting people with too much money and not enough common sense to spend their money a good thing for everyone. Sales taxes collected, property taxes on the store paid, income taxes on the employees and company, less generational wealth passed along, etc etc.
> How come legislators want to stop social media companies from using their power to manipulate consumers, but aren’t as interested in other industries doing the same?
Because its like comparing murder with genocide. You have to stop the enormously larger problem first before you get around to fixing your nails.
The entire media industry uses tactics like that, and has for ages. They probably only notice it with social media, because social media itself is new and different. More at 10:00, but really 10:50, because I'm going to make you stay up late watching a bunch of ads, before I tell you what'll be in tomorrows newspaper, anyway.
The way I understand doom scrolling (and all other forms of passive engagement, e.g. youtube, reddit, hacker news, etc.) is that when we dip below "baseline" mood (be it through stress or any kind of adversity), quick hits of stimuli momentarily bring us back up to that baseline.
At the same time, access to abundant entertainment establishes in us an unrealistically high baseline that we're destined to fall below whenever we're not actively "plugged in". When you fall below baseline, unrealistic though it may be, you feel lacking, like an addict, and you respond to that feeling exactly like an addict.
It's all too easy nowadays to forget that boredom is good. Adversity is good. Having the time to sit with your thoughts is good. We grow stronger through any form of perseverance, and weaker through any form of surrender.
Switching to a more ethical model than advertisements hardly helps. Most tech companies are competing for people's attention, so making one platform less addictive just means the attention will be consumed by the next most addictive platform.
Ads aren't really the problem, either. It's the fact that people are willing to fork over so much of their lives to media feeds. It's a false community, a sea of information filled with faux connection.
The only way out of this trap is to invest in your local community. Meet people in real life and spend time with them and form mutual relationships. Media feeds aren't necessarily bad, but you need to prioritize them according to the innate human need for real community.
Oh don't get me wrong, I agree. They are unreasonably effective, but I think that's in large part because people have lost touch with reality. People tend not to think very critically about ads.
And I agree with you as well, but the "industry" has sure gotten mighty good at training people to not think critically about ads (or much anything else for that matter). It's really been turned into quite the "mass-propaganda" machine overall. :(
A lot of what is being said here could also be said of NBC packing Thursday nights with their top shows back in the day. They increased attention and revenue, but people spent a lot more time watching NBC because of it. Was that a problem?
> They are not even trying to hide it — and I suppose it is not a secret at all: The more time users spend on Facebook and Instagram, the more money Meta makes.
Why would they try to hide something that is obvious?
With the decline of Twitter as the place that it seemed like everyone used to be on, other similar services seeing a small increase is not too surprising. I'm wondering if traffic from Threads, which they launched in 2023 (after Musk bought Twitter in fall of 2022), gets counted under Instagram, since you use your Instagram account to login? I get that Zuck and co want to say those increases are tied to their magical AI to please investors, but was it really?
> I wonder how that time is being spent. Doomscrolling?
I hate, doom scrolling with a passion. And still I am doing it from time to time, On reddit, youtube shorts or even a little bit on HN. It just seems like wasting time by being bombarded with stimuli.
On one hand I give my self the fault, weak will power and missing volition to change it. On the other it true that the environment has real impact on my behavior. Maybe simply blocking reddit and shorts is the best approach.
YouTube shorts is the worst. I want nothing to do with them, but I consume a lot of longform content on YouTube. On a regular basis, I find myself scrolling through shorts without even realizing it. i’ve tried all sorts of things to hide them, but from what I’ve seen it’s impossible.
> I am sure Facebook did not begin as a project designed to steal people’s time. It began as a cool app that people genuinely loved.
Zuckerberg: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuckerberg: Just ask
Zuckerberg: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
Zuckerberg: People just submitted it.
Zuckerberg: I don't know why.
Zuckerberg: They "trust me"
Zuckerberg: Dumb fucks
Instagram was a purchase. Facebook wasn't his idea. Threads is a copy. The 1 thing that Zuck understands better than anybody is that engagement is the only thing that matters to social networks, and he's willing to throw the entire company at the problem. He has been for 20 years.
He's good at addiction. He knows how to build an org that's world-class at addiction. It's entirely reasonable that the EU regulate it, and Zuck is exactly the person to point the regulation at.
I'm not sure producers wanting you to spend time on their stuff is that wrong. Hollywood aren't going to start deliberately making crap movies so no one watches. It's a consumer choice what you spend your time on.
I agree with everything the article says. I think there are two questions that we should be asking.
1. Can we point to a time when Capitalism peaked in terms of a balance of maximal benefit for as many people as possible? In my lifetime, it was somewhere in the late 1990s and early 2000s. No singular answer but something better exists than where we are now.
I have very little faith that it will be very possible to rewind to that point. Not because the technology of today is different, or even the legal landscape, but simply due to the cultural landscape being different. Pandora's box has been opened, and it cannot be closed.
To me at least, there seems to have been some cut-off point where nothing but money mattered, and someone realised that consumers will just take the abuse and you won't actually be punished that much, at least not to the point where it's not worth it if money is all you care about. I'm sure there were industries that behaved like this before (tobacco comes to mind), but now it's everywhere.
The aura of 'they'll screw me over for pennies' is ever-present. Even if there were legal recourse for stuff before, you didn't need it, because the threat alone was enough to keep companies in line. Similarly, the threat of a boycott could be enough for a company to switch course. Now they've discovered that for every person willing to take a stand, there are 1000 more who'll stick around, or be swayed by ads, or whatever else.
The idea that you're doing business to provide actual goods and services which does some good in the world seems to have disappeared. Now that is nothing more than a means to an end: the money. You don't open a business because you want to get into the whatever-business. You do it to earn the most money you can. I'm sure the ever worsening socio-economic climate has something to do with it.
We can introduce more consumer and worker protection laws to bring back some breaks on all this. Make the former theoretical punishments to businesses come back as actual punishments, which will hopefully make them behave. Doing it properly is hard. The culture of loopholes isn't going away any-time soon.
You know, it would be interesting to apply this to the whole company. Want to vertically integrate everything? Sure, but be ready for any infraction to bring everything to a halt.
1. No. It was always awful for an unacceptable number of people. It's just your turn to feel the pinch. I suspect you'd get a different answer if you asked someone from China.
2. We have to look forwards, not backwards. Yesterday contained the seeds of today. Today contains the seeds of tomorrow. No point rewinding unless you want history to repeat.
I think that the concept of "Capitalism going wrong" is silly and ahistorical.
Capital and capitalists ("capitalism" was initially not the focus) is a concept which appeared in the last 17th century with the Dutch East India Company, and became a lot more prominent in the 19th century with the Industrial revolution.
Capitalism is not market economy, mercantilism or the accumulation of money (all of that was already a thing during feudal economies, and before the industrial revolution)...
Capitalism is about the means of production, their ownership, the profits (or plundering of resources, in a colonial context), the sharing thereof.
It has *always* been uneven, and unpleasant if you're not in the class which actually has ownership of the means of production.
"Maximal benefit for as many people as possible" is not a goal that the people who hoarded the means of production (people who hoarded capital) ever had in mind. I understand that you didn't explicitly say it, but it's still implied in what you wrote. Maybe the implications is that capitalism fortuitously happened to encourage that "maximal benefit", but even that is misleading: what actually happened is that whenever you have a "blue ocean" to move to, whenever the market is expanding and growing (by the introduction of new productive technologies or the growth of population), there are more spoils that can be shared and enjoyed more widely across the population.
But the rate of profit tends to fall, there are fewer profits to share, and unless encouraged by the point of a bayonet, those who own capital don't have any reason to divest themselves to share more of it with society.
One obvious example, are the exploited people during colonialism: despite benefit from spoils being abundant in the west, one shouldn't expect that the colonies' benefit was ever a priority.
Another example is you suggesting
> somewhere in the late 1990s
A lot of the profits that you've witnessed in the west, are due to the markets of the former socialist republics opening up to western exploitation. Depending on the kind of investments or economic assistance that had been provided, some countries fared better than others... No one would've claimed that capitalism brought benefits for the many in the late 1990s in Russia, for example.
There will come a time when we need to have an honest conversation about the limitations of an economy which is based on encouraging sociopathic behavior.
Our society learned nothing. As we speak, Mark Zuckerberg is shaking hands with our world's lawmakers and politicians to push Chat Control through the EU to make sure Meta and co. can crawl into every last nook and cranny of your brain that they can for that sweet, sweet data.
> to make sure Meta and co. can crawl into every last nook and cranny of your brain that they can for that sweet, sweet data.
Just wait 'til Musk's brain-chip gets approved for general public sale. They'll find a way to get a law passed that says everyone has to get a hole drilled in their head (except of course the super-rich and their political pets).
Even if you are not the one addicted, other people’s addiction problems are still your problems. Being blind to that fact makes you both complicit in it and vulnerable to it.
1) You’re misunderstanding the concept of magical thinking. It is not an umbrella term for false expectations. Magical thinking occurs when a person assumes that their thoughts, words, or actions can influence, cause, or prevent events that are not causally connected, thereby disregarding conventional rules of cause and effect. Or one could also say that a hidden causality is assumed where common sense would recognize that none exists.
2) You’re confusing the societal level with the individual level. The expectation that my own personal problem will be solved for me is different from the expectation that a society will get a handle on a widespread problem among its people. The first sounds like someone should take more personal responsibility. The second is a reasonable expectation.
3) You leave open what follows from this. If capitalism can’t deliver on this, what should be done? Should it be reformed or overcome? Should we simply accept that many people will be harmed and let things take their course? If so, I’d like to know why we don’t also turn off all traffic lights, remove all traffic signs, and abolish all traffic rules.
> "You can't expect capitalism to solve your addiction problems."
You can hope and wish that they would have at least enough ethics to not actively abuse psychology and the way human brains are hard-wired to totally take unfair advantage of those facts to extract maximum profit for a tiny handful of humanity at the expense of everyone everywhere pretty much.
Sure, better ethical principles might solve this. But extracting maximum profit is the prime directive of capitalism. This might be shit ethics, but it is brilliant capitalism.
This is emblematic of a certain kind of foolish libertarian thinking where capitalism is treated as an end rather than a means. To normal people, the entire selling point of capitalism is that it is pitched as the best way to achieve a happy and comfortable life for the greatest number. If it's working against that end, what good is it? Toss it out and replace it.
I don't think the parent is being tongue-in-cheek, and even if he is, plenty of people have expressed that sentiment seriously. Robin Hanson famously thinks addiction is impossible (or rather, that it's a true expression of revealed preference), which he ideologically needs to do because to admit otherwise creates problems for his defense of unrestrained capitalism.
