Honestly curious why you're being downvoted, but I think about this all the time. We always focus on the positives of any new technology and the negatives are either invisible (till later) or glossed over.
Not my idea though, greater minds than I have talked about this a lot:
Neil Postman, Lewis Mumford, etc..
I know a few people who buy these, and they kind of know what they're doing. They just try and not think about it too hard.
It reminds me of the saying: "It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It".
If these people thought about it for a few minutes, they would understand, but they choose not to, as ignoring it is too advantageous.
I admit I was tempted, as the price of all streaming services goes up, and services become more and more fragmented. During the same period where I have not had a raise.
In the 90s, there was a cottage industry selling CDs of bootleg software at swap meets and flea markets. A guy my dad knew was almost condescending to anyone who paid for software despite having been hit by viruses multiple times because it was so much cheaper. Even having to deal with a client(!) who naively called the vendor support only to be informed that they hadn’t actually purchased a license wasn’t enough to get him to resist that savings.
I won't argue the ethics of piracy. That was not my point, but if you want to I suppose I could.
My point was, their ethics WOULD have prevented them from doing the thing. But they chose not to think about it too hard. Perhaps subconsciously. I'm not above doing this sort of thing either. We all do it for various things.
I've added code that is bad for the user (overbearing telemetry for instance) because my salary depended on it. At the time I tried not to think about it too much, as it would cause cognitive dissonance.
I don't own a cell phone, haven't for years. I fear this alone would be enough to arouse suspicion and I'll be denied access. Not an immediate problem for my family: as a Canadian I have no plans to visit the states for a long time. However, I could see this being suspicious in other countries as well..
I think the difference is between:
1) me doing a nice thing and them reciprocating later, possibly. Others may or may not see this display of niceness.
2) me doing a nice thing, getting karma points my friend and other sees, which I can possibly use to get perks of some kind.
Gamification is not a new word for an old idea. It's a new thing, at least in many contexts.
Ward Cunningham, who coined technical debt, describes it as having interest, which is exponential:
> Shipping first time code is like going into debt. A little debt speeds development so long as it is paid back promptly with a rewrite.... The danger occurs when the debt is not repaid. Every minute spent on not-quite-right code counts as interest on that debt. Entire engineering organizations can be brought to a stand-still under the debt load of an unconsolidated implementation, object-oriented or otherwise.
It's not just a matter of preference or proclamation. There are decades of research showing that more walkable neighborhoods are associated with higher physical activity levels, lower rates of some chronic diseases, more interaction with neighbors, and stronger feelings of community. The debate is usually about how large those effects are and whether they're worth the trade-offs, not whether the effects exist at all.
Yes, yes, totally dismiss the agency of people who inconveniently don't like what you want them to like. Their preferences mean nothing, their actions must be dictated.
I'd be more angry with you if I wasn't amused at the frustration you must be feeling in failing to get traction for your dystopian vision.
You're making a lot of unwarranted assumptions about me:
I'm not dismissing agency.
I don't feel people making decisions is inconvenient.
I don't not like their decisions.
Their preferences do not mean nothing.
I'm not dictating their actions.
I own and drive 2 cars.
I'll just stop there. I don't feel this conversation can continue in a positive way.
Walkable neighborhoods and cities that aren't car centric being a "dystopian vision" is laughable. Thankfully, the default for car brains across much of the globe is car centric urban design.
You people never fail to be ridiculously dramatic.
Ahh France. I was in Paris trying to order a sandwich.
I asked: "Parlez-vous anglais?"
Them: "Non!" (rudely and went back to what they were doing)
I then tried explain in my very butchered french I learned in elementary school:
"Jambon du pain et...."
And they immediately turned back with a big smile on their face:
"What would you like?"
It seems the fact I knew some paltry french and I was trying was enough. A strange but nice experience.
Only it's been shown time and time again that piracy does not destroy the profit motive.
As a personal anecdote, when I used to pirate things, I still bought things in the same category, ie: I would pirate movies and I still bought movies. I would pirate games and I still bought games.
I don't think it affected how much of each thing I purchased by much, but I don't really know.
I think whether you can say it's empirically incorrect depends on if the researchers measured the right thing. Measuring: “Do you think your job is useful?” was over-simplifying, and could miss the phenomenon that Graeber was actually talking about.
However, it's no longer a good metric, as "drawing svg pelicans" is now showing up too much in the training data, so is not proof of generalization.