alt Hacker NewsI remember, vaguely*, a British polemicist once tilting at the eco-populist demons-du-jour by saying “it’s not carrier bags that are the problem, it’s supermarkets, and it’s not SUVs destroying the plant, it’s cars.”
In that spirit, it’s not Facebook that’s crippling children’s brains, it is phones and the apps that run on them. OLEDs, Retina, 120+Hz, infinite scroll, algorithmic content, and 10h battery life are all just as much to blame as Instagram stories.
It’s like recognizing over-fishing is a crisis which needs to be tackled and then suing McDonalds because they sell a lot of Filets-o-Fish.
If we were to do something then we could hold our leaders accountable for regulating all of this, but there’s such an enormous conflict of interest there (namely that they’d be regulating the golden goose that gives them so much tax revenue and economic investment) that I long gave up hope they’d play it by the book.
* Rod Liddell? Giles Fraser? Nick Ferrari?
There may also be an issue of objective divergence. We don’t actually know if kids’ brains are being ruined. All we know is that they’re different—probably better in some ways and worse in others. We are justifiably risk averse when it comes to non-consensually modifying how people think, but we won’t know for 20 years if the losses outweigh the gains. If giving kids ADHD is even possible (and I doubt it is) then it’s a mixed bag because neurodivergent people really do have more of the creativity, insight, and judgment that can’t be outsourced to AI; the ethical issue is that, while neurodivergence is beneficial to the collective, it’s still a hedonic net negative for the person who has it.
All we can say right now is that social media companies are irresponsible, not that they’re necessarily destructive. But institutions have always done things to people’s minds without their consent that have been reckless.
We can look at how Facebook handles its own moral responsibilities and correctly indict it. What’s shakier is the claim that 2020s social media does more psychosocial violence than, say, 1950s communities did. I’m not convinced either side of this argument decisively wins.