alt Hacker NewsOur incredible brains are easily high-jacked. Another concerning trend in global/societal mental health that stresses different parts of it (e.g. increased ER visits). If the entirety of humanity is a connected mind let's say, and more and more parts of it are being damaged by companies that capitalize on "flaws" in the human brain -- which means our shared mentality keeps weakening and can be exploited more and more. It's just so much easier now because there is a machine in your pocket full of endless ways to high-jack your mind and attention.
We live in really crazy/fascinating times, accelerating human problems at "internet scale".
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It is interesting how we actually ended up forming societies and cultures with how many little broken things occur in our minds. I guess as the saying goes "What doesn't kill you leaves you a hollow broken shell to pump out more copies of your DNA".
Because these problems have never been dealt with. We scold victims and sell this "individual responsibility"/"bootstraps" bullshit to avoid doing so. Some of us create these products that actively fuck with people's ability to make decisions well, and then we yell at those people and tell them to act right.
The only difference now is the Internet both makes it frictionless and therefore so much easier to do, and the Internet also then let's us see into the lives being ruined in the process. But the problem remains exactly the same: if you, as a person, have no ethics and see no issue in causing misery at scale, you can make a LOT of fucking money in our society. And not only will you likely not be charged, now they'll probably call you an innovator and put you on a magazine.
And then we wonder why everything is getting worse all the time.
And before anyone tries the gotcha with me, no I do not work at any firm like this. No gambling, no social media, no recommendation algorithms. The company I work at comes by it honestly: we sell solutions to problems people actually have. And no we're not worth 66 trillion dollars but, we can all sleep at night. And that's not so bad.
There is also the direction of influencing those in charge of creating laws and orders and ways to prevent society from collapsing. Law makers who give in to lobbying -- I mean some of these prices points are quite low: $XX,XXX to get someone to vote "yes" for a thing that impacts millions of constituents and earns the lobbying orders of magnitude more than the payout. That is excellent ROI.