Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Free Will

The question of who creates the content is mostly orthogonal to what I mean.

I'm talking about is a platform where my decision to click/watch content is based on reviews and recommendations, not loud design and attention-grabbing headlines.

In that world, the subscription model could make sense and content aggregation could make sense, but neither is required, nor does either addressing the issue on its own.

This kind of attitude from your parent commenter is extremely common, it is an artifact of ideology and the working of technological rationality into the consciousness. While the parent commenter probably believes he or she lives in a post-ideological world in which rationality has been obtained and found to be forever placed somewhere between right and left, a compromise of two extremes in which domination cannot be acknowledged because as Marx put it, Bentham reins, J.S Mill makes a strange comeback in the denial of structural effects and seeing totality. The kind of ignorance or blindness to the totality of society is well captured by P.W Bridman quoted by Marcuse:

>"We evidently know what we mean by length if we can tell what the length of any and every object is, and for the physicist nothing more is required. To find the length of an object, we have to perform certain physical operations. The concept of length is therefore fixed when the operations by which length is measured are fixed: that is, the concept of length involves as much and nothing more than the set of operations by which length is determined. In general, we mean by any concept nothing more than a set of operations; the concept is synonymous with the corresponding set of operations."

>Bridgman has seen the wide implications of this mode of thought for the society at large:

"To adopt the operational point of view involves much more than a mere restriction of the sense in which we understand 'concept,' but means a far-reaching change in all our habits of thought, in that we shall no longer permit ourselves to use as tools in our thinking concepts of which we cannot give an adequate account in terms of operations."

As AI get smarter and places like Google collect more data about you, they will eventually know all the right buttons to press to get you to look and not look away.

Here's how I (try to) keep the Internet-based distractions to a minimum:

* Uninstall twitter, facebook and other social apps from your phone; only use the computer (or other device that's not constantly in your pocket).

* Even on your computer, log out of twitter, facebook and others. Only log in when you want to look into something (eg. check the social events, send a message), and use private/incognito mode for this; use 2FA - besides being good security practice, it's an extra hurdle so you won't default to "quickly check" the sites when your mental energy is low.

* When you do use tw/fb/..., unfollow/block/opt out of all the meme/cute/funny stuff (at least n my fb feed, there's basically 10 sites that'd constantly crop up - blocking posts by all of these greatly increased Signal/Noise ratio on FB);

* Have a reading list ready. I use iBooks on my iPhone to load up interesting articles, but you can use whichever method you prefer. The goal is to have something interesting/worthwhile to read available for the moments when you do want to look at your phone and/or kill some time (eg when in a long queue or waiting for a train). This something shouldn't require special focus or mental energy/capacity.

* Develop heuristics to ignore content that you know is junk but that tends to drag you in. I suspect this is slightly different for anyone, mine is: anything cute, funny, outrageous, sad or is a list of things. I am aware this potentially cuts out some genuinely worthwhile stuff and I'm okay with it. Considering my attention & time is finite and the Internet is (for all purposes) not, I'd rather have false positives than false negatives.

* I also have a high bar for what's newsworthy for me: anything that personally affects me (meaning I have to change my intentions or react in some way), and stuff that'll still be considered newsworthy in a month. Anything else gets ignored, no matter the medium. Again I'm okay with false positives. Also, since my friends are colleagues typically don't have the same approach, if I miss anything important (or really interesting), I'll probably hear it on the grapevine.

Couldn't be happier.

complains about tech distracting us... has a popover ad that greys out and covers the text of the story...