We're moving to a post-entertainment society
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We're moving to a post-entertainment society
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Re: We're moving to a post-entertainment society
#2This part especially stood out to me, capturing the essence of a sentiment I've long felt but struggled to articulate.:
"The tech platforms aren’t like the Medici in Florence, or those other rich patrons of the arts. They don’t want to find the next Michelangelo or Mozart. They want to create a world of junkies—because they will be the dealers."
Re: We're moving to a post-entertainment society
#3'C'mon...the first hit is free.'
Re: We're moving to a post-entertainment society
#4Excellent framing: Dopamine beats entertainment. Just see people with their smartphones out when they’re ‘watching’ a Netflix show. Or the unbundling of funny, often context-less moments from that show into bite sized pieces of dopamine, rebundled together on your social media platform of choice (everything in tech is either bundling or unbundling). It’s all drugs at this point. The emperor is naked.
Re: We're moving to a post-entertainment society
#5This was an interesting piece.
One thing I think was missing is a note about evolution's role.
I think many of these traits are evolutionary; they trigger dopamine responses because at some point they were helpful. Sugary foods have calories so you don't starve. Boredom is painful so people invent.
Modern society is frankly too good at satisfying these evolutionary cravings. They've become maladaptive by nature of being artificially satiated. Boredom no longer leads to invention, it leads to addiction. Sugary foods no longer help you survive the winter, they give you diabetes.
Our social evolution has dramatically outpaced our geneologic evolution. Our social evolution is so far along that we can not only manipulate ourselves using our prior geneologic evolution, but also treat maladaptive traits well enough to prevent evolving out of those signals.
Eating too much sugary food gives people diabetes, but modern medicine allows people to survive that and procreate. Social media makes people depressed and anxious, but we have meds to help and online dating to find a partner.
That feedback loop where maladaptive traits are gradually phased out is gone. Society is now the cause of and solution to most of life's problems (insert Homer Simpson "beer is the cause of and solution to life's problems" meme here).
The solutions here kind of suck. One is to let evolution run its course, but that's frankly a thin veil over eugenics and society will just pivot and make some other trait maladaptive. The other is regulation, which is likely to be politically unpopular. The last is the global warming approach where we largely ignore it until nature takes control away from us. That appears to be what we're doing; we hope the issues don't become society-threatening and wait.
Re: We're moving to a post-entertainment society
#6This was an interesting piece. One thing I think was missing is a note about evolution's role. I think many of these traits are evolutionary; they trigger dopamine responses because at some point they were helpful. Sugary foods have calories so you don't starve. Boredom is painful so people invent. Modern society is frankly too good at satisfying these evolutionary cravings. They've become maladaptive by nature of be…
I feel like people in tech like to ascribe causality to evolution. As if “Evolution” is some sort of sentient, God-like entity that knows what’s best.
It’s not. It’s a theory. The core tenet of evolution is that organisms adapt to their environment.
All organisms are capable of modifying their environment such that they improve their odds of survival. Birds build nests. Beavers build dams. Trees drop seeds in clever ways.
Humans do an upgraded version of all those things.
Technology (in the broadest sense of the term) is really about tweaking the environment to increase our odds of survival. Sometimes, these experiments backfire. It happens to all species. It just happens to be globally-disruptive in the case of humans.
Frankly, all this talk about how “social evolution has hijacked the dopaminergic pathways of the brain” sounds like the ramblings of someone who recently read a pop-science book about the brain.
Re: We're moving to a post-entertainment society
#7This argument starts with
"financialization has killed art" but ends with "screens are bad...."
I am very sympathetic to these points, but it's also slightly amusing to me that a decade and a half post-Web 2.0, they aren't simply agreed-upon points and common knowledge for everyone.
Re: We're moving to a post-entertainment society
#8This was an interesting piece. One thing I think was missing is a note about evolution's role. I think many of these traits are evolutionary; they trigger dopamine responses because at some point they were helpful. Sugary foods have calories so you don't starve. Boredom is painful so people invent. Modern society is frankly too good at satisfying these evolutionary cravings. They've become maladaptive by nature of be…
I feel like people in tech like to ascribe causality to evolution. As if “Evolution” is some sort of sentient, God-like entity that knows what’s best. It’s not. It’s a theory. The core tenet of evolution is that organisms adapt to their environment. All organisms are capable of modifying their environment such that they improve their odds of survival. Birds build nests. Beavers build dams. Trees drop seeds in clever…
"To me the jury is still out as to what this will all mean in the end. The worst case scenario is the annihilation of all life on our planet, rendering the entire human experiment a useless exercise in self aggrandizement. The best case scenario, the one that I personally am holding out for, is that it all leads to a leap in consciousness in which the creative power of abstract thinking stops being used exclusively for the benefit of just one species and starts being utilized on behalf of the planet and ultimately the cosmos." (Jeff Carreira, The Path of Cosmic Consciousness)
Re: We're moving to a post-entertainment society
#9Excellent framing: Dopamine beats entertainment. Just see people with their smartphones out when they’re ‘watching’ a Netflix show. Or the unbundling of funny, often context-less moments from that show into bite sized pieces of dopamine, rebundled together on your social media platform of choice (everything in tech is either bundling or unbundling). It’s all drugs at this point. The emperor is naked.
> people with their smartphones out when they’re ‘watching’ a Netflix show
I noticed myself doing this years ago and when I really reflected on it, I felt very unsettled by what was happening to me.
And meanwhile most of us have people (partner, kids, friends) you'll have (hopefully) a lifetime with, and pursuing some kind of deeper connection with them instead in those moments actually would result in some kind of meaningful reward. Yet you keep on scrolling and seeking out another kind of reward which invariably never really comes. Disturbing stuff when you break it down. But most of us kind of shrug it off. No big deal.
Re: We're moving to a post-entertainment society
#10This is how Silicon Valley "changed the world".