Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Free Will

m.nautil.us

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

491–500 of 523 posts

Re: Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Free Will

#491

Post by erikpukinskis »

freebooter wrote: post #364
zamalek wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Attention as well as free will is a scarce resource on a personal level. I used to seriously question why anyone would buy almost identical Apple devices year-after-year; where-as I'd spend at least a day researching which Android devices were available. The truth is that it's a bloody phone. I was expending all my free will on trivialities and wasn't making choices that actually matter. I think this problem is more…

You make good points. I've been in IT now 20 years, and while I need a phone to text and make calls, I do nothing else with it. I'm thinking of ditching my iPhone for a flip phone. I served in the military years ago. Just one tour. I got out with good memories but also some ideas. For example, I have standardized on Levi's 501 jeans, button down shirts of the same brand, and desert boots. I wear this daily. I don't h…

> I'm thinking of ditching my iPhone for a flip phone

If you are in any longstanding 100% iMessage group chats you will be silently excluded from them if you switch away from iPhone. Disabling iMessage will have no effect on those chats.

Re: Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Free Will

#492

Post by Zak »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #206
alansammarone wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. If you can't consciously choose to turn off your phone and go read a book, you never had anything that remotely resembles free will.

There is a spectrum. If you want to guess the outcome of a coin toss, no strings attached, you're completely free to choose heads or tails. But a lot of bright minds are working very hard to convince you to pick up that phone and not the book. You're being told to pick tails by a man with a gun, offered a reward if you do and pain if you don't. Perhaps this man is quieter for you, or maybe you have never let him in.…

> You're being told to pick tails by a man with a gun

No, you are not. A man brandishing a gun and telling you do do something is threatening to kill you. Nobody at instafacetweet is going to kill you for ignoring their products or limiting your usage.

What we're dealing with isn't an armed strongman, but a clown. The clown really wants your attention and has a lot of tricks up his sleeve to get it, but regardless of the difficulty, ignoring him is not dangerous.

Re: Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Free Will

#493

Post by Mz »

mirimir wrote: post #45
alansammarone wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. If you can't consciously choose to turn off your phone and go read a book, you never had anything that remotely resembles free will.

That's easy to say. But what if family, friends and work are so tied up with your phone that doing so would hurt too much? Sure, you can change your work and friends, and cut off your family, but that's hard.

It can be hard. It may be less painful to do it slowly and gradually over time rather than some sudden pronouncement.

To some degree, any time anyone says they "can't" do something like this, they are saying they don't want it bad enough. I have done a lot of rearranging of my life to get things to work in a satisfactory fashion. This includes but is not limited to changing my relationship to how I use my phone. I used to be a big phone person. I now do most stuff online. After a long time of doing very little with my phone, I am slowly doing more with it these days.

But there is also this: If your family, friends and work all are basically making you crazy, they would probably do so even if phones did not exist. So, this might be an indicator of deeper problems.

Or it might be an indicator that you aren't being driven as crazy as other people, so it just isn't really that important to you.

Re: Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Free Will

#494

Post by xster »

kaendfinger wrote: post #407
briga wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to name any large news publications that don't do this? I can't think of any.

Breitbart has an interesting theory on this: Present your bias, and admit your publication has a world view, because even NPR has a world view. Nobody is unbiased, so stop trying to be unbiased, and present how you see it. Then, a real reader will go to multiple "view points" and gather their own opinion.

+1. I do wish NPR is fully publicly funded and gets some degree of medium term immunity from the current legislative and executive branch (media as a fourth branch of government / res publica?).

Now it's just a mouth piece for rich donors but has 'public' in its name for marketing.

Re: Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Free Will

#495

Post by dmfdmf »

pmichaud wrote: post #234
dmfdmf wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In that scenario, we're effectively no longer in control of our own free will as long as someone else can profit by controlling it. This is a self contradiction. You always have the choice to turn off or tune out the distractions and focus your attention on more important things (which is the essence of free will). That people don't feel like doing that is a psychological problem not a problem with capitalism or pr…

This is wrong because it looks exactly one layer deep and ignores the greater complexity. Of course the answer to a DOS is to not accept the incoming requests. It's tricky to distinguish between the malicious requests and the legitimate ones, and doing so doesn't cost nothing. One way to break the defense of a DOS is to DOS the system that does the sorting. Further, The "requests", in this case bids for our attention…

I never denied it was complex, I denied that it was an attack on free will which is impossible. I think it is a real psychological problem and I think blaming capitalism or the "the system" or "the man", etc. are themselves rationalizations and misdirection that prey on people susceptible to suggestion or manipulation, i.e. emotionalism, to advance political agendas.

Re: Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Free Will

#496

Post by elijahparker »

"One standard I use is GPS. If a GPS distracted us in physical space in the ways that other technologies distract us in informational space, no one would keep using that GPS."

Wow, that's a good way to bring the issue to light! How many times have I gone to the internet to look something up (Amazon, perhaps) and got distracted by other things? Although they are a big player in this space, this is why I really like google's homepage compared to (ugh) yahoo or MSN. Nothing trying to distract my attention from why I came there in the first place (initially anyway)

Re: Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Free Will

#497

Post by woodandsteel »

slimshady94 wrote: post #226
woodandsteel wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems to me the only answer is web decentralization plus improving peoples skills for critical thinking and problem-solving communication.

Would a technical solution (web decentralization) really be necessary if a political solution (adequate regulations) was available for these issues?

I am very dubious that could happen, for two reasons.

One that the big centalizers have too much political influence, at least in the US, and let's not forget places like China and Russia where the governments to control the web.

But even if you passed some strong regulations, the centralizers would likely keep coming up with new innovations that would break the spirit of the laws.

Re: Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Free Will

#498

Post by dgwight »

free_everybody wrote: post #256

Stop carrying your smartphone. Leave it at home. If you must because your family/work depends on you, then delete every app. Use your laptop as your main driver. If you need to, get a laptop with better battery life. Start developing a personal philosophy of internet usage. Here is mine: Category 3 [Abstain from completely] Reddit (Yes, all of reddit), Facebook ... Category 2 [Check once every couple days ~15 min tot…

On an iPhone you can see how much time you spend with each app open in the last week. (Go to the Battery section and toggle the clock button).

I think I’m going to start keeping a log to help be more conscious of this.

In the last week, I’ve had 28 hours total screen time. My top 3 are MiniHack 8.8 hrs, Safari 7.5hrs, and Reddit 3.6hrs

Re: Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Free Will

#499

Post by anigbrowl »

jerf wrote: post #348
anigbrowl wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there aren't that many people who have their health, shelter, or food directly affected by this race for the attention economy That seems highly questionable to me. Large numbers of people in retail and service industries disrupted or threatened by technological change are arguably impacted by it.

Tone: Honest. How does attention economy abuse impact people in retail and service especially? (I get that the internet at large is impacting them immensely, and the list of such people and professions hardly stops there, but I don't immediately see the connection between them and attention abuse specifically.)

I'm probably casting ym net a bit too wide, so as to encompass all non-specialist internet-driven retail. Amazon uses these techniques a lot, I feel, albeit in a more subtle way. But I agree that's outside the scope of the original article's journalistic focus.

Re: Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Free Will

#500

Post by SamPatt »

jmcgough wrote: post #302
xster wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corporate media like NYT and WashPo etc that writes things like you must be crazy to not believe there are WMDs in Iraq are not serious news sites. Rich != serious. And hegemonic news smearing all sources of independent journalism and grassroot progressive political movements is just about the opposite of the point of this article.

Like them or not, the NYT and WashPo do some of the best, factual investigative journalism in the world. Have they been wrong? Sure. But they have extremely high standards for publishing a story, so you can generally assume that they're accurate. They also are the ones who break a lot of the biggest, most impactful stories. I think a better criticism of them would be wash po turning a blind eye to Bezos and others th…

>they have extremely high standards for publishing a story, so you can generally assume that they're accurate

Dangerous assumption for any given story. Skepticism always warranted.

Post reply on HN