Quotulatiousness

August 17, 2024

Twit/X – Hellsite or online Hotel California?

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Ed West on the odd phenomenon of people loudly claiming they’ve had it with “this hellsite” and that they’re decamping to social-media-site-of-the-minute, yet in many, many cases they’re back on “this hellsite” not very long afterwards:

There was something of a trend in the late 2000s for former hell-raising journalists to start more sedate publications because they felt that society was changing, and people didn’t want to drink and party as much as they used to. It was heralded as the end of the “new lad” and the rise of a more mature outlook among men, largely by culture journalists whose job it is to invent societal trends.

And I remember reading these articles and always thinking “isn’t this just you getting old?” None of my friends go out and get pissed four times a week anymore — what does this say about British society?

I’ve long felt the same about Twitter, that while it’s immensely useful as a resource for news and information, and interacting with friends, I’ve got to the stage where it’s not fun. But that’s probably just middle age, and at a certain point people should avoid too much time joking around on social media, lest they become Facebook boomer memes. (Or, in Britain, go to jail.)

This week I was on the Spectator Americano podcast talking about Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, following my recent post on how he had changed the nature of the place. (I promise this is the last time I write about every journalist’s favourite social media site for at least two weeks.)

Everyone claims to hate Twitter, I pointed out, but they never leave. I actually started writing this piece a few months back, and noted that many people have bailed out from “X”, as no one calls it, among them academic Kathleen Stock, satirist Andrew Doyle and Labour politician Dawn Butler.

I’ve had to rewrite this because I think they’re all back now. In fact almost everyone who leaves the Hellsite soon returns; it’s a running joke, because we’re all addicted. I checked in on Threads the other day and it was full of people expressing their relief about breaking their Twitter habit and finding a new home. We shall see.

Others, like Alastair Campbell, have set up accounts on Bluesky but still proclaim their intention to stay on Twitter to fight the far-Right. Okay, sure.

Stock and Doyle seemed to be leaving in part because of the toxicity of their own side, in their case gender-critical feminists, and this kind of unpleasantness can indeed feel worse than when it comes from opponents. Watching online debates about immigration, for instance, I’m often reminded of GK Chesterton’s famous quote about pity and truth:

    The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.

On one side will be vaguely establishment figures repeating arguments that feel warm-hearted and kind but also untrue, and on the other, mostly anonymous users citing a wealth of studies to show that the situation is actually much worse than that, and clearly having better arguments, while often being incredibly unpleasant and personal to the journalists involved. The fact that anonymous users are often the most informed and insightful accounts adds to the Chestertonian feel.

July 23, 2024

QotD: Coffee

Filed under: Humour, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Without a quart of coffee in the morning, I will be functionally retarded. I will stare at the wall like a stunned carp until noon. I will take things out of the refrigerator and put them in the pantry when I’m done with them. I will put toothpaste on my toothbrush and then attempt to shave with it. I will open peanuts, throw out the insides, and eat the shells. People at the grocery store will remind me to run home and put on pants. I will never turn my turn signal off. When my cell phone rings, I will answer my wallet.

Steve H., “I’m Going to Kill Myself: It’s as Simple as That”, Hog On Ice, 2005-03-18.

April 20, 2024

QotD: Cyber-addiction

Filed under: Health, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Researchers at the University of London Institute of Psychiatry say the distractions of email and such extract a toll on intellectual performance as similar to that of marijuana. The study of 1,100 volunteers found that attention and concentration could be so frazzled by answering and managing calls and messages that IQ temporarily dropped by 10 points. The resulting loss of focus due to “Crackberry”, in fact, was judged to worse than that experienced by pot smokers.

This, of course, cannot really be a surprise. It is a great hallmark of modern life that over-indulgence in practically anything can be turned into pathology given enough time and clinical studies.

Jeff A. Taylor, Reason Express, 2005-04-26.

April 5, 2024

“[T]oo many charlatans of this species have already been allowed to make vast fortunes at the expense of a gullible public”

Filed under: Books, Health, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Colby Cosh on his “emerging love-Haidt relationship” as Jonathan Haidt’s new book is generating a lot of buzz:

If Haidt has special expertise that wouldn’t pertain to any well-educated person, I wonder a little in what precise realm it lies. Read the second sentence of this article again: he’s a psychologist … who teaches ethics … at a business school? Note that he seems to have abandoned a prior career as an evolutionary biology pedlar, and the COVID pandemic wasn’t kind to his influential ideas about political conservatives being specially motivated by disgust and purity. Much of The Anxious Generation is instead devoted to trendy findings from “neuroscience” that it might be too kind to describe as “speculative”. (I’ll say it again until it’s conventional wisdom: a “neuroscientist” is somebody in a newly invented pseudofield who couldn’t get three inches into the previously established “-ology” for “neuro-“.)

These are my overwhelming prejudices against Haidt; and, in spite of all of them, I suspect somebody had to do what he is now doing, which is to make the strongest available case for social media as a historical impactor on social arrangements and child development. Today the economist/podcaster Tyler Cowen has published a delightfully adversarial interview with Haidt that provides a relatively fast way of boning up on the Haidt Crusade. Cowen belongs to my pro-innovation, techno-optimist, libertarian tribe: we both feel positive panic at the prospect of conservative-flavoured state restrictions on media, which are at the heart of the Haidt agenda.

But reading the interview makes me somewhat more pro-Haidt than I would otherwise be (i.e., not one tiny little bit). On a basic level, Cowen doesn’t, by any means, win the impromptu debate by a knockout — even though he is one of the most formidable debaters alive. Haidt has four key reforms he would like to see implemented politically: “No smartphones before high school; no social media before age 16; phone-free schools; far more unsupervised play and childhood independence.”

This is a fairly limited, gentle agenda for school design and other policies, and although I believe Haidt’s talk of “rewiring brains” is mostly ignorable BS, none of his age-limitation rules are incompatible with a free society, and none bear on adults, except in their capacity as teachers and parents.

The “rewiring” talk isn’t BS because it’s necessarily untrue, mind you. Haidt, like Jordan Peterson, is another latter-day Marshall McLuhan — a boundary-defying celebrity intellectual who strategically turns speculation into assertion, and forces us, for better or worse, to re-examine our beliefs. McLuhan preached that new forms of media like movable type or radio do drive neurological change, that they cause genuine warp-speed human evolution — but his attitude, unlike Haidt’s, was that these changes are certain to happen, and that arguing against them was like arguing with the clouds in favour of a sunny day. The children who seem “addicted” to social media are implicitly preparing to live in a world that has social media. They are natives of the future, and we adults are just observers of it.

April 1, 2024

“The loss of capacity for memory or real experience is what makes people susceptible to the work of cartoon pseudo-intellectuals”

Filed under: Business, Media, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Matt Taibbi strongly encourages his readers to exercise their brains, get out of the social media scroll-scroll-scroll trap, and stay sane:

After a self-inflicted wound led to Twitter/X stepping on my personal account, I started to worry over what looked like the removal of multiple lanes from the Information Superhighway. Wikipedia rules tightened. Google search results seemed like the digital equivalent of a magician forcing cards on consumers. In my case, content would often not even reach people who’d registered as social media followers just to receive those alerts.

I was convinced the issue was political. There was clear evidence of damage to the left and right independents from companies like NewsGuard, or the ideologically-driven algorithms behind Google or Amazon ad programs, to deduce the game was rigged to give unearned market advantages to corporate players. The story I couldn’t shake involved video shooter Jon Farina, whose footage was on seemingly every cable channel after J6, but which he himself was barred from monetizing.

Now I think differently. After spending months talking to people in tech, I realize the problem is broader and more unnerving. On top of the political chicanery, sites like Twitter and TikTok don’t want you leaving. They want you scrolling endlessly, so you’ll see ads, ads, and more ads. The scariest speech I heard came from a tech developer describing how TikTok reduced the online experience to a binary mental state: you’re either watching or deciding, Next. That’s it: your brain is just a switch. Forget following links or connecting with other users. Four seconds of cat attacking vet, next, five ticks on Taylor Ferber’s boobs, next, fifteen on the guy who called two Chinese restaurants at once and held the phones up to each other, next, etc.

Generations ago it wasn’t uncommon for educated people to memorize chunks of The Iliad, building up their minds by forcing them to do all the rewarding work associated with real reading: assembling images, keeping track of plot and character structure, juggling themes and challenging ideas even as you carried the story along. Then came mass media. Newspapers shortened attention span, movies arrived and did visual assembly for you, TV mastered mental junk food, MTV replaced story with montages of interesting nonsensical images, then finally the Internet came and made it possible to endlessly follow your own random impulses instead of anyone else’s schedule or plot.

I’m not a believer in “eat your vegetables” media. People who want to reform the press often feel the solution involves convincing people that [they] just should read 6,000-word ProPublica investigations about farm prices instead of visiting porn sites or watching awesome YouTube compilations of crane crashes. It can’t work. The only way is to compete with spirit: make articles interesting or funny enough that audiences will swallow the “important” parts, although even that’s the wrong motive. Rolling Stone taught me that the lad-mag geniuses that company brought in in the nineties, who were convinced Americans wouldn’t read anything longer than 400 words in big type, were wrong. In fact, if you treat people like grownups, they tend to like a challenge, especially if the writer conveys his or her own excitement at discovery. The world is a great and hilarious mystery and if you don’t have confidence you can make the story of it fun, you shouldn’t be in media. But there is one problem.

Inventions like TikTok, which I’m on record saying shouldn’t be banned, are designed to create mentally helpless users, like H addicts. If you stand there scrolling and thinking Next! enough, your head will sooner or later be fully hollowed out. You’ll lose the ability to remember, focus, and decide for yourself. There’s a political benefit in this for leaders, but more importantly there’s a huge commercial boon. The mental jellyfish is more susceptible to advertising (which of course allows firms to charge more) and will show less and less will over time to walk out of the Internet’s various brain-eating chambers.

A cross of Jimmy Page and Akira Kurosawa probably couldn’t invent long-form content to lure away the boobs-and-cat-video addicts these sites are making. The loss of capacity for memory or real experience is what makes people susceptible to the work of cartoon pseudo-intellectuals like Yuval Noah Harari, who seem really to think nothing good or interesting happened until last week. The profound negativity of these WEF-style technocrats about all human experience until now reminds me of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, whose dystopian characters feared books because “They show the pores of the face of life”.

March 20, 2024

This “should be a reality check for the technocracy”

Filed under: Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ted Gioia on the SXSW audience reaction to being presented with full-quill AI enthusiasm that didn’t match the presenters’ expectations at all:

Tech leaders gathered in Austin for the South-by-Southwest conference a few days ago. There they showed a video boasting about the wonders of new AI technology.

And the audience started booing.

At first, just a few people booed. But then more and more — and louder and louder. The more the experts on screen praised the benefits of artificial intelligence, the more hostile the crowd got.

The booing started in response to the comment that “AI is a culture.” And the audience booed louder when the word disrupted was used as a term of praise (as is often the case in the tech world nowadays).

Ah, but the audience booed the loudest at this statement:

    I actually think that AI fundamentally makes us more human.

The event was a debacle — the exact opposite of what the promoters anticipated.

And it should be a reality check for the technocracy.

If they were paying attention, they might already have a hunch how much people hate this stuff — not just farmers in Kansas or your granny in Altoona, but hip, progressive attendees at SXSW.

These people literally come to the event to learn about new things, and even they are gagging on this stuff.

It’s more than just fears about runaway AI. Prevailing attitudes about digital tech and innovation are changing rapidly in real time — and not for the better. The users feel used.

Meanwhile the tech leaders caught in some time warp. They think they are like Steve Jobs launching a new Apple product in front of an adoring crowd.

Those days are gone.

Not even Apple is like Apple anymore. A similar backlash happened a few weeks ago, when Apple launched its super-high-tech virtual reality headset. The early response on social media was mockery and ridicule — something Steve Jobs never experienced.

This is the new normal. Not long ago we looked to Silicon Valley as the place where dreams came from, but now it feels more like ground zero for the next dystopian nightmare.

He’s not just a curmudgeonly nay-sayer (that’s more me than him), and has some specific things that are clearly turning a majority of technology users against the very technology that they once eagerly adopted:

They’re doing so many things wrong, I can’t even begin to scratch the surface here. But I’ll list a few warning signs.

You must be suspicious of tech leaders when …

  1. Their products and services keep getting worse over time.
  2. Their obvious goal is to manipulate and monetize the users of their tech, instead of serving and empowering them.
  3. The heaviest users of their tech suffer from depression, anxiety, suicidal impulses, and other negative effects as a result.
  4. They stop talking about quality, and instead boast incessantly about scalability, disruption, and destruction.
  5. They hide what their technology really does — resisting all requests for transparency and disclosure.
  6. They lock you into platforms, forcing you to use new “features” and related apps if you want to access the old ones.
  7. They force upgrades you don’t like, and downloads you don’t want.
  8. Their terms of use are filled with outrageous demands and sweeping disclaimers.
  9. They destroy entire industries not because they offer superior products, but only because as web gatekeepers they have a chokehold on information and customer flow — which they use ruthlessly to kill businesses and siphon off revenues.

Every one of those things is happening right here, right now.

We’re doing the technocracy a favor by calling it to their attention. If they get the message, they can avoid the coming train wreck. They can return to real innovation, with a focus on helping the users they now so ruthlessly exploit.

March 10, 2024

The rapid transition from the amazing smartphone to the “pocket moloch”

Filed under: Health, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:01

Magdalene J. Taylor follows up her New York Times article from last year with more evidence that so many of the social problems identified today are caused by, or at least made worse, by the almost universal addiction to smartphones:

A year ago, I published an opinion essay for the New York Times that changed the trajectory of my career. It was about how fewer Americans are having sex, across nearly every demographic. For any of the usual caveats — wealth, age, orientation — the data almost always highlighted that previous generations in the same circumstances were having more sex than we are today. My purpose in writing the essay was mainly to try to emphasize the role that sex plays in our cultural wellbeing its connection to the loneliness epidemic. Many of us have developed a blasé attitude toward sex, and I wanted people to care. It wasn’t really about intercourse, and I said as much. It was about wanting to live in an lively, energetic society.

Since writing, I have been continuously asked what I think the cause of all this is. Obviously, there isn’t one universal answer. After publishing, I went on radio shows and podcasts and was asked to share what I thought some of them could be. Economic despair, political unrest, even climate fears were among the reasons I’d heard cited. But all of that, honestly, feels pointlessly abstract. It puts the problem entirely out of our hands, when in fact I believe it may quite literally be in them.

The problem is obviously our phones.

In February, The Atlantic published a feature about the decline of hanging out. Within it was a particularly damning graph sharing the percentage of teens who report hanging out with friends two or more times per week since 1976. Rates were steady around 80 percent up until the mid-90s, when a subtle decrease began to occur. Then, in 2008 — one year after the release of the first iPhone — the decrease became much more dramatic. It has continued falling sharply since, hovering now at just under 60 percent of teens who spend ample time with friends each week.

Some of us really don’t like our screen time habits criticized. Others may think they appear smarter by highlighting other issues, that they can see above the fray and observe the macro trends that are really shaping our lives, not that stupid anti-phone rhetoric we hear from the Boomers. And some of these other trends do indeed apply. Correlation does not equal causation. Lots of things happened in 2008. Namely, a financial crisis the effects of which many argue we are still experiencing. When I shared the graph on Twitter/X saying phones are the obvious cause, this was one of the most common rebuttals. Another was the decline in third spaces. There are indeed few places for teenagers to hang out outside of the home. Skate parks are being turned into pickleball courts with “no loitering” signs, malls are shuttering and you can no longer spend $1 on a McChicken to justify hanging out in the McDonald’s dining area for hours. But as the Atlantic piece explains, the dwindling of places to be and experience community has a problem we’ve been lamenting since the 90s. And it’s not just teens — everyone is spending less time together than they used to. “In short, there is no statistical record of any other period in U.S. history when people have spent more time on their own,” the article states.

March 6, 2024

Ted Gioia on escaping from the trap of Dopamine Culture

Filed under: Health, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Following up on this hot issue, Ted Gioia has some suggestions to get out of the habit:

My dopamine culture essay is still stirring up lots of discussion. And people have their own stories to share.

For example:

And also:

The same thing is happening everywhere — at concerts, at museums, at work, at church, while driving, or even at a funeral.

But it’s even worse when people don’t even try to multitask, instead abandoning essential life tasks—because of the compulsion to scroll.

I’ve now heard from

  • People who scroll instead of sleeping
  • People who scroll instead of engaging in physical activity
  • People who scroll instead of finding a life partner, or connecting with flesh-and-blood people
  • People who scroll instead of gaining skills, finding a job, and pursuing a vocation
  • Etc.

I originally focused on the impact on arts and creativity—because that’s the world I live in. I was worried that people had no patience for a movie or concert or book, because they can only digest stimuli in 15-second bursts.

But I now see that the problem is much, much bigger.

It’s almost quaint to worry about these screen zombies not reading books. The simple fact is that, increasingly, their entire life is suffering because of a technology shift imposed on them by Silicon Valley.

These addictive and compulsive behaviors are troubling. But even more disturbing is how the largest corporations in the world are investing billions in promoting and accelerating this compulsive use of their tech tools.

If you look at the 10 largest companies in the world, half of them are trying to create this addictive relationship to technology. The days when the dealer in addiction had to hide in the shadows are over. They now operate freely in your home, and every other sphere of your life.

A few days ago, I promised to offer concrete suggestions for dealing with this. Some of these are listed below.

February 26, 2024

Time to pry the smartphones from the clutches of our dopamine-addicted youngsters?

Filed under: Britain, Education, Health, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

A couple of articles this weekend deal with the already acknowledged problem of dopamine addiction especially among the young whose brains and personalities are still in the formative stages. First, here’s Christopher Gage reporting with some delight that British schoolchildren are going to have to learn how to cope with a full school day without the electronic binkies they’ve grown so dependent on:

Detail of an article at bankmycell.com

I long for the day when gawking at one’s phone like a lobotomy patient invokes derision. Don’t you know your filthy addiction pollutes every atom of our society? You selfish bastard. You perverts should be ashamed of yourselves, etc. That day is on the horizon.

This week, British lawmakers banned smartphones in schools. Those pocket perils are lobotomising those whom sentimentalists call “the nation’s future”. Denied their devil devices, schoolchildren will endure hours of reading, thinking, and writing. Heaven forbid, they’ll talk to their friends and teachers in flesh and blood.

In these matters, I am militant. Children are not vessels of wisdom and wonder corrupted by a cruel world. They’re ignorant. By teaching them how to think and live, adults civilise children. That bleeping burping buzzing beehive in their pockets renders that civilising mission impossible.

Many disagree. But their knee-jerk reaction to this “knee-jerk reaction” crashes against concrete evidence. Smartphones erode concentration, dull critical thinking, blunt memory, and shred retention. The monstrous equation: Smartphones plus face-hugger apps equals ignorant, depressed, anxious youths.

Yes, technology invites moral panic. Plato worried that the written word would mulch minds into mush. But this is serious.

Last year, Dr Vivek Murthy, the United States surgeon general, issued a rare public health advisory. Across 19 pages, Dr Murthy warned that the effects of social media on adolescent mental health were “not fully understood”.

“There are ample indicators that social media can also have a profound risk of harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents,” he said.

And what did we say? Not much. We had more important matters to attend. If I remember correctly, on that very day, Kim Kardashian revealed on Instagram her latest arse or her newest boyfriend.

However, serious people think this is a serious problem. Dr Benjamin Maxwell, a director of child and adolescent psychiatry at Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego, said he is “immensely concerned” by a study linking social media and poor mental health. That “highly stimulating environment” may corrode “cognitive ability, attention span and memory during a time when their brains are still developing,” Maxwell said. “What are the long-term consequences? I don’t think we know.”

The UN’s education, science, and culture agency says the more young Jack scrolls through TikTok and the like, the lower his grades sink.

Countless studies show smartphones and their face-hugger apps — designed by behavioural psychologists to addict and milk the user — worsen anxiety, depression, and self-esteem. Not to mention lining up children for the predation of bullies 24/7.

Psychologists Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge are the canaries in the cultural coalmine. They say HMS Progress is crashing toward the icebergs — rising rates of suicide, depression, and anxiety. To them, the evidence is almost irrefutable. Turn back now, they say, or the ship sinks.

The second item is a follow-up by Ted Gioia to his post on dopamine culture last week:

My article on “dopamine culture” has stirred up interest and (even more) raised concerns among readers who recognize the symptoms I described.

One of the illustration went viral in a big way. And I’ve gotten requests from all over the world for permission to translate and share the material. (Yes, you can all quote generously from the article, and reprint my charts with attribution.)

This image was shared widely online

But many have asked for more specific guidance.

What can we do in a culture dominated by huge corporations that want us to spend hours every day swiping and scrolling?

I find it revealing and disturbing that readers who work on the front lines (in education, therapy, or tech itself) expressed the highest degree of alarm. They know better than anybody where we’re heading, and want to find an escape path.

Here’s a typical comment from teacher Adam Whybray:

    I see it massively as a teacher. Kids desperately pleading for toilet breaks, claiming their human rights are being infringed, so they can check TikTok, treating lessons as though they’re in a Youtube reaction video, needing to react with a meme or a take — saying that silence in lessons scares them or freaks them out.

    One notable difference from when I was at school was that I remember a lesson in which we got to watch a film was a relief or even pleasurable (depending on the film). My students today often say they are unable to watch films because they can’t focus. I had one boy getting quite emotional, begging to be allowed to look at his phone instead.

Another teacher asked if the proper response is to unplug regularly? Others have already embraced digital detox techniques of various sorts (see here and here).

I hope to write more about this in the future.

In particular, I want to focus on the many positive ways people create a healthy, integrated life that minimizes scrolling and swiping and mindless digital distractions. Many of you have found joy and solace — and an escape from app dependence — in artmaking or nature walks or other real world activities. There are countless ways of being-in-the-world with contentment and mindfulness.

Today I want to discuss just one bedrock of real world life that is often neglected — or frequently even mocked: Ritual.

I know how much I rely on my daily rituals as a way of creating wholeness and balance. I spend every morning in an elaborate ritual involving breakfast, reading books (physical copies, not on a screen), listening to music, and enjoying home life.

Even my morning coffee preparation is ritualistic. (However, I’m not as extreme as this person — who rivals the Japanese tea ceremony in attention to detail.)

I try to avoid plugging into the digital world until after noon.

I look forward to this daily time away from screens. But my personal rituals are just one tiny example. There are many larger ways that rituals provide an antidote to the more toxic aspects of tech-dominated society.

Below I share 13 observations on ritual.

February 20, 2024

Welcome to Dopamine culture

Filed under: Business, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Ted Gioia thinks the annual “State of the Union” address is boring, but a much more relevant thing would be a “State of the Culture” address … and he’s got lots of concerns about modern day culture:

Many creative people think these are the only options — both for them and their audience. Either they give the audience what it wants (the entertainer’s job) or else they put demands on the public (that’s where art begins).

But they’re dead wrong.

Maybe it’s smarter to view the creative economy like a food chain. If you’re an artist — or are striving to become one — your reality often feels like this.

Until recently, the entertainment industry has been on a growth tear — so much so, that anything artsy or indie or alternative got squeezed as collateral damage.

But even this disturbing picture isn’t disturbing enough. That’s because it misses the single biggest change happening right now.

We’re witnessing the birth of a post-entertainment culture. And it won’t help the arts. In fact, it won’t help society at all.

[…]

Here’s a better model of the cultural food chain in the year 2024.

The fastest growing sector of the culture economy is distraction. Or call it scrolling or swiping or wasting time or whatever you want. But it’s not art or entertainment, just ceaseless activity.

The key is that each stimulus only lasts a few seconds, and must be repeated.

It’s a huge business, and will soon be larger than arts and entertainment combined. Everything is getting turned into TikTok — an aptly named platform for a business based on stimuli that must be repeated after only a few ticks of the clock.

TikTok made a fortune with fast-paced scrolling video. And now Facebook — once a place to connect with family and friends — is imitating it. So long, Granny, hello Reels. Twitter has done the same. And, of course, Instagram, YouTube, and everybody else trying to get rich on social media.

This is more than just the hot trend of 2024. It can last forever — because it’s based on body chemistry, not fashion or aesthetics.

Our brain rewards these brief bursts of distraction. The neurochemical dopamine is released, and this makes us feel good — so we want to repeat the stimulus.

[…]

So you need to ditch that simple model of art versus entertainment. And even “distraction” is just a stepping stone toward the real goal nowadays — which is addiction.

Here’s the future cultural food chain — pursued aggressively by tech platforms that now dominate every aspect of our lives

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.

Addiction is the goal.

They don’t say it openly, but they don’t need to. Just look at what they do.

December 13, 2023

Ontario discovers that even “great ideas” with the “best of intentions” sometimes go wrong

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Health — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Line, Adam Zivo reports on Ontario’s “safe supply” drug program running into another one of those pesky human nature problems that couldn’t possibly have been foreseen:

Image courtesy of Meme Generator

New research from Ontario has yielded further evidence that Canada’s “safer supply” drug programs are being widely defrauded and putting addicts’ lives at risk.

These programs claim to reduce overdoses and deaths by providing drug users with pharmaceutical alternatives to potentially tainted illicit substances. In Canada, that typically means distributing large volumes of hydromorphone, an opioid as potent as heroin, in the hope of reducing consumption of illicit fentanyl.

Addiction experts have widely reported that, based on their clinical experiences, drug users regularly trade or sell (“divert”) some (perhaps much) of their safer supply on the black market to fund the purchase of stronger substances. This has flooded some communities with hydromorphone, crashing its street price by up to 95 per cent over the past three years while spurring new addictions, especially among youth.

The federal government denies that these problems exist and has said that any evidence of harm is “anecdotal” — but two addiction experts working in a hospital in London, Ontario recently used patient data to show that the problem is indeed very real.

Dr. Sharon Koivu and Allison Mackinley (a nurse practitioner) examined the charts of 200 patients who had been referred to Victoria Hospital’s addiction medicine consultation service between January and June 2023.

The review showed that 32 per cent of patients who were not in a safer supply program had self-reported using diverted hydromorphone — the vast majority of these patients indicated that their hydromorphone came from purchasing drugs provided to someone else as part of a safer supply program.

“It was more common for them to actually specify safer supply than to say they didn’t know the source,” said Dr. Koivu in an interview. “They said things like, ‘The person in the apartment beside me goes and picks up her safer supply and when she comes back I get 20 of her pills’. It was quite specific.”

Diversion was not the only problem that was validated.

The chart data suggested that safer supply clients were roughly five-to-10 times more likely to be hospitalized than drug users receiving traditional, evidence-based addiction medications, such as methadone or buprenorphine (these medications are known as “opioid agonist therapy“, or “OAT”). Compared to OAT patients, drug users on safer supply were more than 15 times more likely to be hospitalized for serious infections.

These findings were so concerning that when a group of 35 addiction physicians recently wrote an open letter calling upon the federal government to reform safer supply, they included this data in their accompanying evidence brief.

(This chart, included in a recent evidence brief, compares the number of hospitalized patients with the number of drug users in London, Ontario who receive safer supply (250), methadone (2,000), and buprenorphine (300).)

Safer supply patients also had a slightly higher hospitalization rate, and only slightly lower infection rate, than patients who were receiving no addiction treatment at all, which suggests that the health benefits of safer supply may actually be negligible.

Dr. Koivu said that the hospitalization rate seen among safer supply patients was “alarmingly high” considering that safer supply programs provide significant wraparound supports (i.e. access to doctors, housing and social assistance) in conjunction with free hydromorphone. Any patient who receives such supports should see substantially improved health outcomes.

August 28, 2023

QotD: Progressives don’t have collections, but they may have fetish objects

Filed under: Education, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The reason SJWs are so hung up on “capitalism” is, as we’ve seen, they regard it as something very like an addiction. Specifically, like sex addiction — we “capitalists” are compelled to accumulate new, different, better, more-for-more’s-sake, though the acquisition is harmful to both ourselves and society. Ever known a Leftist with a collection? Coins, stamps, baseball cards, anything? It’s 100 to 1 that you don’t, because Leftists aren’t wired like that.

Leftists put their entire lives on display at all times. They might have some knickknacks or mementos (though it’s shocking how few of them have even that), but they’re all for show — if a Leftist ever had a baseball card, it would be framed and displayed in the center [of] xzhyr apartment’s living room, and would have something to do with the player’s politics (the only openly gay player on the Yankees or something). The collector’s joys are unknown to them, because the collector collects for personal reasons. Collectors often can’t wait to show you their collections, of course, and they can be godawful tedious about it, but — pace the Left — they aren’t showing you to brag about it; they’re showing you because you’re their friend, and they assume you’re interested in what interests them.

[…]

SJWs always project, right? They know better than anyone that money can’t buy you happiness, because SJW-ism is strictly an upper-middle-class pursuit. They have all the stuff in the world, and they’re miserable. Look at the ivory tower. I hate to keep beating this dead horse, but it’s really the best example I can think of. Those people are “the 1%” by any measure that makes sense. They have everything. They work 24/7 — that’s “24 hours a week, 7 months a year” — and get comped, on average, nearly $100K for it. You can always tell which one is the faculty parking lot — no make cheaper than Volvo; no model year earlier than 2017. The houses in the faculty ghetto tend to be physically small, it’s true, but that’s because they’re all restored Victorians — go ahead and cost out what it takes to fully restore one of those puppies, and contemplate a lifetime of pauperism.

Commodity fetishism? In spades, kameraden, and we haven’t even gotten to the “lifestyle” stuff yet. Organic food — tiny little bananas from Trader Joe’s that wouldn’t feed a pygmy marmoset, but cost $4 per pound. Hot yoga lessons — $100 per hour. Eat-pray-loving your way across Indonesia — I can’t even begin to calculate it. SJWs live niiiice; way too nice for us deplorables to afford, filthy “capitalists” that we are.

Severian, “Junkies (II)”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-01-18.

July 19, 2023

Infohazards on the internet of lies lead us into the clutches of “egregores”

Filed under: Books, Health, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The latest review at Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf from John Psmith, is on the 1872 novel Demons by Fyodor Dostoevsky”. I didn’t read the post immediately, as Russian literature and I aren’t even nodding acquaintances. I should have remembered that both of the Psmiths have an amazing ability to tell you a lot more than a “review” would normally contain, and this one certainly lived up to expectations, including a brief discussion of philosopher Charles Taylor’s ideas about pre-modern versus modern concepts of the self. Most pre-modern cultures believed in external influences having disproportional impact on the person, while most modern cultures believe the influences arise internally within the mind. Most pre-modern cultures also feared the self could be taken over, or possessed, by malevolent external entities, ideas, or thoughts:

Dostoevsky obligingly gives us a character who’s clearly possessed in exactly this sense — a dissolute nobleman around whom the various radical conspiracies swirl. He is, simultaneously, a subversion of the brooding Byronic hero archetype that was so popular in 19th century European literature, and an eerie anticipation of the modern concept of the serial killer. How did he get this way? Remember the modern view of our desires is that they come from within us, and indulging them leads to inner harmony. But the older and truer view is that they can come from outside, force their way into our skulls through an opening, set their hooks in our brains, lay their eggs. These fledgling desires start out small and weak, but to indulge them is to feed them, grow them, until they take over their host and move its mouth and limbs around like a puppet. In this sense the porn addict, the drug addict, and the rage addict are all alike: sensual dissipation gets boring eventually, and you need harder and harder stuff to feel the same thrill, until one day you reach for something so hard you lose yourself forever.

The Dostoevskian twist to all this is that the proto-serial killer is far more sympathetic, and ultimately more redeemable, than the revolutionaries. The radicals’ motivations spring from the same emotional source as his, theirs are just sublimated into politics, which is why the form of the dystopia doesn’t really matter to them, all that matters is that there be a boot stomping on a human face. The sexual sadism of the serial killer is unflinchingly portrayed as less disordered and less socially destructive than its political equivalent and, ultimately, as rather basic. It’s actually quite easy to miss all of this because it’s so deeply at odds with modern sensibilities. Not just “serial killers are better than communists actually,” but also “serial killers are really pretty boring actually,” and all from the guy who just invented serial killers.1

But what if the radicals aren’t sublimating anything at all? What if there’s another kind of demon, another kind of infohazard, another kind of meme, which rather than infecting or possessing individuals, instead tries to do that to entire societies? Such a being might still work through individuals, the way a Haitian voodoo spirit speaks through a chwal, but here the individual puppet is not a target, but rather an instrument or a transmission vector. The internet jargon for such a being is an “egregore,” and you’ve encountered them before: the bizarre fad that sweeps through a middle school class like a wildfire, the war fever that grips a nation and turns it overnight into a basket of bloodthirsty lunatics. Dance crazes, viral TikTok challenges, internet-mediated mental illnesses. There’s a classic Futurama gag involving the Brain Slug Party, but the real joke is that every party is the Brain Slug Party, they’re all egregores. Have you ever spoken with somebody who had hashtags in their Twitter bio? If you looked carefully, you may have seen the slender, silvery proboscis emerging from the back of their neck and vanishing into the ether. If you listened carefully, you may have heard the alien metallic clacking of the egregore’s mandibles, as it sent messages down that tube for the meat puppet to vocalize.

Sometime in the mid-19th century, an egregore was born in the Russian Empire. It went by a thousand different names — among them: anarchism, communism, nihilism, democracy. What’s that? Those four ideologies are completely opposed to one another? That’s the entire point! It wasn’t actually any of those things, it was an egregore, its true name was something like Melkhorbalai or Uztaa-Binoreth. It wore those other names like skins when it was convenient to do so, which is why in the real life history of 19th century Russia we see countless examples of individuals switching between communism, anarchism, and democracy like they were flavors of ice cream.

The egregore wanted none of these things: it wanted to grow, to spread, to manifest itself into this reality. Madly, it willed destruction, and the more destruction it caused the stronger it got, and the easier further destruction became, a runaway exothermic reaction endlessly feeding on itself. So the reformist zeal of the 1840s became Nechayev’s insane nihilism of the 1870s, then the even more insane terrorism of 1900-1917 with which I opened this review, until finally, strengthened by half a century of blood sacrifice, that rough beast slouched towards St. Petersburg to be born. The trauma of that birth ripped apart first Russia, then Europe, then it almost ate the rest of the world too.

Could anything have stopped it sooner? In Dostoevsky’s story there’s one character who tries lamely to stand in the way of the swirling, coalescing, immaterial malevolence. He is a reactionary, a newly-freed former serf,3 and (like Dostoevsky himself) a repentant former revolutionary. He’s young and hip, but has old and edgy views, a perfect stand-in for online “trads”. Given Dostoevsky’s own views it would be easy to make him the hero of the story, but Dostoevsky is too great a writer for that, and instead makes him a pathetic LARPer:

    “I only wanted to know, do you believe in God, yourself?”

    “I believe in Russia … I believe in her orthodoxy … I believe in the body of Christ … I believe that the new advent will take place in Russia … I believe …” Shatov muttered frantically.

    “And in God? In God?”

    “I … I will believe in God.”

How great a description is that of all the crusader-avatar twitter accounts named “DeusVult1571”? Imagine one of them blubbering: “I believe in based aesthetics … I believe in Western civilization … I believe in the Hajnal line … I believe …” Ah, but do you believe in God? Probably some of them do, but for many others it’s a pose, or a meme, or a philosophical premise that they must accept in order to turn the rest of the brand they’ve assumed into a self-consistent whole.2 For these, the god they worship is just another egregore — one small and weak for now, less threatening perhaps than some others, but feed it, let it grow, and see how fast it turns on you.

The other force that could have resisted the growing darkness is the parents’ generation, the liberals of 1848, Turgenev’s boomers. We already know how that turned out in real life, but while Dostoevsky didn’t live to see it happen, he had these peoples’ number. Once so bold in condemning their government and sneering at their civilization, they are suddenly timid in the face of their children, terrified of being seen as uncool or conservative or just not with it. That’s a good way to raise a psycho, and Dostoevsky more than hints that everything which follows is ultimately their fault. And it’s a bad way to face down an egregore. Doing that requires boldness and … well:

    “But this is premature among us, premature,” he pronounced almost imploringly, pointing to the manifestoes.

    “No, it’s not premature; you see you’re afraid, so it’s not premature.”

    “But here, for instance, is an incitement to destroy churches.”

    “And why not? You’re a sensible man, and of course you don’t believe in it yourself, but you know perfectly well that you need religion to brutalise the people. Truth is honester than falsehood …”

    “I agree, I agree, I quite agree with you, but it is premature, premature in this country…” said Von Lembke, frowning.

    “And how can you be an official of the government after that, when you agree to demolishing churches, and marching on Petersburg armed with staves, and make it all simply a question of date?”

“Premature, premature”, is what the useless normies will bleat when our own radicals are blowing up Mt. Rushmore and pulling down statues of George Washington. Who are these radicals? I have no idea what the egregore will call itself this time. It doesn’t matter. Its true name sounds to human ears like a high-pitched mechanical screeching and clicking, a sound calculated to drive men mad, and to drive madmen into making it real.

    1. I’m told that the internet jargon for this is an “unbuilt trope.”

    2. Dostoevsky positions a former serf as the defender of “Holy Russia,” Orwell suggests that if there is hope it lies in the proles, Bismarck believed the poor would serve as a reactionary bulwark against liberalism, and MAGA believes that various dispossessed and subaltern groups will keep America great. Are they all correct? No. They’re all wrong. The lower classes have no special compass for political or religious truth, they’re just almost definitionally slightly behind the times. When an egregore is rapidly accumulating strength, they’re likely to oppose it out of inertia, but they’re as vulnerable as anyone to its blandishments, and will just as vigorously defend the new thing once it has taken over.

    3. Look, I have a lot of sympathy for these guys. Like the Russian radicals of the 1870s, they correctly observe that there’s something insane and rotten about our society, but unlike those radicals they’re attracted to something that’s really out there and really true and good. “Fake it til you make it” is not the worst strategy ever invented for securing a mature and authentic faith in a supreme being. But once you’re in that state, there’s a clock running, your time is limited, there are other things out there in the night, attracted by the smell of lost and receptive souls.

June 17, 2023

China’s long-term revenge for the Opium Wars

Filed under: Britain, China, Health, History, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Quillette, Aaron Sarin discusses what he calls the “Reverse Opium War” with Chinese drugs flooding the US street drug culture:

Jean-Jacques Grandville cartoon originally published in Charivari in 1840. “I tell you to immediately buy the gift here. We want you to poison yourself completely, because we need a lot of tea in order to digest our beefsteaks.”
Image and translated caption from Wikimedia Commons.

An epidemic is stalking American cities. Every day, men and women die on sidewalks, in bus shelters, on park benches. Some die sprawled in crowded plazas at midday; others die slumped in the corners of lonely gas station bathrooms. Internally, however, the circumstances are the same. They all end their lives swimming in the warm amniotic dream of a lethally dangerous opioid. When it comes, the moment of death is imperceptible: coaxed by the drug further and further from shore, the user simply floats out too far, passing some unmarked point of no return. The heartbeat weakens, the breathing slows and shallows. As soft an end as anyone might wish for.

This is the fentanyl crisis. It may seem strange to connect a very modern and very American phenomenon to a brace of wars waged 200 years ago by the British Empire on the last of the Chinese dynasties. But so the rhetoric runs: we are witnessing a Reverse Opium War; a belated Sinic revenge.

The Communist Party teaches schoolchildren that China was once a glorious superpower, until it was brought low by that subtlest and most devious of British weapons: Lachryma papaveris (poppy tears). Opium sapped the nation’s strength, and when the Chinese authorities banned it, then Britain went to war — twice.

Those wars crippled the Qing and heralded a “century of humiliation” for China — multiple military defeats and lopsided treaties, the Anglo-French looting and burning of the Emperor’s Summer Palace, the Japanese Rape of Nanking and lethal human experimentation by Unit 731 — ending only with the liberating forces of Marxism-Leninism in 1949. Now some commentators are telling us that history has inverted, that karma has kicked in.

Before examining this idea, we should remind ourselves of the American predicament. Ten years ago, fentanyl began its steady flow from China to the United States. Within just three years the drug had surpassed heroin to become the most frequent cause of American overdose deaths. Fentanyl is many times more powerful than heroin, and so there should be no surprise that lethality has spiked since the great Chinese flow began: in 2012, heroin topped the list with 6,155 deaths; by 2016, fentanyl was proving three times as deadly, with 18,335 deaths. The opioid’s influence seeps into all corners of the narcotics market, due to dealers hiding it in cocaine, heroin, and ecstasy. And it leaks across social strata, killing the homeless but also the rock star Prince, who passed away in an elevator at his Paisley Park estate after ingesting fentanyl disguised as Vicodin.

Under American pressure, the Chinese authorities agreed to regulate fentanyl analogs and two fentanyl precursor chemicals, but it soon turned out that shipments were being rerouted via Mexico. With this new arrangement, the crisis only deepened: between 2019 and 2021, the opioid killed 200 Americans a day. Last year alone, the DEA seized quantities of the drug equivalent to 410 million lethal doses. That’s enough to kill everyone in the US. Even a pandemic couldn’t stem the flow for long: in fact, Wuhan is one of the world’s most reliable suppliers of fentanyl precursors (a role it played both before and after starring at the eye of the COVID storm).

The booming fentanyl trade does not appear to rely on traditional criminal organisations, in the way that East Asian methamphetamine trafficking depends on the Triads. Instead, it turns out to be small family-based groups and legitimate businesses who manufacture and move the drug. Usually located on China’s south-eastern seaboard — Zhejiang, Fujian, Guangdong — these groups use the cover of the vast Chinese chemical industry to channel ingredients into the manufacture of fentanyl-class drugs and their precursors.

June 6, 2023

Australia’s “teen smoking rates rose sixfold between 2018 and 2023”

Filed under: Australia, Government, Health, Law — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Christopher Snowdon on Australia’s determination to stamp out vaping … even at the cost of vastly increasing the number of tobacco smokers:

More bad news from the supposed world leader in tobacco control. Official figures show that teen smoking rates rose sixfold between 2018 and 2023, from 2% to 12.8%.

It’s been over a decade since Australia introduced plain packaging, a policy that the Southern hemisphere’s wrongest man, Simon Chapman, likened to a vaccine for lung cancer. Australia has had the highest cigarette taxes in the world for ages, the sale of nicotine e-cigarettes has always been illegal, and all they have to show for it is an insanely big black market for both tobacco and e-cigarettes, more children smoking and a whole bunch of people using unregulated vapes. The wowsers just can’t stop winning, can they?

Naturally, this has led to much soul searching among the tobacco control elite who are having to reassess their assumptions in the face of this overwhelming evidence of policy failure.

I’m joking, of course. They are doubling down again.

If you spoke to someone from the reality-based community, they would tell you that children find it easier to access a product when the market is in the hands of illicit traders because illicit traders don’t care who they sell to. They might also point out that the Australian government has gone out of its way to portray vaping as being at least as bad as smoking. School children in Australia are taught that vaping causes brain damage. Public health agencies produce websites that purport to tell people the facts about vaping but actually tell them lies and misleading half-truths.

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