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I'm surprised by the negative comments here so far that sound more indignant or "called out" than anything else. The article's argument is not only thoughtfull

• GJim 2y ago
  > I'm surprised by the negative comments here so far that sound more indignant or "called out" than anything else. I'm not. This forum is dominated by people who write software for, and are addicted to, fondle slabs.
  • _rpxpx 2y ago
    love "fondle slabs". I've been going with "slave phones"
    • johtso 2y ago
      "Babylon rectangles"
      • disqard 2y ago
        "Adult pacifier"
    • mos_basik 2y ago
      My partner and I have been calling them "fun boxes", as in, "Hey, I just started to poop but I forgot to bring my fun box, can you grab it for me?". I started it maybe a couple of years ago. Was aiming to give myself a verbal reminder of their skinner box nature every time I mentioned them while keeping a fig leaf veneer of comfortability so I didn't have to explain if someone else overheard. Maybe didn't go hard enough with it; about a year ago it came up that my partner had been taking the name at face value and didn't ascribe anything sinister to it.
  • dmje 2y ago
    Fondle Slabs gets my vote!!
• grajaganDev 2y ago
  >sound more indignant or "called out" than anything else. Yes - some people are very defensive regarding their phones. This underscores the point of the article.
  • tokai 2y ago
    Its just a bad blog post full of inaccuracies, falsehoods, and trivial takes. Your shallow dismissal of the critiques just underscores the hollowness of the articles content.
    • grajaganDev 2y ago
      Your comment underscores the point of my comment.
• leidenfrost 2y ago
  IMHO it's because in the phone world only a handful of people look good naturally. Another handful learns to compensate by using really complex lighting setups (akin to a real photographic studio). And the rest of us are left behind. We can even look "approachable enough" for some people by showing your way to approach the world, how we talk, how we move. But all of that is way harder to capture on a static photo. I personally look terrible in front cameras, and I have a hard time creating any kind of profile in a dating app.
  • baobun 2y ago
    This is very little about looks. Those handful of good-looking people aren't necessarily feeling sexier, happier, or more fulfilled.
    • polynomial 2y ago
      They do have an appreciably different dopamine regulation. So they're feeling something. (Not defending or apologizing for anyone's lifestyle here.)
      • baobun 2y ago
        ?
        • polynomial 2y ago
          meaning they themselves may feel "happier" when they are on their digital dopamine treadmill there is some subtext here about saying others are "not happier"
          • baobun 2y ago
            The person I was replying to was lamenting about "naturally good-looking people", you're talking about chronically online people. Different conversations.
  • 2y ago
• pjc50 2y ago
  > I'm surprised by the negative comments This is, shall we say, not the kind of audience that is going to give this article a fair reading.
  • potato3732842 2y ago
    Well of course it won't get a charitable reading here. Roughly speaking HN built this monster. On a macro level I agree that phones and connectivity have some pretty huge downsides and bad effects on society but once you drill down more than that there are serious flaws with the article and the author seems to be longing for a past that if it existed at all was never sustainable and wouldn't exist long. It falls into the same category as romanticizing commercial whaling or feeding a family of four with a know-nothing job riveting spring hangers onto Chevrolets.
• Aurornis 2y ago
  Years ago, one of my friends who was really into fitness offered a free service to help people with meal planning and setting up their diets. A lot of people would come to him and say they wanted to lose weight, but when he started discussing their diet and shopping lists they would get defensive. They didn’t like the implication that something they did or a choice they made was a factor in their weight gain. Instead, they wanted to blame everything but themselves. It wasn’t their fault they picked the packaged, ultra-processed thing at the store. It was the food industry’s fault for making it unhealthy. It wasn’t their fault they didn’t buy vegetables at the store, it was their parents’ fault for not teaching them how to cook as a kid. It was common to hear people claim that they were doing calorie restriction but it didn’t work because of microplastics, toxic chemicals in the soil, pesticides, or other environmental factors. This mentality even swept through the “rationalist” community online recently. A blogger wrote a long series with over a dozen long posts trying to find any other explanation for weight gain. In the very first article he had a graph showing that caloric consumption was up and activity was down over the years where obesity was on the rise, but he concluded that couldn’t be it. It must be chemicals in the water! The blog series was very popular in rationalist communities and IIRC even Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex gave the author a financial grant. The story with phones is the same: People don’t want to hear that it’s their fault for using phones so much. They want to blame the algorithm or their job for “making” them spend hours on the phone. Resistance to any concept of self accountability is stronger than ever on the internet. Social media delivers convenient excuses, which can be seen throughout this thread.
  • arthurofbabylon 2y ago
    When looking at a system, it is appropriate to identify the causes (plural) and the intervention points (plural). I believe it is at once possible to both blame or seek to change an extrinsic factor and do what one can with their own initiative. I do not think it is appropriate to dismiss extrinsic factors in order to emphasize personal initiative.
    • Aurornis 2y ago
      Multiple factors contribute, but they don’t lessen the impact of people’s choices. We can list extrinsic factors that influence things for hours, but nothing changes the fact that using your phone for hours per day is a choice that people make. The external factors are brought up as a way to distract from that choice or shift blame, but you can’t make progress until you realize that it’s your choice to pick up the phone and use that app for hours every day.
• xyst 2y ago
  The article to me feels like it pussyfoots around the real issue and perpetuates the “blame {some new tech} on downfall of society” fallacy. Yes, personally I agree that doom scrolling is not ideal but this is a symptom of a much larger issue — no time available for a majority of people to invest in real relationships. Real issue here is a significant number of people left behind in this economy and this largely due to shitty economic policy based on neoliberalism
  • SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
    I don't think it's true that a significant number of people have less time available today than in the article's "late 90s and early 2000s" time frame. I'd concede that many people feel like they do (sometimes including me!), and I think it's pretty clearly because of how much time we're spending on our phones.
• mattgreenrocks 2y ago
  I worry a significant portion of the populace does not have anything better to fill their time with, so phones/Internet fill the void. You have to put something better than that in place, but that can be hard when everything is hyper-optimized for dopamine. If we step back, it’s obvious we’ve created TV 2.0. A lot of people prior to the Internet had TV fill this same role. These people need to decide they want something better for themselves to have a chance of changes sticking.
  • goatherders 2y ago
    I've been making a series of changes in last 18 months that fit the "deciding they want something better for themselves." I've lost 40# in 18 months. I stopped drinking alcohol cold on Oct 2nd after being a daily moderate/heavy drinker for ~25 years. I deleted X, FB, IG and LI on my phone 4 days ago (still schedule posts on LI via desktop). All of these decisions were really hard right up until I did them. In reflection I don't miss the food (yes Ozembic, best decision I've made for myself as an adult). I don't miss booze - which is incredible. I haven't yet missed social media. To replace SM I keep the kindle app on the home screen of my phone. I read a couple pages of a book then go back to something else. To replace drinking a bottle of wine while watching a movie I go for more walks outside than I used to (10k steps instead of 6k a day kind of thing). Long way to go, but I'm hopeful. I realized I was doing things that were bad for me (food, drink, phone time) and it was impacting me in increasingly negative ways.
    • fragmede 2y ago
      Hell yeah. It's amazing how GLP-1's help in other areas of life, not just food cravings.
  • HumblyTossed 2y ago
    > I worry a significant portion of the populace does not have anything better to fill their time with... Or... people are exhausted from the daily grind and want some sort of escape. The lives of most people are not improving; they're having to work harder and harder for less and less.
• jdietrich 2y ago
  It is extraordinarily generous to describe an article as thoughtful when it begins with the words "Scrolling on our phones is killing us. This is a statement of fact that needs no citation". To my mind, bald assertion is the opposite of thoughtfulness. If an article is well-written because it creates a plausible justification for a belief held without evidence, then I think I'd prefer a badly written one.
• TeMPOraL 2y ago
  Well, I have an instinctive negative reaction to your comment. Specifically, to this line: > Smartphones provide a level of private immersion in silent, "socially-flavored" dopamine consumption that's antithetical to robust, vibrant socialization. Regardless of whether the article is right (it might be) and smartphones in general, some of us find ourselves feeling trapped in this reality of "robust, vibrant socialization", and crave any form of "private immersion". Myself, I'm not glued to phones or the usual social media sites (HN on the other hand), but the very thought that the goal is to give up what little "private immersion" time I have, and embrace "robust, vibrant socialization" instead, just makes me want to finally bite the bullet and install TikTok. (Yes, this says much more about me than about your comment. But there's some source of this feeling. I don't know what it is, but I suspect I'm not the only one feeling like this - so it perhaps could be a factor in the "smartphone equation".)
• SirMaster 2y ago
  How is that the phone's fault? You don't have to stare at it anywhere near that long, and all those apps are completely optional things to install and use. This just feels like making excuses and not having any self-control or self-discipline.
• kevinsync 2y ago
  I think a lot of the negative comments here just miss the spirit and point of the article, which for me is that, as the phone is now an omnipresent literal extension of your body, we collectively have chosen to relocate many human experiences from inside of our chests to the very ends of our arms. We don't look up and out anymore, we look down. Our senses and sensibilities are being processed and filtered by an external peripheral rather than by our natural hardware. We are effectively already transhumanists and biohackers, albeit crude ones that lack invasive implants, tuning and modulating our neural pathways in ways that have been heretofore unseen, frequently as simple-minded consumers of the modulation rather than conscious curators of our own metamorphosis. Author is opining for the way things used to be, is expounding upon the real, significant consequences of this transformation, and just wondering in general what the hell happened and why we let it get to be like this lol It's also worth noting that the author is a woman, so if you're a dude and feel attacked by the article somehow (or god forbid instinctively dismiss the whole thing because it's not from a male perspective), just take a deep breath and try to recognize that other people have valid, salient thoughts and opinions too. She's just suggesting we all 'touch grass' in a much more substantial way than a bite-sized meme phrase.
  • yamazakiwi 2y ago
    Nah they're just trying to police other people's behavior with nostalgia-bait. The fact that you think there is a group of people who are actually mad at reading this and are trying to minimize any criticism as gender bias is...something.
    • kevinsync 2y ago
      Honestly man I wrote that last part as more of a thought-out-loud rather than a straight-up accusation. I just felt like a lot of comments who (to me, just my opinion) really didn't understand the writing were probably guys, possibly young, definitely in a bubble (we're on Hacker News, like it or not it's a distinct male bubble with a specific world view), and I think it's worth establishing a bit of context so that somebody might find themselves able to interrogate their reactions to it, in the event that they had a reaction at all. Maybe I was reaching, whatever -- but even your comment ascribing intent to the author's post as "trying to police other people's behavior" illustrates that you read it as instruction rather than introspection. It's just somebody's musings on a topic, nothing more. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
• xnx 2y ago
  > There's nothing sexy about essentially staring at something in your hand for an hour or more every day. Like a book?
  • yifanl 2y ago
    Have books of any form ever been categorized as sexy?
• yamazakiwi 2y ago
  A lot of what is stated is out of touch with reality and more fits a narrative of someone's choosing. Like a news article that tells you Nintendo DS are bad because they facilitate communication between strangers and children in PictoChat. There is a lot of information and accuracies left out of this article to create a viewpoint when mostly the writer is nostalgia baiting.
• xela79 2y ago
  it's as "sexy" as reading a book for an hour or more every day. oh wait... I didn't know that using a phone or reading a book was meant to be sexy for others when a person uses a phone or reads a book. woopsie