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A collection of some classic Lemmy memes for your enjoyment
Pro tip: the nightmare rectangle is actually under your control. You can:
People can not eat shitty food and get fat.
but they'd rather take GPL-1 drugs.
That's what drives me nuts about these sorts of memes, they're just learned helplessness. You control what you're viewing. No-one is forcing you to read or watch anything. Some platforms try to mould and filter what you see on them, so simply stop using them, or limit your use if you must dip in. Others have biases that you should be aware of and take in to account.
Curate your own intake, and know when to stop. Put the phone down, and do something else. Uninstall the apps and delete the bookmarks if you must, but take control and stop blaming things you have control over.
Ah yes, bury your head in the sand and all the ills of the world will disappear.
No unfortunately even if I don't watch the news, the news is still happening all around me.
Absolutely, but that doesn't mean you have to let your phone become a "nightmare rectangle". You already know things are bad, you don't need to constantly immerse yourself in every detail of the badness. Keep an overview, of course, but save your energy, and your sanity, for doing something positive instead.
It's not that simple, sadly. It's curated and designed to drag you in, social media is slightlymore obvious about it, but everything has an app with bells and whistles to drag you in (look at our adds, buy our stuff, pay a subscription) ,. Plus addiction is real. If everyone drinks in every spare moment, how do you tell if you're an alcoholic, but replace alcohol with phone.
Sure, when I say these things are simple, I don't necessarily mean they're easy. None-the-less, it is down to each individual to control their behaviour. Having supportive people around you undoubtedly helps, but no algorithm can actually control your behaviour unless you permit it to.
I mean, that's literally addiction though, when you can't control your behaviour. I had a feeling the algorithms were intense, but reading the stuff from the Facebook whistle-blower really opened my eyes eve further.
They have studied how to force the human brain to stay attached. To summarise the Facebook stuff they figured out you stay stuck to the screen if they bombard you with anxiety ridden content. And then they monopolise a system of communication businesses and schools use (I'm not ok with the fact businesses and schools use Facebook).
I get it, community noticeboard and it's an easy way into a business web page if you don't have capital to hire someone. It's a mess. But yeah, there's a reason why most people who are, say, alcoholics have to stay away from bars or parties where people are drinking, Facebook is designed to attach to certain parts of your brain and keep you stuck, and people out there are using it in such a way you still have to engage.
I definitely felt the algorithms effects on me when I left reddit and came here. Seeking that dopamine deep scroll, that just isn't here. I'm so grateful for that, this being a place to detox and doesn't have a malicious algorithm. But all in all, the human brain is hugely pliable and easily manipulated (or targeted advertising wouldn't be such a big business) I don't believe it's in any way fitting to blame the person engaging with purposefully manipulative content that's designed to trap you. I don't think it's not possible to break free and detox, and I agree with you it's hard, really hard. I just don't agree with faulting people for falling into a designed trap that has had millions, probably billions put into its powers of manipulation.
Plus, saying it's the person's fault, in any phrasing, takes away from the real culprit that we should be fighting. And gives them an easy out. It's not the individuals fault it's the evil overlords, causing literal brain washing and they need to be taken down. And if people look at it from a "this is designed to trap you" perspective, it causes a very different, and much more achievable, approach to abstinence, too. Just my take. Thought you might find the perspective interesting.
Alcoholics also normalize their behaviour and shame everyone whose who isn't an alcoholic as being 'no fun' or 'lame' etc.
I mean, yeah, you gotta hit some huge life lows for it to be classed as an addiction. That word isn't thrown around lightly. That's probably a lesser phase, it gets way worse.
I saw this thing once that tallied up all the time of your life you spend doing mundane things, how many years you spend sleeping, doing dishes etc etc.
It really got me thinking about what tiny things were a dripping tap, leaking my life away. It's not about not doing mundane things, it's about being in the moment and enjoying life as much as possible, so I set about shortening things or making things more fun that weren't, or rethinking how much time something takes and if it's worth that added up contribution of my life. Am I going to look back and regret spending time in that way.
It's not just the big things, some things creep in in small incremental ways and steal your time and attention. I suppose that's the beginning stages of phone addiction?
How many people do you know in life who actually control themselves, vs those who just endlessly complain about how they can't help themselves?
For me the ratio is probably 1:20
Where I can, I tend to distance myself from those who can't control themselves, and my family are all pretty disciplined, so the total is around about "everyone I care about or spend time with".
You sound extremely lucky/privledged.
Most people don't have people around them like that. The vast majority of people out there are low level addicts for algorithms. Nobody in my family can control themselves and I grew up with two parents who were crackheads for cable news TV feeding them endless streams of nonsense. My folks were basically overgrown toddlers most of my life and everything made them throw a tantrum. And my entire town I grew up in was full of people like that.
I think the error you are making is you assume other folks have the circumstances around them that they can exercise control and discipline over their lives... a lot of folks don't. Esp if they never had examples in live to teach them those things, or had higher education or income levels. Poverty and low income legit has different wiring in the brain and people in that lifestyle typically don't develop their executive control. The fact I did, made me more or less a freak-show anomaly among my family and friends growing up.
I am lucky with my friends and family, and I'm always grateful for that. As I said before, when I say something is simple, that doesn't mean I'm suggesting it's easy. The trouble is, no one but the addict themselves can break addiction. Of course algorithmic media, social or otherwise, should be much more stringently controlled, but if it disappeared overnight people who just move to the next source of quick dopamine hits.
You can also CONSUME
or enjoy an ad experience
I hate Apple these days but the old school iPods and original iPod touch were so good at the time.
I'd still love a modified iPod classic with bluetooth, USB-C, and an SD card slot.
i love nano shuffle back in the day. the only one i can afford at that time and i abused the shit out of that thing until i bought nano touch years later..
i miss dedicated music box, sure you can still do it now. but its just... different..
It really is different. I have all this music available, and that's awesome.
But I really miss buying an album, listening to it eager to see if is as good as I hoped.
Add burning and loading up the music player and you have a whole evening.
I will still listen to an album every now and then, but it's not the same as having to have fished it out of a radio or mtv or something.
Now, music is just sort of on and I sort of like all that I hear 😂
They killed off physical qwerty keyboards on phones because a touchscreen is cheaper, and i still miss them
We had the internet in 2007 my guy, and apple sold macbooks and imacs. I know. I was there. It was awesome. web ads and user interfaces didn't take manipulative interactive psychology and science seriously back then—that wasn't until android got popular. And we didn't have Cambridge Analytica. We didn't have personalized ads or the user base. It wasn't until android really that put smartphones in everyone's hands. I remember the dev conferences about getting the next billion users by making everything accessible and localized. It made great i18n tech but was specifically for google's advertising purposes. Facebook capatalized with Facebook and buying instagram (ios exclusive originally. Facebook put it on that next billion Android) and whatsapp (part of that 'next billion' world in asia already)
Better than 2034
My turn to post next time please
Interesting inference, the meme implies that if society was thriving then it wouldn’t be a nightmare machine.
Is that honestly true? If most software on people’s devices was FOSS and the world was like 20-30 years ago, would it have the same magic of the past?
I’m curious how much or it is form factor and the addiction that goes along with it.
Personally I think it would be very different. Sometimes I get lost in an obsession over a random topic, I go to wikis instead or doomscrolling. I would imagine that smartphones in a good world would mostly be that.
Oh and games that aren’t trying to be gacha
It's nostalgia.
People were just as shitty in 2007 as they are today. They just didn't have FB accounts to publicize it to the world and they didn't use social media to make money back then.
People don't remember the past correctly, they only remember it selectively, and they super impose modern standards of living onto it. Like if people from 2025 had to go back to 1955 and live the way 1955 people lived, they'd be traumatized, because they have no idea how polluted, loud, and unclean awful life in 1955 was. They just think 'cheap cost of living!'
It was shit back then, and the dawn of enshittification.
I mean planned obsolescence, maybe... But data mining wasn't as profitable at the time and Facebook had just overtaken MySpace, so I would argue 2007 wasn't yet a race to the bottom in many aspects.
Bro I was trying to get files from a friend's ipod and one album was in several different randomly assigned folders with other randomly assigned songs.
The ads don't say any fucking info about the hardware, just dancing silhouettes and how fashionable it is.
Now people just want to literally ask their computer "where's my passwords". This was the jumping off point.
NGL I am desensitised to bad news. But I admit that I have been ragebaited, which doesn't serve me but the algorithm and Palantir. I will avoid visiting the US for the foreseeable future even if Trump leaves...
Cool
