#but people acting like apps arent designed to monopolize your attention chap me

[jasper-dixon]

My problem with this is newspapers are not tailored with an algorithm to abuse your attention. Or needy, schizophrenic app alerts that ding just to get you to look at them. Of course humans want to occupy their mind with entertainment. But when said entertainment comes from a device with dark patterns designed to rot your brain from the inside we get the modern world.

It's okay to exist without phone. I know how boomer that sounds, but notifications, algorithms, and dark design literally keep you trapped in doomscrolling by design. Social media used to work just like a newspaper, you could reach the end of the feed and be done.

If you think people used to willingly stare off into the distance before smartphones, my dad told me he had this psychology assignment when he was in college in the 80s which was basically

Go to a restaraunt by yourself and eat a meal without a newspaper or journal or anything else to keep you occupied and then write a report about it

Which tells me that this was a way for a professor to inflict psychological torture on their students and that people used to bring little things with them to keep them entertained. Shown by those old pictures of everyone in a trolley reading a newspaper with one hand.

Frankly I think that the human brain has been craving smart phone forever. Perhaps we use it too much at times but if this was 1985 we also wouldn’t be talking to people. We’d just be looking at newspaper or drawing stuff on notepad instead. And the old people would all be shaking their fists about how kids spend too much time looking at that damn TV because yes this discourse has been going on long before smart phone