I liked most of this article and found it interesting. Maybe a bit long-winded, but like many people I've been thinking a lot about the same topic in recent years, struggling to break free of a certain mindset. Hearing the images and language how someone else feels when they describe that "machine" that keeps them captive is interesting -- a very "blind men and the elephant" experience. The cargo cult aspect is a new connection to me and something I'll think about more.<p>That said, like many tech critiques, I found the conclusion underwhelming. In particular, the idea that how we manage our "upvotes, likes, shares, and retweets" is important strikes me as foolish. These are the master's tools and they won't unmake the master's house. Sites like reddit and twitter have long put their thumbs on the scale to rewrite these metrics. Plus, just like with democracy, institutions and norms that encourage uninformed frivolous voting will drown out the meaningful signal. Not to say these forms of engagement are all bad, but they aren't a solution in and of themselves.<p>The real commodity to regulate is attention, of which "upvotes" are only a simulacrum. It should never be forgotten that this means often means disengaging from certain sites and systems entirely.<p>edit: on the note of attention being the <i>real</i> metric -- another thing I thought the author could have done well drawing attention to is the trend of watching/listening at 2x speed. It increases our tolerance for drawn out drivel. Maybe an alternative would be to shun media that we don't think would be worth playing 2x times at normal speed.
> We favor videos that either are very short or don’t require dedicated focus, confident in the knowledge that we can move on to something else whenever we want to. We ignore thoughtfully composed “walls of text,” but we electronically applaud memetic image macros and single-sentence references that aren’t inherently entertaining or insightful<p>The rise of long form YouTube videos and Podcasts directly contradicts this. Summoning Salt, Technology Connections, and the dozens of other small documentary channels. Heck Matholger is able to regularly hit 500k+ views with 30min+ math videos![1]<p>True crime podcasts and history podcasts are also in direct opposition to the idea that we only consume short form content.<p>Then there is the entire rise of Medium and Substack. 10 years ago if I wanted long form journalism it was either The New Yorker, The Atlantic, or some tiny indie news magazines.<p>Now long form articles are more popular than ever.<p>Heck even movies are getting longer! [2]<p>[1] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/@Mathologer/videos">https://www.youtube.com/@Mathologer/videos</a>
[2] <a href="https://www.whattowatch.com/features/are-movies-really-getting-longer" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.whattowatch.com/features/are-movies-really-getti...</a>
The author appears to have fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the so-called "cargo cults" in the pacific. Our best understanding is that these cults amounted to scams conducted on a vulnerable population by their own leaders - leaders who had suffered irreparable damage to their ability to control the local economy when the US army briefly thrust their culture into post-scarcity.<p>The infinite scroll of mindless content generated by the big social networks is also about creating (a shallow facsimile of) post-scarcity. An endless stream of hobbies and lifestyles that could be yours - much like late night TV offered your parents the same promises for the low, low price of $14.95 excl. shipping and handling.<p>You can spot this in the way these companies constalty try and undermine the livelihoods of the content creators whose labour they rely on, or try and replace creators wholesale with AIs. If there was a genuine desire to push the social aspects of these systems, they'd be considerably more invested in creating a viable living for creators who participate in the system - instead these networks are just a tool for profit and power.
>As unpleasant as it may be to admit, we are each individually to blame for this slump-inducing cycle’s persistence, and we are each responsible for halting it.<p>To some degree we are to blame, however this doesn't take into account the fact that there are armies of psychologists, marketers and developers and billions of dollars' worth of equipment at the other end of your feed. They aim specifically to get you to stay in the Skinner box so it's not exactly fair to say it's on us.
<i>"There is a solution to all of this...When we scroll through our various feeds, we need to remain consciously aware of what we’re doing and what messages we’re silently sending.'</i><p>That's not likely to help. The author is asking for people to devote more attention to something trivial.
I like the sentiment but this could have been a tweet. If it was it wouldn't be preaching to the choir.<p>I am being glib above but in the spirit of useful feedback, the article needs editing for length. It's not that it's badly written, I just found that it took too circuitous a route to make its point.
> Our upvotes, likes, shares, and retweets need to be reserved for only those things which truly deserve to be amplified, not just because we personally appreciate them, but because they’re of exceptional quality.<p>Sounds great, but with all the morons reacting prolifically to every piece of trash, will my one carefully allotted upvote be valued?<p>I like the idea of Quadratic Voting: <a href="https://www.economist.com/interactive/2021/12/18/quadratic-voting" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.economist.com/interactive/2021/12/18/quadratic-v...</a>
I upvoted this one but wonder whether I did it because it cunningly convinced me to consume a long form content just to eat the pellet for the fact I read it to the end. I agree with many of the statements, always keep an eye out though for the potential I am just the old man who does not get the sophistication that goes into phenomenally only cheap, thoughtless content. What if the new art is not articulated in lighting but in the surprise out of the subtlety of the chain of simple contents. What if art is transitioning to a more directly dialectic between creators. I see my son working with a group on stickman animations, and I appreciate the community and its shared sense of newfound beauty in the pursuit of a perfection that I cannot fully understand.
>We need to remember that five minutes invested in reading an article – even a mediocre one – will almost always offer a better payout of emotional energy than five minutes of gambling on a slot machine with only one reel.<p>This is not true. You cannot trick your brain into enjoying a mediocre "healthy" thing more than the enjoyment that you actually feel.<p>This a recipe for burning out and relapsing. Your brain will always know the actual ratio of effort/reward over time, and will prefer the skinner box without question.<p>If you are truly consciously aware of yourself while scrolling, you might find (to your disgust and dismay) that just being in front of the slot machine <i>is</i> a reward to your brain.<p>The unfortunate truth is that you can "cargo cult" yourself into all kinds of debilitating addictions and behaviors with their own twisted, undeniably sound logic that you can't "mindset" your way out of.
=== Article ===
<i>"Worst of all, we snarl at anyone who tries to help us out of the mire, and we decry attempts at pulling anyone else out. We make excuses for writing errors instead of correcting them, we overlook factual mistakes if addressing them would be inconvenient, and we sneer at the alleged pretension of so-called elitists who haven’t yet been ground into the dirt. The only thing that we ever really accomplish is a gradual yet consistent lowering of standards… because even a reasonable excuse is still an excuse, and it represents an opportunity for improvement that’s being cast aside."</i>
====<p>We do? I don't recall anyone ever yelling at me for opening my Kindle at lunch and reading a chapter or two of Rules of Civility for 45 minutes as I scarf down the meatballs leftovers I prepped last night for me and my partner?<p>The article is cathartic in nailing the Ennui Engine's downsides of cheap content. The lack of fact checking, or care put into basic literature. But most people aren't mindless zombies <i>only surfing Tik Tok</i>. You do a little of that. And a little of the other things you like. Cable Access TV was full of Better Call Saul quacks in the 90s, you know.<p>How many people genuinely read the newspaper in 1950 versus the funnies or the sports page? Wasn't that a staple joke in every sitcom? Yokels gonna yokel. New economies spin up. But NYTimes is still making a killing. The straggler media outlets adapt? And of course some terrifically fine middle sized agents unfortunately got pinched in the spinning of the universe at this juncture of Space–Time.
Reading through the text which implicitly and as a perlocutionary/performative act by the author is precisely intended to be <i>not</i> the kind of low-effort content of the evoked 'Ennui Engine', actually strengthens my perception why I would actually feel more enjoyment in the "low effort content":<p>The relatively long suspense of the "Cargo Cult"-like explanation at the end completely falls short of any built up expectations I had, I wouldn't have noticed a difference in the argument if it would have been left out. Instead it seems to function merely as an ornament to elicit some feeling of superiority in one's insight.<p>I mean if I am able to "explain" cargo cult to you it would be least expected to be cargo cult'ed by the very thing.
The text touches on that briefly but suddenly rejects its humbling implications for all the facets of our life by highlighting one aspect: ><i>its most insidious and impactful manifestations lies in entertainment and how we consume it.</i> Where does this uncanny certainty come from?<p>Not to end on a negative note: Why not trying to appreciate some low-effort boredom at a time? Not something to be avoided at all cost but as an highly viscous opening space in one's rapidly passing sense of time, being mostly empty ("boring") or worn out of preconceived notions, but yet to be taken roads, train of thoughts or in some very rare cases, I'm told, for inspiration. Some appreciation for boredom goes a long way and makes oneself intrinsically less prone to the trappings of the described engine by just waiting "it" out.
i wish i had an interest in learning.<p>i seem to prefer mindless consumption.<p>is it just laziness and lack of discipline.<p>im unmotivated to learn anything that doesnt have immediate practical value, like consumption has immediate reward.