The attitude towards pornography here is immediately dismissive and negative. By far the biggest movement in porn since the internet is 'amateur'. Unrecognized here as direct reflection of human sexuality, movement away from fantasy to authenticity.<p>I think the point of the article is that all media is entertainment, and journalism has lost it's informant pretense. A legit point, I don't care for porn bashing though.
Is it just me or do I find it ironic that the article is surrounding by the things the author seems to dislike?
The twitter/facebook tie ins on the site are one thing, but the recommended content made me laugh.<p>>Why You Should Start Smoking<p>>6 Rules For Increasing Your Chances Of Getting Laid At Parties For The Chronically Alienated, Interspersed With Songs I Like Right Now, Vol. 1<p>> Paid Distribution What Your "Drink" Says About You on a Date<p>It's a great way to unintentionally strengthening the authors argument.
Using 'porn' in the title is also kinda porn.<p>Edit:<p>Seriously though, I would replace 'the porn generation' with 'the porned generation'.<p>"Corporations are not looking out for your best interests; they’re looking to make as much money as possible."<p>That's the obvious part. But the interesting part is how all this big corporations managed it to finally break into our lives. Not only the sell us all kinds off stuff we don't need. They also very actively comment our consume behavior. Something is always wrong with our lives. We are too fat, too boring, our relationships are not thrilling enough, we don't manage to get what we deserve.<p>Corporations are not longer selling stuff to us in the traditional way, from producer to consumer. For them, we are gigantic consumption mass, trained to buy and to be evaluated from day one.<p>We are not consumers, we are here to be consumed. We get porned.
The comparisons he made reminded me of something I read not too long ago:<p><a href="http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2011/02/hes_just_not_that_into_anyone.html" rel="nofollow">http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2011/02/hes_just_not_that_int...</a><p><i>In other words, online porn isn't a drug, it isn't an addiction, it isn't a sign of deviancy or a trigger for disease: porn is junk food. It is a bag of potato chips you eat when you aren't even hungry, and once you start and the initial "mmmm!" passes you're all in, may as well finish the bag, you've ruined your diet/night already, start over clean tomorrow.</i><p><i>After a while potato chips just figure into your routine, there's a passing thought that perhaps you shouldn't but since there aren't any obvious and immediate consequences... And now it's part of who you are.</i><p><i>But no one would ever say that "other foods don't measure up", no one says that potato chips taste better than steak not because they don't but because no sane person makes those kinds of comparisons. If you did, if you played it all out in your head and now deliberately avoid eating a steak in order to get to potato chips-- then you have a problem that is deeper than steak or potato chips.</i><p><i>Junk food is stripped of the essentials of real food, leaving just the vulgar, the simple, the obvious of taste: sugar, salt, fat, repeat. It is the pornographization of food. The mistake people make is that they think it is delicious, but it's really just easy, comforting, reliable, satisfying. And that's where we are now: online porn is the pornographization of porn.</i>
It's funny; I started thinking about his examples and except for the TED talks (which for me complement but haven't replaced reading), the only kind of porn I'm exposed to is actual pornography. I don't really spend a lot of time with the others (commercial radio and MacDonalds are particularly unpleasant).<p>I also don't get when he says<p><pre><code> If you’re a vegetarian… Well, you’re shit out of luck.
</code></pre>
and then two paragraphs later he inverts that by saying the other stuff is still out there. And, in my opinion, it's not just "still out there" - there's actually <i>more</i> of such content available.
Let me keep in style with this article and TL;DR it for you: instant gratification is awesome, and it's easier than it's ever been.
I embrace this and look forward to a day when I can just go into dreamland in my mind while my body is controlled by a computer to do space mining that robots can't. Then I can spend more time doing exactly what I want.
currently a lot of the market players are focused on grasping a part of your attention. essentially there is a constant battle raging inside of you trying to figure out which of all those mental stimuli you should give in to. if you as an individual don't learn to refrain from such distilled indulgence (social media, fast food, pornography) you might as well get lost in the 21st century (and end up void of any free will)... and that's a dangerous outlook (remember Huxley's brave new world?)
Ok, so I have a point to make. I don't quite understand how, whenever porn is discussed, all the HN community gets very rational about it and we start discussing it as if it was a normal product. It is absolutely not. It is not what human beings are and it degrades women (And increasingly, trends in porn change only in one way: How they degrade women). It is also dull, and repetitive, despite their sad attempts to innovate; there is a finite number of sexual positions, and you can only go past that once you establish the fact that women will choose to degrade themselves and go with it, which the makers (men, always) happily decide its the case.
So yes, as a hacker, there things to learn from the porn industry (scaling, traffic analysis..),but its effect on society and its subjugation of half of said society far outweigh those few technological insights.
Isn't this rehashing PG's essay, The Acceleration of Addictiveness? <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html</a>
Oh man, I wrote a giant post, but it was too big to post here. Essentially I disagree with the author, and I probably have said some interesting things in my rant. Here it is: <a href="http://pastebin.com/EV64mvm8" rel="nofollow">http://pastebin.com/EV64mvm8</a>
I agree with this article, however, it overlooks one huge aspect; porn has been popular long before America became fat and obsessed with the "I want it now" massive $1 cheeseburgers.
We were just talking about this in an IRC channel. I think the article is saying that we've cut everything down to the common denominator. I've also heard it called the 'fast food' generation. We want the quick hit, the down and dirty. We live in an incredibly fast paced society. But in that context, how can you not chop everything down to the kibbles and bits, in order to get people even interested? (or in other terms: tl;dr)
This article made me think of the foodgasm:<p><a href="http://foodnetworkhumor.com/2009/12/the-top-10-biggest-food-network-foodgasms-of-2009/" rel="nofollow">http://foodnetworkhumor.com/2009/12/the-top-10-biggest-food-...</a>
The way I look at it, anyone who indulges in porn isn't going to be a competitive threat to me or take my job. Why? Because they're preoccupied, lack self control and settle for fantasy over reality.