‘Brain rot’ is the Oxford word of the year – a fitting choice, given the startling impact the internet is having on our grey matter, says journalist Siân Boyle
We have never had machine learning algorithms that exploit human psychology to give precisely timed hits of dopamine. Algorithms that know you better than your family members do.
I think in the near future we’re gonna be looking at the modern social medias similar to how we see smoking cigarettes today. Addictive and bad for you.
Every single generation fixates on something new ones do because they’re scared of change. I was endlessly derided for many things that are norm now. They were supposed to end the world but somehow we keep on going. I see my generational peers turning into own parents and dooming about Skibidi toilet thing. They forgot they were children once too.
One difference I see is that unlike before, the older generations are also caught in the attention shortening dopamine trap.
It used to be parents complaining about kids watching TV while reading the newspaper. Now adults are watching 3 minute YouTube videos just like children.
Y’all talking about dopamine just sound silly. That’s not actually what dopamine is. It’s just pseudo-science to sell grifts like happy pills and violent control of the internet.
Scared of change? This is not just change - we have never had social media algorithms putting shit into people’s head about themselves and others, all day, every single day.
This shit is affecting people’s entire perception of the world and who they are. It’s not just some random change.
I haven’t forgotten being a kid. But when I was growing up, the so called dangers were computer games and too much TV. That was nothing compared to weaponized algorithms picking content that will “engage” people (make them react).
Some kids today are completely out there with pluto man. They just lost any sense of reality. Their entire perception of the world is from social media algorithms from tech companies. That’s one scary thought.
Sure it’s funny with “old man yelling at the cloud”, but there is something here to be concerned about.
„We have never had x” is the exact same argument that could be used to a number of things that sparked moral outrages before. This is too much of a dejavu for me to treat seriously.
we have never had social media algorithms putting shit into people’s head about themselves and others, all day, every single day.
We still don’t. There are no algorithms putting shit into my head. I choose to use certain apps because I enjoy them, find them useful, etc. I do this when I want, definitely not all day everyday unwillingly. Is it just me? Are y’all really being attacked by algorithms all day? lol.
Some kids today are completely out there with pluto man.
“they just forget they were children once” said every generation of kids.
Myself included.
We saw what was coming in the 90’s, and discussed the inevitable shitshow that social media was going to be (we didn’t know Facebook itself was coming, but we had MySpace, etc, which was also something we studiously avoided using because it was clearly problematic).
I highly recommend reading about Las Vegas and the research the gambling companies have done to get people addicted to slots, etc.
Vegas is designed to entrap you. Social media companies are using the same research to the same ends.
I’m half a year from 40 myself, and I’m quite concerned. We were fortunate enough that social media never really took off in popularity until we were adults. We’re basically the last ones who can claim that. Sure, our parents wrung their hands and got upset about too much garbage TV and video games, but there is something legitimately different and more alarming here. Even when social media was first coming onto the scene, the technology was different and any algorithms that existed weren’t nearly as fine-tuned as they are now. You basically just got a feed of whatever the people you included as your friends were up to or wanted to share, and efforts to profile you or curate that content in order to keep you glued to their site were not nearly as sophisticated. Smartphones were a brand new tech, so most people still had a “dumb” cell phone that could just present a super stripped-down mobile version of a website, and most apps for them came directly from the manufacturer or service provider. All of that technology has exploded in the last 10-15 years, faster than even the rapid rise of the Internet itself in the '90s. All the goofy Flash games and stuff back then, or skibidi toilet today, aren’t really the problem, I will agree on that (even if I think the stupidity of that stuff has only continued to go downhill). The danger is in that rapidly increasing sophistication of the algorithms and other psychological patterns that social media companies, advertisers and other big tech moguls have been using to ensure we never put our smartphones down, and all the data we give them just makes those algorithms stronger by the day. TV broadcasters and game developers could utilize some techniques to keep you watching or playing, but they could never fine-tune an experience tailor made for the individual user like these tech and social media companies can. The stupid nature of so much of the stuff that’s out there is certainly not helping, but that’s also a matter of “garbage in, garbage out”. But the user would never know exactly how garbage the content they’re consuming is if they never break out of the bubble these companies contain them in.
I’m going to say something that I just want people to think about.
Part of the allure of TV and video games is the idea that they are something you can do after working 8-12 hours a day that doesn’t ask anything of you. You can just sit and go through the motions. There is nothing being required. No deadlines. No bills. No stress. Not even attention if you don’t want to.
It’s something of a detox from a world that is always trying to extract productivity from you.
Because that is the case and because we have let the world creep in on any and all personal time we have to the point that we are afraid to not always be connected.
While always being connected has a lot of positives (family always being just a phone call away, friends having an avenue to interact etc), there are obvious detriments as well.
At the same time we have moved to a significantly digital age where there’s not anything to do outside that doesn’t cost money in some way. Transportation, venue, food, drinks, parking etc.
I think what’s happening is that due to these and other factors, adults and kids don’t have the headspace to do more than veg out sometimes and the times when I see people doing that are while they’re waiting around or on break or when they get home from work or school.
The short form video is the kind of thing that allows you to veg out to some extent. It also offers the chance to feel like you’re being interacted with (humans showing you something they think is neat or interesting or funny or stupid).
We make the mistake of assuming that everything we do has to be if some substance. I don’t think that’s necessary. I think it’s healthy to give your brain a time and place free from the demands of everyday life. We discourage daydreaming or wandering off in our thoughts. We discourage a lot of healthy brain downtime actions.
The corporate aspect of it is obviously not good. But when you realize we are more productive than we have ever been as a species, spending more hours working, and going to school than we do in leisure, I don’t think it’s necessarily terrible that we take a break from that when and where we can.
I understand this phenomenon and it goes all the way back to Socrates. There’s that famous quote.
The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.
And he even used to complain about the new invention of writing. Said it would weaken people’s memory because they wouldn’t have to remember everything.
So I get it. I understand what you mean.
But I think this is different. Because let me posit this.
Cigarettes existed for a very long time, but it wasn’t until the late 1800s that they started being produced en masse. Very quickly, the majority of the country was smoking and smoking a lot. Much more than before.
That eventually caused a dramatic increase in lung diseases because a lot more people were smoking. You could say “Tobacco has been around forever. Every generation has fads”
But in reality, it was different. It was a new thing. Cigarettes were hand-rolled before. Now you could buy a pack and smoke your 20 a day much more easily.
I think this is more similar to what we are seeing with social media today. I consciously make an effort not to judge the youth. And I’m not judging the youth. The social media “epidemic” does not only concern the youth, but all generations. Smartphones in general but modern social media specifically operate in manners we don’t fully understand.
Look at the brains of gambling addicts. Your brain literally gets rewired when you play slots all day. Social media operates in a similar manner as slots. We are all rewiring our brains in a way that has never happened in human history.
It could cause permanent damage for all we know. We just haven’t had the time or studies to confirm this. And if we look at research that exists right now, social media does increase rate of anxiety, depression, etc. It’s not so simple.
All good points, thank you. I don’t disagree but I don’t think those things are as impactful as most.
The way I see it is that we keep trading one bad thing for another all the time. We might have TikTok now but we no longer have led in gasoline that gave anxiety/ADHD/depression to my generation. TT has also been demonised beyond belief due to influence campaigns from Meta but that’s a side note. We have mass manufactured nicotine products but at least it’s not an unfiltered cigarette. I don’t believe we’re regressing, or regressing beyond what’s a normal amount of random change.
Accumulation of knowledge is one of our best bets and seems to be somewhat working out. History will probably not always move towards a brighter future but that’s okay because long term we either bomb ourselves out of this planet or actually work it out.
But the tiktok algorithm does learn about what holds your attention and what loses it, down to the second of what was playing on your video when you scrolled away.
We have never had machine learning algorithms that exploit human psychology to give precisely timed hits of dopamine. Algorithms that know you better than your family members do.
I think in the near future we’re gonna be looking at the modern social medias similar to how we see smoking cigarettes today. Addictive and bad for you.
Every single generation fixates on something new ones do because they’re scared of change. I was endlessly derided for many things that are norm now. They were supposed to end the world but somehow we keep on going. I see my generational peers turning into own parents and dooming about Skibidi toilet thing. They forgot they were children once too.
One difference I see is that unlike before, the older generations are also caught in the attention shortening dopamine trap.
It used to be parents complaining about kids watching TV while reading the newspaper. Now adults are watching 3 minute YouTube videos just like children.
Y’all talking about dopamine just sound silly. That’s not actually what dopamine is. It’s just pseudo-science to sell grifts like happy pills and violent control of the internet.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-modern-brain/202403/the-truth-about-dopamine-and-your-brain
Did you read the article you linked?
"More recent research shows that dopamine has less to do with the experience of pleasure and more to do with anticipating or craving something. "
“Create checks and balances for time spent in unhealthy behavior loops (e.g., social media scrolling, online shopping, online gambling).”
I didn’t claim it was pleasure but addiction like gambling.
Scared of change? This is not just change - we have never had social media algorithms putting shit into people’s head about themselves and others, all day, every single day.
This shit is affecting people’s entire perception of the world and who they are. It’s not just some random change.
I haven’t forgotten being a kid. But when I was growing up, the so called dangers were computer games and too much TV. That was nothing compared to weaponized algorithms picking content that will “engage” people (make them react).
Some kids today are completely out there with pluto man. They just lost any sense of reality. Their entire perception of the world is from social media algorithms from tech companies. That’s one scary thought.
Sure it’s funny with “old man yelling at the cloud”, but there is something here to be concerned about.
„We have never had x” is the exact same argument that could be used to a number of things that sparked moral outrages before. This is too much of a dejavu for me to treat seriously.
We still don’t. There are no algorithms putting shit into my head. I choose to use certain apps because I enjoy them, find them useful, etc. I do this when I want, definitely not all day everyday unwillingly. Is it just me? Are y’all really being attacked by algorithms all day? lol.
I haven’t seen this.
“they just forget they were children once” said every generation of kids.
Myself included.
We saw what was coming in the 90’s, and discussed the inevitable shitshow that social media was going to be (we didn’t know Facebook itself was coming, but we had MySpace, etc, which was also something we studiously avoided using because it was clearly problematic).
I highly recommend reading about Las Vegas and the research the gambling companies have done to get people addicted to slots, etc.
Vegas is designed to entrap you. Social media companies are using the same research to the same ends.
I’m 40, I’m reflecting on how my own generation is becoming dumb like boomers.
Who discussed social media in the 90s?
I’m half a year from 40 myself, and I’m quite concerned. We were fortunate enough that social media never really took off in popularity until we were adults. We’re basically the last ones who can claim that. Sure, our parents wrung their hands and got upset about too much garbage TV and video games, but there is something legitimately different and more alarming here. Even when social media was first coming onto the scene, the technology was different and any algorithms that existed weren’t nearly as fine-tuned as they are now. You basically just got a feed of whatever the people you included as your friends were up to or wanted to share, and efforts to profile you or curate that content in order to keep you glued to their site were not nearly as sophisticated. Smartphones were a brand new tech, so most people still had a “dumb” cell phone that could just present a super stripped-down mobile version of a website, and most apps for them came directly from the manufacturer or service provider. All of that technology has exploded in the last 10-15 years, faster than even the rapid rise of the Internet itself in the '90s. All the goofy Flash games and stuff back then, or skibidi toilet today, aren’t really the problem, I will agree on that (even if I think the stupidity of that stuff has only continued to go downhill). The danger is in that rapidly increasing sophistication of the algorithms and other psychological patterns that social media companies, advertisers and other big tech moguls have been using to ensure we never put our smartphones down, and all the data we give them just makes those algorithms stronger by the day. TV broadcasters and game developers could utilize some techniques to keep you watching or playing, but they could never fine-tune an experience tailor made for the individual user like these tech and social media companies can. The stupid nature of so much of the stuff that’s out there is certainly not helping, but that’s also a matter of “garbage in, garbage out”. But the user would never know exactly how garbage the content they’re consuming is if they never break out of the bubble these companies contain them in.
I’m going to say something that I just want people to think about.
Part of the allure of TV and video games is the idea that they are something you can do after working 8-12 hours a day that doesn’t ask anything of you. You can just sit and go through the motions. There is nothing being required. No deadlines. No bills. No stress. Not even attention if you don’t want to.
It’s something of a detox from a world that is always trying to extract productivity from you.
Because that is the case and because we have let the world creep in on any and all personal time we have to the point that we are afraid to not always be connected. While always being connected has a lot of positives (family always being just a phone call away, friends having an avenue to interact etc), there are obvious detriments as well.
At the same time we have moved to a significantly digital age where there’s not anything to do outside that doesn’t cost money in some way. Transportation, venue, food, drinks, parking etc.
I think what’s happening is that due to these and other factors, adults and kids don’t have the headspace to do more than veg out sometimes and the times when I see people doing that are while they’re waiting around or on break or when they get home from work or school.
The short form video is the kind of thing that allows you to veg out to some extent. It also offers the chance to feel like you’re being interacted with (humans showing you something they think is neat or interesting or funny or stupid).
We make the mistake of assuming that everything we do has to be if some substance. I don’t think that’s necessary. I think it’s healthy to give your brain a time and place free from the demands of everyday life. We discourage daydreaming or wandering off in our thoughts. We discourage a lot of healthy brain downtime actions.
The corporate aspect of it is obviously not good. But when you realize we are more productive than we have ever been as a species, spending more hours working, and going to school than we do in leisure, I don’t think it’s necessarily terrible that we take a break from that when and where we can.
I understand this phenomenon and it goes all the way back to Socrates. There’s that famous quote.
And he even used to complain about the new invention of writing. Said it would weaken people’s memory because they wouldn’t have to remember everything.
So I get it. I understand what you mean.
But I think this is different. Because let me posit this.
Cigarettes existed for a very long time, but it wasn’t until the late 1800s that they started being produced en masse. Very quickly, the majority of the country was smoking and smoking a lot. Much more than before.
That eventually caused a dramatic increase in lung diseases because a lot more people were smoking. You could say “Tobacco has been around forever. Every generation has fads”
But in reality, it was different. It was a new thing. Cigarettes were hand-rolled before. Now you could buy a pack and smoke your 20 a day much more easily.
I think this is more similar to what we are seeing with social media today. I consciously make an effort not to judge the youth. And I’m not judging the youth. The social media “epidemic” does not only concern the youth, but all generations. Smartphones in general but modern social media specifically operate in manners we don’t fully understand.
Look at the brains of gambling addicts. Your brain literally gets rewired when you play slots all day. Social media operates in a similar manner as slots. We are all rewiring our brains in a way that has never happened in human history.
It could cause permanent damage for all we know. We just haven’t had the time or studies to confirm this. And if we look at research that exists right now, social media does increase rate of anxiety, depression, etc. It’s not so simple.
All good points, thank you. I don’t disagree but I don’t think those things are as impactful as most.
The way I see it is that we keep trading one bad thing for another all the time. We might have TikTok now but we no longer have led in gasoline that gave anxiety/ADHD/depression to my generation. TT has also been demonised beyond belief due to influence campaigns from Meta but that’s a side note. We have mass manufactured nicotine products but at least it’s not an unfiltered cigarette. I don’t believe we’re regressing, or regressing beyond what’s a normal amount of random change.
Accumulation of knowledge is one of our best bets and seems to be somewhat working out. History will probably not always move towards a brighter future but that’s okay because long term we either bomb ourselves out of this planet or actually work it out.
Perhaps every generation has been right and things have just been getting progressively worse.
We still don’t.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-modern-brain/202403/the-truth-about-dopamine-and-your-brain
But the tiktok algorithm does learn about what holds your attention and what loses it, down to the second of what was playing on your video when you scrolled away.