“I want to leave the world better than I found it.”
I used to say that, but I've come to appreciate that many things are not within my control. Through no fault of my own and despite my best efforts, the world may very well worsen in the future. Society may be devastated by climate change, nuclear war, artificial intelligence, or social media. Would that be a personal failure? Of course not.
I later settled on alternative wording: I want to leave the world better than it would have been without me. Even that sometimes seems impossible, given my contributions to pollution and my consumption of limited resources, given the number of ants I've inadvertently stepped on, and so on. Still, it seems like a more reasonable goal.
Cross-platform messaging is a mess. That is, sending a message from an iPhone to an Android phone, or vice versa, still doesn't work right. Want to create a group chat or respond to messages on your computer? Good luck.
One solution would be for everyone to buy Apple products. That's not realistic, and it only rewards bad behavior; Apple's “our way or the highway” attitude is the reason this is so bad in the first place.
Another solution? Use Signal. Seriously. Just use Signal. Get everyone you know on Signal and never look back. It's time to text like it's 2023.
“We need to find a way back to reality, and the only way to do that is to have conversations that aren’t mediated by technology that is financed and animated by third parties who hope to persuade us. We must fight to speak to each other outside of the persuasion labyrinth.”
“We curate our lives around this perceived sense of perfection because we get rewarded in these short-term signals—hearts, likes, thumbs up—and we conflate that with value and we conflate it with truth, and instead, what it really is is fake, brittle popularity.”
—Chamath Palihapitiya, former VP of Growth, Mobile, and International at Facebook, in a conversation at Stanford
I'm intrigued by Boring Report, a news aggregator that uses artificial intelligence to offer “boring” coverage of current events, free of sensationalism and clickbait. As one example, it offered the following headline:
Shakira and Lewis Hamilton Spend Time Together in Miami
for an article originally titled:
Newly-single Shakira enjoys cosy boat trip with Lewis Hamilton just days after pair were spotted at secret dinner
It's not perfect, but I like it. Imagine if all news read this way. How much more normal would the world feel?
I'm a paying YouTube Premium customer, but YouTube is getting worse every day. I especially dislike the over-the-top thumbnails that some creators use, often showing their surprised faces reacting to something incredible that never occurs in the video. The many “news reaction” videos are almost as bad, wherein creators pad 10 seconds of a real news clip with 3 minutes of blabbering; the thumbnail shows the real news clip.
The race to the bottom of the brain stem, as Tristan Harris puts it, continues.
For those who feel similarly, I recommend the Clickbait Remover add-on (get it for Firefox, get it for Chrome), which replaces custom thumbnails with real video frames.
I think of social media like the cigarettes of our time. Of course, cigarettes still exist, but most people today understand their harms and abstain from them. Not so with social media.
One consequence of thinking this way is that I’m particularly horrified when I see very young children using social media. They’re inhaling digital tar and forming habits that will be difficult to unlearn, but the cartoon characters and DIY slime videos make it seem okay.
When we don’t engage with our ideological opponents, our arguments weaken and our naivete becomes painfully obvious to them. When we don’t engage with our ideological opponents, we also don't notice this.
We should ask ourselves these questions more often than we do: Is this true, or is this only thought to be true by people in my circles? Do I want it to be true?