We Need to Encourage Society to Reject Modern Skinnerboxes (Made for Humans)
Your typical "mobile phone" (or "cellphone") user with social control media "apps" (for humans):
THE latest press reports we saw earlier this week claim that both Twitter and Facebook are on the decline as far as the % of young people using them. Prior reports generally said more casually that social control media had gradually 'died' - basically usage levels just keep collapsing. In relative terms, one can see Twitter's demise since Elon Musk took over and sites that relied on social control media suffer the most (some say that they shut down due to this dependency). People who conflated social control media usage with popularity are sobering up; some of them realise they're not as popular as they were led to believe.
Over at the sister site, which deals with BSD and GNU/Linux, half an hour ago it was taken note that Vietnam's numbers show a grim future for Microsoft - a future where Windows has since-digit market share (about 7%) and where mobile devices, i.e. skinnerboxes, take over. Many of those devices run "apps" that spy on users, and that's not limited to TikTok and other very toxic social control media.
It will likely be a big challenge to come; how do we convince billions of people that not only social control media is really bad but also the skinnerboxes that act as a "carrier"?
We are ruining brain (even emotional) development and so much more.
The other day my wife and I went to the local swimming pool (Olympic size) and were told cash payments were no longer accepted ("since COVID" according to them), which meant we needed to give personal details, not just for entry (a database) but also for payment. The lady at the reception kept asking if we had "the app" - to which we dismissively replied. The very fact they assume each person has a skinnerbox carried around (or has an Internet connection; many elderly people don't) illuminates a real issue; social control media aside, just going about in one's daily routine can become difficult without surrendering to mass surveillance. When I was young I could just pay cash and access all the pools anonymously, without proving a phone number, E-mail address, and so on. Sooner or later they suffer (but won't publicly announce) some security breach, so the data supplied to all those firms falls onto hostile hands. This begets all sorts of other issues. █