Social Control Media as a Rapid Race to the Bottom - Part IV - Physical Health, Mental Health, and Debilitating Anxiety
One is better off feeding stray pigeons (rather than scrolling and clicking on "timelines" like a dumb pigeon)
In prior parts (see Part I, Part II, and Part III) we spoke about how Social Control Media impacts people, society, and states (not limited to politicians, government departments, and police). Social Control Media is seemingly a force for evil/bad more often than not because of the way it 'evolved', seeing there's no viable business model other than spreading propaganda and selectively embracing conflict (of financial interest to the operator of the platform*).
Let's start with how one's body is impacted by these "platforms".
Many ails debilitate the mind, but some ails debilitate the body (e.g. infections) and cause discrimination, humiliation, mistreatment, neglect etc. Consider this example of Facebook, as explained by Ryan. He explained what it's like to be a gay man - i.e. already marginalised - in Social Control Media:
Did you mention the part about apps like Grindr selling your data to Facebook? Then you get ads going "Did you take Truvada and have a broken bone?" They find out who is gay and who might have HIV.Then they sell it to advertisers.
Truvada can also be taken to prevent HIV. But Gilead left it on the market for years knowing it was hurting gay people very badly in some cases, to run out the patent before improving its safety profile with Descovy and with HIV medicines that use the new formulation of tenofovir.
Now they're trying to get a settlement from the drug companies, so they pay Facebook to market ads regarding bone breaks and kidney damage to people. How do they know who took this medicine?
Grindr tells them if you have HIV or use PrEP. Then they market the ads targeting the people who may have been hurt by the drug company.
You also get "gay cruise" ads on Facebook if they bought your info from Grindr and they know you're gay. It's another way to market to you because Facebook has spyware libraries in a gay hookup app. So they could potentially, maybe, even buy lists of who you've been having sex with.
Even the government buys data like this.
That way they can get it without any constitutional "issues". You know, like a search or a warrant.
This bunch of stuff impacts everyone:
Everything you do in a mobile phone probably ends up being sold to Facebook, or bundles spyware libraries from Facebook.But they're hardly the only ones. There's dozens, maybe even hundreds. Mobile apps are bad because they know all about you, right down to who you're having sex with. What you buy at the grocery store. When you go to fast food restaurants and what you buy there.
They know where you are all the time as long as the phone is on.
CNN recently reported (today) that there's a company that monitors people as they walk around stores with smartphones, to monitor customer "traffic". They said that CostCo foot traffic fell 4.8% in the week of February 17th, Walmart was down like 5.6% I think, Target was down way more than that.
But they know because they're always spying on you. Facebook isn't just a website, or an app. They develop software to put into unrelated apps to mine your information straight out of that app.
I have a Free Software program called TrackerControl for my phone, from F-Droid. I can look into any app on my phone and tell you who put spyware there and what domains the app tries to contact and why. Many Android apps from the Play store have between 5 and 20 pieces of spyware in them.
Grindr had 17 pieces of third party adware and spyware. Including 5 from Facebook. TextNow, which is a burner phone number VOIP app has 19 pieces of adware and spyware, including 4 from Facebook. I think people might be shocked that even if they don't use Facebook, their apps on the phone tell them all about you anyway.
Grindr is probably making a lot of money selling user data to Facebook. What do people like to do when they're bored? Sex. What do people like to do when they have no money? Sex. Maybe even recession-proof.
I think this is the single most disturbing context I've seen Facebook implicated in.
When you want to hook up with someone, imagine Mark Zuckerberg staring at you, recording it to sell to his friends, you know. The advertisers, the insurance companies, the police. The US has seen an explosion in all kinds of loathsome diseases since apps like Grindr hit the scene. Several times the former norm. They even have new diseases now that were never there before. They did not exist until apps like this made them easier to get and spread. And so probably the worst one, HIV, Mark Zuckerberg is in your Grindr going "Please say it louder and into the microphone."
Half the Grindr profile is what loathsome diseases you either have, have been checked for (and when), or been vaccinated for. But they're selling this. Most people would feel violated if Mark Zuckerberg was in the corner of their bedroom with a camcorder while they were going at it. So why are they not disturbed about Facebook's spyware libraries in Grindr? Peeping Zuck.
That impacts people's behaviour and social awareness. Consider reading The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt.
Quoting Haidt's thesis (in a nutshell):
- The Tidal Wave: In this section, I show the basic statistics on the mental health of young people.
- The Decline of the Play-Based Childhood: In this section, I discuss the nature of childhood and how we messed it up by depriving children of play and role-models, damaging attachment systems, and erasing any clear path from childhood to adulthood.
- The Rise of the Phone-Based Childhood: In this section, I discuss the harms that result from the new phone-based childhood, with a chapter devoted to harms to girls, a chapter on harm to boys, and a chapter on the “spiritual degradation” that is happening to all of us––including adults––from our new phone-based lives.
- Collective Actions for Better Childhood: In this final section, I explain what we must do to reverse the damage. I explain how parents, school, governments, tech companies, and young people are trapped in “collective action problems” and how these can be resolved when individuals organize and act together.
Ryan habitually speaks of things like these and he told us how to deal with visible distraction, among other nuisance, based on his personal experience with "smart" phones and other such novelties.
"I have my phone on do not disturb, always, with limited whitelisting," Ryan told us. "I don't use many "apps" and most are from F-Droid, I mentioned that the other day. It's been proven that just having a phone that you KNOW could try to alert you in the bedroom with you, destroys sleep quality. When you know it won't bother you, you sleep better. Even before "smart" phones which are always going off, and with scams, or Taco Bell telling you there's a chalupa, you know, in the 90s my mother used to leave the phone off the hook. I asked her why she did that, she said "I'm off today and I don't want that stupid hospital trying to call me in." They'd get short staffed and then they'd call her on her days off and try to insist that it wasn't mandatory, but it was mandatory. So if the phone was busy all day then they couldn't ask."
I know the feeling of unwanted distractions (post from 2019) and I keep hearing from relatives who say the same thing, constantly distracted by some gadget in the dinner table. It's socially unhealthy, never mind the impact on one's own health. People might start imagining that people whom they never met in person (or even heard) are their true friends, whereas people who sit beside them are mere strangers because they never give them "likes" (or might not be using any Social Control Media at all). █
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* Twitter is not US-owned and TikTok is openly US-hostile.