alt Hacker NewsThis societal view that you are a powerless NPC slave to ones desires/addictions is highly toxic. It is not in fact binary for most people and people do have free will to make different choices. To absolve the individual of accountability is to undermine the very fabric of society. The way individuals typically overcome addiction is through reliance on close family & friends. Those family & friends can "take the phone away" or "uninstall the app" if there is really an issue. Laws are a blunt instrument and should be used sparingly.
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inigyou • yesterday at 2:17 PM
This is sparingly. The government basically let the tech industry run amok for 20 years and only acted when the problems it was causing were serious and undeniable.
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I’m a Buddhist, so I really do see what you’re saying about personal responsibility and agency, but the other problem I see is that the companies at the forefront of these ultra-addictive industries (including mass social media) get busted eventually every single time for working overtime to hide what they knew about how damaging their products can be, and in fact to convince the public that their products do the opposite of what they actually do.
Does nicotine have some beneficial health effects? Yeah, it actually does. But do they outweigh the downsides (and societal costs)? Absolutely not.
I do believe strongly in individual freedom of choice, but only under a paradigm of informed consent, and companies like Meta have never allowed that to happen and they never will, because the truth getting out could destroy their bottom line.