can we stop using arbitrary corporate powers to force behavior on people? Everybody is damaged in someone else's mind, how about being tolerant to people's lifestyle choices that have no impact on us
> that men as a class are vulnerable to this kind of illness, and design public health interventions to help divert men
Interesting. The ancient lawmaker Solon instituted public brothels with a standard fee as a public health measure. But people think that s horrible -- damned if you do, damned if you don't. I guess the suggestion is that people shouldn't have sexuality or desires, they should just cut off their genitals and live as vegetables. O what a world we live in
This is the standard libertarian reply but it’s not really compelling.
Being choosy about your culture and protective of your youth on a societal scale is necessary. Without it, corporations with Billions of dollars will be competing to extract as much value out of children of families with a median net worth of about 40k. And that already massive imbalance is only getting worse and worse, not just through inequality, but through technology where corporations are more and more able to access their entire mind in evermore convincing fashion (VR up next!).
So you’ll take base desires that should be met as naturally as possible (sexual desire met with supervised interaction with peers of the same age) and you suddenly have unlimited virtual reality porn with facetuned, hyper optimized algorithm, AI generated responses, and suddenly you have a new generation of “incels” or similar who were so satisfied by their internet porn addiction that they never were forced to grapple with... well, real women, and the fact that they are absolutely not constantly sexually available and hyper optimized for your pleasure. And then you have Big Problems.
Listen, these are all, like, opinions, man. But with where we are heading with technology. Having seen TikTok and how it’s radicalizing and dopamine retraining a whole generation... I wish the government would get a whole lot more overbearing with requiring regulation - not to ban it per se, but to ensure platforms that provide it must validate age with more than a checkbox, etc. At least that Apple continues to provide evermore effective parental controls.
I think you should consider the extent to which the "normal" culture you are advocating is actually "real" or manufactured via the mass media and hollywood. There are so many ways in which american culture (and its inherent, persistent puritanism) is un-natural to people from so many different countries around the world. Technology is an enabler or a megaphone for our desires, but it doesn't create them.
Then there's the issue of helicopter-like supervision of children. This is a very recent phenomenon and has deprived the latest generations of any 'risky' and unrestricted encounters. I can understand why they feel the need to escape from it, because it really acts like a prison wall. If anything, their online escapades probably help them to grow and discover their own personality.
I didn’t specify normal culture, but I would include media portrayals of normal as included in dangerous and would encourage people to find normality through ancient cultural traditions and religions, not media.
Although Puritan culture is certainly not enhanced by media much at all, if anything the exact opposite.
And helicopter parenting is a totally different thing which I don’t like either.
As long as the incentives are there, the business and technology will follow.
Do you have the same strong feelings about other addictions, like social media in general or gaming? These are industries designed around creating psychological hooks at the expense of their user (some are worse than others).
> that men as a class are vulnerable to this kind of illness, and design public health interventions to help divert men
Interesting. The ancient lawmaker Solon instituted public brothels with a standard fee as a public health measure. But people think that s horrible -- damned if you do, damned if you don't. I guess the suggestion is that people shouldn't have sexuality or desires, they should just cut off their genitals and live as vegetables. O what a world we live in