Smartphones: Parts of Our Minds? Or Parasites?

> Humans being manipulated is not, in and of itself, a hint that things are going wrong.

Well, if this is meant to counter the abstract's claim that:

> Modern smartphones are designed to manipulate the attention and behaviour of users in ways that further the interests of the corporations that built them. In this they are importantly different from resources typically associated with the extended mind—such as notebooks, Scrabble racks and maps—which are not designed to manipulate or exploit users

I think it falls a little short of refuting a claim that in this particular case things are going somewhat wrong.

And now, I disagree with you ;)

> Humans being manipulated is not, in and of itself, a hint that things are going wrong. If a car can be stolen, should it be stolen ? If a dog can be beaten, should it be beaten ? I don’t think because something is fragile that it should be broken, on the contrary. We should recognize the delicacy of our species and design around it. That’d be a sign of evolved behaviour , I’d reckon.

> the #1 enemy of most people is their own mind Again, define the « mind ». Is it really the mental space people live in that is the problem or the culture, teachings, bullyings and programmings that have been thrown at them since birth that are maladaptive ? I’d argue that the mind is fine, given what it can do and that it is just a tool. It is what we do with it that matters and since birth, we’ve been hijacked to fit in society.

Yet most of the people now struggle with some basic calculations: “your calculator history is more embarrassing than your browser history”.

Ie “use it or loose it” kind of vibe.

That’s why one of the possible threats of AI is if one would “forget” how to reason. Or even worse: brain rewires itself to never being able to reason again.

Then again, for me personally it’s a very low probability in our lifetime: ie no that kind of earth-shattering changes of either real AI or, say, nuclear fusion in this century.

However I would love to see long-term studies of someone really smart start only watching tictoc, reels and shorts (and doing nothing else). With brain scanning and what have you.

Uninstall social media.

At this point I’m pretty convinced that social media is a net negative for humanity with little redeeming quality.

There was a time when it did connect people, like you could meet people or find old friends, but that was long ago deprioritized or even stripped away. Now it’s just a pure chum feed that serves up either brain rot trash or political fear and rage bait.

TV was always full of crap but it also gave rise to great shows, to art and lasting culture. It was a medium of mixed value. Social media doesn’t even have that going for it unless some day people celebrate the great Pepe memes. Everything it creates is disposable low effort trash. Nothing worth keeping. You could delete it all and everyone would forget a week later.

>Parasites. Period. This thing fills my head with a bunch of images from distant warped realities, summoned up out of thin air, it clogs my brain with a flood of other voices,

It does all that by it self? Of course not. This thing is not autonomous. Every app that _fill your head_ was your choice to install, signup and OPEN every time. It's like saying drugs are parasites. Of course they aren't. Your choices made you addicted to the thing. What happened to agency? Everyone is now a slave of social media apps?

Is it the phone or is it the internet you're lamenting? Sounds like the latter. I think TFA misattributes this as well.

You know that is you, not the phone, that is desperately looking for a distraction and a different reality.

I don't understand why it's ever so trendy to do this performative i-have-minimal-agency-in-my-existence bit when it comes to smartphones; swap that last word with "TV" and the same people professing it would smirk - presumably because that's an old timey, rather than a très trendy, thing to be part of.

Pacifiers. For a while I watched dash cam video from police car chases. I'm over it now, but one interesting thing frequently happens: officers yank the drivers out, get them on the ground and cuff them. In most cases, the drivers are yelling about their phone. "My phone!" "My phone!" Cars is wrecked, they've got knees pressing them into the dirt, frequently injured, facing all manner of charges, and the one thing they care about it some phone.

After sitting in the patrol car for a quite while, some officer opens the door to speak with them. Immediately: "Can I get my phone??"

Sometimes they'll still have a phone after being cuffed and detained. They will nearly dislocate joints to thumb their phones continuously while cuffed. They will not stop until someone takes it.

I don't know...

The symbiotic-parasitic spectrum likely depends on usage patterns - tools that augment cognition when used intentionally can become parasitic when designed to maximize engagement at the expense of user agency.

If you're interested in real-time collaboration in Obsidian, you might be interested in Relay [0].

(disclaimer: I'm the dev)

[0] https://relay.md