Designed for Addiction

This definitely touches on what @willmattei wrote here:

In #2, it’s the idea of “When tech services which are essential to live and work are needlessly designed to be addictive”. Now I am old enough to be around when the Web was first invented (and even worked on the first Web site in the U.S.), and back then there was this utopian belief that the openness of web protocols would provide a means of bypassing media power that was concentrated in so few hands.

Well, guess what? The Internet, like every other technology and human tool, is a reflection of us. And we humans always seem drawn to concentrate power in fewer hands. In hindsight I think this was a natural outcome (and is also a reason I am skeptical of the latest round of blockchain social utopianism: we cannot escape our humanness with the tools we humans make).

When the concentrated powers become akin to oligarchies and monopolies, we humans need to do what we humans have always done under those regimes: demand change and create a healthier playing field for all. At least until the next round of humans games the system to aggregate power.

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