<story><title>Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Free Will</title><url>http://m.nautil.us/issue/52/the-hive/modern-media-is-a-dos-attack-on-your-free-will</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>yosito</author><text>As someone who works in tech, I like the analogy of a DoS attack. The root of the issue is attention capitalism. Our attention is essentially a resource being exploited for profit. In that scenario, we&amp;#x27;re effectivley no longer in control of our own free will as long as someone else can profit by controlling it. On an individual scale, we can give it relatively benign labels like &amp;quot;distraction&amp;quot;. But when you look at it from macro scale it&amp;#x27;s effectively a DDoS attack on our free will perpetrated by all of the companies trying to get a slice of the pie of our attention.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zamalek</author><text>Attention as well as free will is a scarce resource on a personal level. I used to seriously question why anyone would buy almost identical Apple devices year-after-year; where-as I&amp;#x27;d spend at least a day researching which Android devices were available. The truth is that it&amp;#x27;s a bloody &lt;i&gt;phone.&lt;/i&gt; I was expending all my free will on trivialities and wasn&amp;#x27;t making choices that actually matter.&lt;p&gt;I think this problem is more complex than just the media. In general, people are spending their attention and free will on broad spectrum of useless junk. Media, especially Netflix (&amp;quot;what do I do with my free time?&amp;quot;), is definitely a major offender - my point is that it&amp;#x27;s not the only one.&lt;p&gt;The modern world has wound up being an attack on free will, malevolent or not. It&amp;#x27;s exponentially easier to make a choice from a menu of 5 items vs. a menu of 50. There seems to be a biological limit on our ability to choose and the modern world has &lt;i&gt;far&lt;/i&gt; exceeded that.</text></comment>
<story><title>Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Free Will</title><url>http://m.nautil.us/issue/52/the-hive/modern-media-is-a-dos-attack-on-your-free-will</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>yosito</author><text>As someone who works in tech, I like the analogy of a DoS attack. The root of the issue is attention capitalism. Our attention is essentially a resource being exploited for profit. In that scenario, we&amp;#x27;re effectivley no longer in control of our own free will as long as someone else can profit by controlling it. On an individual scale, we can give it relatively benign labels like &amp;quot;distraction&amp;quot;. But when you look at it from macro scale it&amp;#x27;s effectively a DDoS attack on our free will perpetrated by all of the companies trying to get a slice of the pie of our attention.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wffurr</author><text>&amp;quot;The root of the issue is ... capitalism&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;FTFY.  The structural issues mentioned in the original article are inherent in a free market economy.  Democratic deployment of capital and technology would change the dynamic substantially.&lt;p&gt;An alternate approach would be to have substantial regulation on speech by companies (aka advertising and propaganda), but even this would require major changes driven by the democratic process, e.g a U.S. constitutional amendment.</text></comment>