Published December 13, 2020
Earlier this week I was realizing I was feeling a bit down due to my reading Twitter and general stupidity on Facebook.
I had also been thinking about building a future online discussion group for select clients of mine.
For discussion / community purposes, I’ve considered Facebook Groups in the past. These days, though, I’m re-thinking about the tradeoffs between “free” online services and the damage they do to society by everything from tracking and selling our information for advertising and government intelligence freelancing to societal damage from manipulating dopamine in our brains, encouraging grevience, and acting as an accelerant to enable further stupid by the current president.
To solve the first problem, feeling down, I signed out of Twitter and Facebook. I didn’t delete the accounts. I did turn off ALL notifications from them and uninstalled the apps from my mobile devices.
I’m sort of curious how long it will be before the Facebook AI adapts and finds some new way to contact me. Maybe they will start sending me paper letters listing the updates I’ve missed?
Twitter had become extremely entertaining on one hand and maddening on the other.
Anyway, I feel more calm. I still read news from time to time.
I can keep in contact with people via email and phone and in person. Feeling like Facebook is the only way to keep in contact with your friends and loved ones is a dangerous feeling encouraged by Facebook.
I’m still on LinkedIn for my business purposes. LI has a different financial model than FB. They are not 100% advertiser supported. A lot of their income comes from people like me who pay for LI accounts. They also don’t have a goal of world domination through mind control.
Yes, it’s valid to consider manipulating dopamine responses in our brains as a form of mind control. (See the book “Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products” by Nir Eyal for reference).