This article kind of highlights what I despise about the modern economy and technology: tech used to be about solving hard problems that made human life better. I'm extremely grateful for my refrigerator so I can have fresh food on demand, my dishwasher, washing machine and dryer to save me from some drudgery, etc.
But I feel like the vast majority of consumer tech these days falls in one of two camps:
1. It's there simply to addict us. Tobacco companies saw they had a gold mine with nicotine, and realized they could make food similarly addictive (and ultimately lethal in the long term). But it's not just tobacco companies: social media, "fast fashion", many types of entertainment, etc., don't do us really any good beyond a quick dopamine fix and are ultimately harmful to us.
2. It exists simply to deal with the complexity of systems we've set up in the first place. I think of all the fin tech and health tech startups that exist because so many of our financial and especially healthcare systems are insanely complex.
As someone who was a big techno optimist in the late 90s, I admit it's pretty depressing sometimes to think that the work you do is not ultimately helpful.
> 2. It exists simply to deal with the complexity of systems we've set up in the first place. I think of all the fin tech and health tech startups that exist because so many of our financial and especially healthcare systems are insanely complex.
This one really bothers me too, having worked in the healthcare industry. There is an entire class of business the "does good" by helping people navigate an intentionally hostile system. And those businesses therefore profit off the hostility of the system. It is an abusive relationship.
> There is an entire class of business the "does good" by helping people navigate an intentionally hostile system.
Yeah, I'm currently in this boat, and it hurts a bit when I think about it too much sometimes. That is, I tell myself "OK, you're not curing cancer, but you're helping make a shitty system less shitty for people who need to navigate it." And that is true. But I do acknowledge that a much better solution would just be to fix the underlying problem in the first place, and I admit that my company is just profiting off the unnecessary complexity that exists to begin with.
I appreciate that you recognize this and are not just rationalizing to protect yourself. Still, survival is a natural drive. It also feels natural to seek work that fits one's values and gives enough of a sense of meaning to life.
I found this in K-12 education and now in parenting, which will have a long tail since our child has extra needs due to disabilities. I have the freedom to pick up some extra work now that school started (my spouse has a full-time job she feels good about), and this work aligns with my values but is not particularly lucrative. I use the public library for most of my entertainment and education (thank you, taxpayers of the USA; this is one of our best investments for the future), and I feel rich in non-monetary ways.
All that to say- make the jump to something you feel good about doing!
Edit to add:
Easily-consumed media (phone games, video shorts, social media posts, etc):books and movies from the public library::highly-processed food:homemade food from your garden or local farm; these wholesome things can be difficult to get in the habit of, but they feel more than momentarily good.
> tech used to be about solving hard problems that made human life better
It's unclear to me when this was ever "purely" true. Tobacco companies, for example, definitely used cutting-edge (for its era) agro-tech to increase yields, potency, etc since like the 1950s and earlier. Tech has been developing weapons, addictive substances, and useless consumer goods since the industrial revolution (at least). The history of technology is chock-full of abominations. For every "refrigerator" there's "holes in the ozone layer", for every "golden rice" there's "Agent Orange".
I 100% agree that modern consumer society is absolutely out of control, and that tech is a major driver, but I see this as an intensification/elaboration of trends that have been in place for centuries rather than a paradigm shift from a previously benign era. As much as I love the various cultural trappings of 90s tech-optimism (and I do love many things about that era) I think it was ultimately kind of a delusion brought on by the complete global dominance of the US economic model (following the end of the Cold War), alongside the headiness of the dot-com bubble, rather than a clear-sighted vision for the future of "technology" (wherever you draw the line on what that is). Not trying to shame anyone who participated in that scene, or say that it was "bad" or "wrong", but I do think that we can't really afford to be sentimental these days. We need to honestly assess the shortfalls of the movements that brought us here.
To emphasize, I agree with you. I don't think "back in the good ol' days" that things were always benevolent, nor do I believe that today that things are always evil.
But I do think it's a mistake to say this is just another step, or going from an "8 to a 9". I think this idea that so much of our technology is actively hostile is a part of the puzzle around why many people feel that our pace of real technological advancement and our ability to build big projects has slowed greatly (Patrick Collison has a great blog piece, https://patrickcollison.com/fast)
I feel part of this is a consequence of the fact that we've gotten so good at data analysis, when you look at 2 alternatives and one shows an immediate, clear payoff (but the downsides are long term and not all that clear), while the other shows a riskier, longer term payoff, we (collectively) nearly always go with the short term win. E.g we can see with A/B testing what keeps people the most "engaged", but we just kind of ignore that this "engagement" is with the lowest common denominator of content like rage-inducing tribalism.
Interesting read, I've definitely heard similar things through various podcast-y outlets (I think there was a "The Weeds" episode about this phenomenon a few years back). I could see an argument that all the engineering talent getting sucked into working on stupid, anti-human projects is a big source of this slowdown. It does seem like over the last decade or so grad degree programs have transitioned from "here's the training you need to work on the cutting edge of your field" to "here's what you need to get picked up by the data science arm of an ad tech company". I will say that going from an 8 to a 9 may come with "phase change" type effects, and personally I believe this is more in line with what's going on. Consumer capitalism has sort of metastasized in the US, and is basically eating our ability to do anything but generate more widgets rather than actual value. Curious to see how/if we pull out of the doom loop
> Tobacco companies, for example, definitely used cutting-edge (for its era) agro-tech to increase yields, potency, etc since like the 1950s and earlier.
The invention of the automatic cigarette rolling machine was a huge step.
Tech downsides (?) has always been with us since the Industrial Revolution. Like workers being forced by circumstance to work 12 hour days with no rights. Then some of them having to die to get any rights whatsoever.
Marketing also isn't new (“these days”). Smoking was marketed to women as “freedom sticks”.
There never was a time when we were all playing on the same team and trying to eventually colonize the Galaxy.
It is very convenient for bad actors to insist on a game of whac-a-mole rather than a reckoning with the larger problem that seems to govern the behavior of a large number of significant companies.
The idea of a systemic issue is that an underlying factor is encouraging/inducing bad behavior, not that everyone conspires to perform the bad behavior together (although it certainly doesn't discourage them if everyone else is doing it too).
This is such a bizarrely worded piece. It's like, really trying to milk some sort of controversy. But for the record most of the brands owned by Tobacco-adjacent holding company were acquisitions. Tobacco companies didn't invent Oreos or Kool-Aid or Jello. And in most cases they were barely involved in the companies they invested in.
So in just a bizarre way we're really just talking about the marketability of junk foods.
The whole idea of "hyperpalatable" foods is silly, and it's what journalists were previously calling foods "engineered" to be "addictive" a couple years ago, which was equally silly.
In terms of regular everyday food/snacks, nobody has figured out a way to make food tastier that isn't just regular cooking done by home cooks and restaurant chefs. (Leaving expensive techniques like molecular gastronomy aside.)
Adding salt, fat and/or sugar doesn't make something "hyperpalatable". It's just making food tasty the way we always have for centuries, in countries everywhere across the world. It isn't new. Grandma added tons of salt to her tomato sauce (as you have to do), donuts and croissants have been full of fat forever, and it's not like sugary desserts are anything new.
And it's certainly not like we've suddenly figured out how to jam 5x more sugar in the same candy and that this is rewiring our brains or something.
It's just straightforward food ingredients. Any talk of "hyperpalatability" is pure nonsense. It makes as much sense as saying certain artists on Spotify have developed "hypermusicality" to "push you" into listening more. It's silly.
(There are more "engineered" food ingredients like preservatives and xanthan gum and similar that grandma didn't use. But they have nothing to do with palatability or taste -- they're about shelf life and texture. There are also things like extrusion and air-puffing that snack makers can do that you can't at home, but these are also texture rather than taste.)
The point you're making seems similar to the argument that GMOs have a lot in common with earlier selective breeding techniques.
I think the difference is that while historically grandma or restaurant chefs were biased towards repeatable, appetizing products, they weren't using focus groups and industrial/scientific methods to get there. I.e. you can't send your grandma to General Mills and have her create Spaghetti-Os.
There seems to be medical consensus that "ultraprocessed" food, as squishy as that term is, is obesogenic. Part of that may be influenced by the marketing and marketing science behind the food as well, but there seem to be human and animal studies that support that our food has changed.
> they weren't using focus groups and industrial/scientific methods to get there. I.e. you can't send your grandma to General Mills and have her create Spaghetti-Os.
But that's exactly what I'm pushing back against -- you've never needed focus groups or fancy methods to figure out what the tastiest amount of sugar or salt or fat is for a recipe. It's remarkably easy to figure out on your own. Focus groups just serve as objective evidence over the opinion of a single chef, and can reveal that different markets prefer slightly different ratios (e.g. Brazilians prefer sweeter desserts than Americans). And Spaghetti-O's are just spaghetti in tomato sauce in a different shape, for those who prefer their tomato sauce sweeter rather than saltier, like kids do -- and of course grandma made spaghetti.
> There seems to be medical consensus that "ultraprocessed" food, as squishy as that term is, is obesogenic.
There isn't even remotely consensus on what the causality is here -- it's one of the thorniest problems to untangle. But the idea that tastier food is contributing seems extremely far-fetched. Look at sugary soft drinks first of all, look at decreased physical activity, look at changing cultural norms around portion sizes and body weights, look at the reduction of fats that have raised carbohydrate intakes.
Snickers bars have been around since 1930. People in the 1950's were eating every kind of supposed "hyperpalatable food" and obesity was a minor issue. So the idea the flavor is somehow new or responsible for health issues just doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
They did it in a metabolic ward, so about as controlled as you can get in a diet study. Created 2 diets that were matched - so caloric density and macronutrients of the food were the same. Let people eat as much of the food as they wanted, and the ultraprocessed group consumed 500 calories per day more.
Thanks for linking that -- it's a rigorous study for what it attempts.
However, there are two fatal flaws. The first it that it neither controls for nor even measures the glycemic index of the two diets, and the second is that it neither controls for nor even measures the vitamins and minerals in either diet.
The major critique around dividing foods into "unprocessed" vs. "ultraprocessed" is that high-GI foods like rice and raisins are considered unprocessed, while lower-GI foods like pasta (and zero-GI foods like hamburger patties) are considered ultra-processed. And in this study, the authors could assemble whatever GI they wanted for each diet, and never revealed it.
But there's a clue -- in the study, the additional calorie intake and weight gain in the "ultraprocessed" diet is entirely consistent with a vastly higher GI of that diet, which is almost certainly indicated by the nearly doubled non-beverage energy density (2.147 vs 1.151, Table 1).
Which means the study is actually entirely consistent with the idea that higher-GI foods lead to weight gain, and that "ultraprocessing" itself is entirely irrelevant.
The study’s author, KevinH_PhD is a good follow on Twitter and generally responsive to his critics there:
“Glycemic index was calculated to be ~52 for both diets with respect to oral glucose. There were no significant differences in CGM determined mean glucose or glycemic variability as assessed by glucose CV.”
First time I've come across the term "hyperpalatable"; I guess it's the same as what's referred to in the UK as "ultraprocessed".
Ultraprocessed food doesn't appear to be much to do with the ingredients; it appears to have a lot to do with activities like extrusion, and the use of certain additives, most of which are harmless, as far as I can see (exception for HFCS). Apparently a hamburger and chips is considered "ultraprocessed"; I can see very little about that meal that's different from ordinary homemade food.
The bun might use the kind of strange chemicals that make most white bread cotton-wooly, and the chips might use some shifty trans-fat, although I think trans-fats are now mostly banned.
FWIW, I buy premium hamburgers made from minced steak, no cheese, one pattie. I could make the same thing at home, using steak from the butcher, if I had a meat-mincer. The fact that I buy it takeaway doesn't make it more harmful than homemade food.
The only possible motivation for these dirty corporate pigs to make these foods UNNATURALLY TASTY is, at the least, morally fraught, and, more likely, such an act of villainy as to clearly implicate them as disgusting subhuman monsters.
/s
If all those companies acted within the bounds of law, then is it the companies fault for producing a product that the customer wants?
We should stop expecting morality from companies. A company is nothing more than a mechanism that optimizes for profit. We, the customer and the regulatory bodies, create the field in which the company optimizes.
If we think that something is wrong with the products created by those companies, then it's up to us to not reward those companies.
There are two layers to this:
- First: The customer does not buy products and/or services they do not value.
- Second: Regulatory bodies protect customers against companies that offer a product that they find hard to decline. Think about gambling, addiction, health effects, etc.
The big issue however, is that companies have infiltrated this layer of regulatory bodies, rendering them incapable.
We need to find a way to expel corporate interests from regulatory bodies and v.v. They can only function when they are not contaminating each other.
> If all those companies acted within the bounds of law, then is it the companies fault for producing a product that the customer wants? [...] The big issue however, is that companies have infiltrated this layer of regulatory bodies, rendering them incapable.
When you write "corporate interest", I interpret that as well as "business interest" or "market interest", is that correct?
I think the great difficulty is that you'd be hard to find the specialists to write the regulation or approve regulation, that haven't come from the business world and aren't going to the business world. The in-depth knowledge needed to make fair and effective regulations can usually only come from real-life experience from the business side of things. Unless you can find exceptionally interested and honest people - who manage to have interest in an industry without wanting to go into it themselves.
Therefore, I think the more simple regulations are, the better. So that honest and intelligent lawmakers without complete industry saturation can make decisions.
Unless they are operating outside of the law, I don't fault "Big Tobacco" or any "Big Business" for, you know, operating a business. Yes, it's kind of funny they went from one way of exploiting our brains to another, and I personally wish they had not. But companies don't operate to satisfy our wishes, hopes and desires, they operate to make money.
I've said it a million times, but if we don't like the way a company legally operates, the only solution is to change the laws the company operates under. Maybe the occasional boycott or shame campaign can force a corporation's hand, but the vast majority of the time when a company is forced to change the way they operate it is because a law was passed.
EDIT: terrible typo that undermined my entire point
The problem with what you have said a million times is that by the time a company gets to the point where it is a major problem, it is also at the point where it has a lot of money going through it, and since corporations have absolutely no ethics, they are perfectly fine with spending a chunk of their profits on lobbying lawmakers to not change those laws.
I fault "Big Business" for completely ignoring ethics and morals in favor of profit. I fault every CEO who has made these decisions, I fault every minor worker who has done what they were told to do regardless of any moral qualms. They have all decided that they do not give a shit about the harm they cause as long as they are making enough money.
And the assumption that religion is not only moral on average (what's questionable), but also able to stay moral while given extraordinary power (shown to be false every single time people tried).
Ah, but "the problem with the world today is that everyone else doesn't believe what my religion teaches" has an enormous feature that your arguments do not:
It gives the one who holds this belief the comfort that _they_ have done everything that can and everything they should; all that is left is to be publicly smug. This is much easier to do than engaging closely with complicated ideas, and crucially can never result in deciding that it's necessary to go through the pain of changing one's own behavior or beliefs.
Yeah, this is a problem. Separation of church and state is a good thing, but centering the profit motive as the highest ideal of a society is a pretty bad thing.
It's true that the only solution is to change the law.
> Unless they are operating outside of the law, I don't fault "Big Tobacco" or any "Big Business" for, you know, operating a business.
Why this casual dismissal? Operating a business. Are those the magic no-harm-done-here words? I'm not even saying that being “mad” about it would have any effect. But I still will argue for my right to be mad...
Businesses can also lobby the government to keep or change laws. Is that also to be with dismissed with the same attitude? Like, oh Big Tobacco lobbied against your candidate that would enact some kind of law that would put a wedge in their business plan? Well—you know—they're just operating a business. Lobbying is an investment, and clearly they made a calculation that said that lobbying would make them more money.
The puzzle piece that usually gets missed in these conversations is that a business is a public danger. It has to be, inherently, because as we see "just trying to make a profit" consistently does harm at a certain scale. Making a profit and doing public good are completely separate imperatives, and when push comes to shove prioritizing profit will reduce the ability to do public good.
A business can be too small or too inefficient to do much harm, but we are doomed (literally) if we can't wrap our heads around the fact that all businesses are enemies of the public (literally). So often the conversation simply reaches a full stop at "businesses are just doing what they do" as if we have to accept that - as if making a profit is a good thing.
Similarly, fire is a danger to the public. It consumes and destroys things. That doesn't mean we've sworn off fire - on the contrary, we use it to make new dangers (pollution, primarily). It's just that we have developed measures to contain fire. Without measures to contain profit-seeking behavior, humans can't coexist with businesses safely.
Every business? A mom and pop grocery store is a business. A old-fashioned diner that serves actual cooked food instead of microwaved pre-processed junk is a business. Are they public dangers?
> Making a profit and doing public good are completely separate imperatives
No, they're not. "Making a profit", in a sane economy, means creating wealth. Businesses are an essential tool for creating wealth.
The problem is that we do not have a sane economy. We have governments that we have given vast regulatory powers, and that means corporations that are big enough to buy politicians can make a profit without creating wealth, by buying regulations that skew the economy in their favor. The effect of the regulations is not to make it easier to run a business but to make it harder, so much harder that only the large corporations can afford to do it--which means the mom and pop small businesses that actually create wealth can no longer exist. We also have governments that print money and give it to financial institutions in order to make cheap loans available to the same large corporations, so they can expand cheaply and drive out small business competitors. That's why we have big box stores and chain restaurants in strip malls next to freeways instead of mom and pop stores and old fashioned diners in actual town centers.
But, as the saying goes, the problem is not that politicians can be bought but that they have something valuable to sell. As long as large corporations can buy regulations that favor them, they will. And as long as we let governments print money and give it to those they favor, that will just make things worse.
...Nothing you wrote refuted the point that "making a profit and doing public good are completely separate imperatives."
> Every business? A mom and pop grocery store is a business. A old-fashioned diner that serves actual cooked food instead of microwaved pre-processed junk is a business. Are they public dangers?
Yes... I explicitly addressed this point already. It doesn't appear that you've actually read my entire post, despite its brevity.
> Nothing you wrote refuted the point that "making a profit and doing public good are completely separate imperatives."
Sure I did: I pointed out that making a profit by creating wealth is doing public good. Try living without all the wealth that businesses create (and have created over centuries) and see how you like it.
> I explicitly addressed this point already.
I don't see where. You mention businesses that are too small or inefficient to do much harm, but you never mention businesses creating positive value at all.
> I pointed out that making a profit by creating wealth is doing public good.
It's not. A rich person getting richer doesn't make society healthier or happier. Wealth can be used for public good, though.
> You mention businesses that are too small or inefficient to do much harm, but you never mention businesses creating positive value at all.
Because the positive value created by a business is, actually, not relevant to the discussion. Did you miss my fire analogy? Really doesn't seem like you grasped my points. Could be my fault if you can show me where my meaning was unclear.
I'm not anti-fire. At the same time, I think that we as a society should prevent people from running around starting fires whenever and wherever they want, because it's dangerous. (Yes, by force if necessary. I'm not ignorant of the logical conclusion of laws.) Fortunately, we already do this, because everyone agrees: fire indeed hot. You, on the other hand, are not acknowledging the danger of profit-seeking behavior. Again: that's my entire fucking point, so please address it.
Has nothing at all to do with what most businesses do. Most businesses are small businesses and their owners are not rich. And most businesses create wealth directly, instead of buying government favors to help get wealth transferred from other people to them.
> Because the positive value created by a business is, actually, not relevant to the discussion.
Yes, it is. "Business" does not just mean large corporations, and it does not just have negative effects. Focusing on the negative effects and ignoring the benefits is foolish.
> Did you miss my fire analogy?
No, I just grasp the fact (which apparently you don't) that you are focused only on the negatives and not the positives, so your analysis is flawed; it doesn't support your claims. That's just as true of your fire analogy, where you only focused on the dangers of fire (and the additional dangers we create by using fire), not the benefits we gain from fire.
> You, on the other hand, are not acknowledging the danger of profit-seeking behavior
Sure I am. I'm just balancing it against the benefits, which you are not. You are saying that everything businesses do can be described by analogy with "fire indeed hot". Which is even less of an apt description of businesses than it is of fires.
I am literally just asking you to discuss how we can deal with the dangers of profit-seeking behavior, and you're talking about something else. Every one of your comments is off-topic.
Address what? The problem I described? Sure, that's simple: stop the government from favoring large corporations with regulations and money printing. Make it so the only way businesses can make a profit is by creating wealth. (IIRC pg advocated for much the same thing in one of his essays a while back.)
Will that address the problem you describe? I have no idea, because the way you describe businesses, it sounds like you're saying we should just shut them all down as public dangers.
From your snark I gather that you don't think businesses provide any value. So I assume you don't use any goods or services provided by businesses, right?
First of all if that was the case then I would obviously not do it since it would be tantamount to throwing money in a hole. So the answer to that is trivial.
Second of all my snark was about being completely wholesome. If something is less than wholesome they can still be... okay, not outright bad.
Third of all, OP (I don't agree but that's a different matter) was clearly talking about finding a balance between letting businesses pursue profit and keeping them from interfering with the larger public good since they gave an analogy with fire. (The examples with fire seemed a bit out of tune with that though.) We do use fire for good but we also have to contain it very carefully.
Oh, you make a good point. I made a mistake with my fire analogy and didn't actually state that I'm pro-fire. I'm glad to have fire and to be able to use it. Not sure profit-seeking behavior is quite as useful, but whatever.
> Not sure profit-seeking behavior is quite as useful, but whatever.
In other words, as I said elsewhere upthread, you just dismiss all the benefits we gain from businesses with "whatever". But if you're able to post here at all, you are taking advantage of numerous benefits provided by businesses. I don't think you are taking that into account. You even admit as much since you're "not sure" businesses are as useful as fire (when in fact businesses are far more useful than fire--businesses overall have created a lot more wealth than our use of fire has).
If "completely wholesome" is your standard, does anything at all in our world meet it?
But if we allow wholesomeness to be evaluated on a scale, most businesses seem to me to be a lot more wholesome than the large corporations that buy government regulations and get favored by government policies. So tarring all businesses with the same brush does not seem to me to be a good idea.
You're reading messages I didn't write. My point was stated openly. We can't allow businesses to operate without consideration for their impacts on the public (unless we're ok with being destroyed by them).
This is not entirely accurate. Causing harm to people is not good. If you harm enough people egregiously enough, law enforcement eventually will notice and will figure which law said company broke. If the harm is bad enough, and intent obvious enough, they will find a law.
So, it's more true to ask: "Is intentionally manipulating food to cause harm to people-- is this consistent with existing legal norms?" I personally would not bet on it.
> intentionally manipulating food to cause harm to people
I seriously doubt that this has ever been done.
Companies "manipulate" food so it tastes good and they'll sell more of it. They don't intentionally do it to "cause harm". At most, that might be an unintended consequence.
It turns out that intentionally killing your customers is bad for business.
It's like (IIRC) Ozzy Osbourne's comment back in the days when metal was being blamed for teen suicides. "Why would we do that? That would tank sales for the followup album." Or Rob Halford on the same subject "If we were going to put backward-masked subliminal commands in our records, it wouldn't be 'kill yourself', it would be 'buy more of our records'"
(probably not exact quotes in either case, but that was the gist)
Your post is a tautology because you define "wrong" as breaking the law.
Yes, of course, if a company is not breaking the law they are not breaking the law. And if we want them to stop doing what they are doing we would benefit from making it illegal.
I would say the foods coming from the big junkfood brands are not much different from streetfood. Streetfood found in poorer countries are also dripping with fat, sugar and salt. So the main differentiator is marketing because while availability/distribution/volume is an advantage, it's marketing that gets the kids to get the parents to buy the junk.
And fat; French cuisine in particular involves the liberal use of butter, especially in sauces. "Mounting" a sauce amounts to stirring in a big knob of butter at the end. Bearnaise sauce for steaks is about 70% butter.
There's a reason for this; they make food taste good.
"Hyperpalatable" is such an odd word. I suppose it's meant to be more sciency than "junk". But IMO the word does a disservice, because the it carries a positive connotation.
Even when using “excessive” you can infer the overall meaning to be “excessively tasty food”. Unlike “junk food” the former doesn’t confer negativity - in fact the opposite. Who doesn’t want excessively tasty food? And excessively tasty food isn’t necessarily bad for you. It’s pear season and the fruits are excessively palatable - but they’re not unhealthy.
I prefer white bread but conciously choose whole-grains for the extra fibre and lower glicemic index. Often one needs to make the less desirable choice for a global good.
No one's dictating your choices? If you thought eating glass was tasty it wouldn't be factually inaccurate to tell you that it's bad for you. Same idea for hyperpalatable foods.
Strictly speaking, I'm not sure that the US is founded on doing what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law but I do think that's an increasingly common understanding. A nation state does have some stake in maintaining the basic health of its people, whether you agree that's desirable or, if it is, to what degree.
they probably should ban advertising. That's not the same as "one we'd better avoid altogether". The fact of the matter is that people eat junk food because it tastes good, the advertising just boosts their margins.
The people in the advertising industry would probably reply with, "lmao who are you to dictate our choices. Telling people ads should be banned goes against literally everything the US stands for, for better and worse."
I find it interesting that experts in addiction then pivoted and turned that to how to exploit people’s tendencies in food addiction. And then killed millions more people through heart disease, cancer, obesity that they couldn’t reach via cigarettes.
I see parallels to social media and tech giants now also. They know how to make the rat hit the lever and get that dopamine hit to the brain. The rat’s health be damned and the free market will not fix it.
I've seen the opposite where ironically going after Big Tobacco left trial lawyers with an addiction to crusading and looking for the next witch to hunt regardless of guilt via downright speculative lawsuits. Look at the cell phones cause cancer pursuit which many desperately wished to be true when the correlation is that cancer causes cellphones.
But I feel like the vast majority of consumer tech these days falls in one of two camps:
1. It's there simply to addict us. Tobacco companies saw they had a gold mine with nicotine, and realized they could make food similarly addictive (and ultimately lethal in the long term). But it's not just tobacco companies: social media, "fast fashion", many types of entertainment, etc., don't do us really any good beyond a quick dopamine fix and are ultimately harmful to us.
2. It exists simply to deal with the complexity of systems we've set up in the first place. I think of all the fin tech and health tech startups that exist because so many of our financial and especially healthcare systems are insanely complex.
As someone who was a big techno optimist in the late 90s, I admit it's pretty depressing sometimes to think that the work you do is not ultimately helpful.