[HN Gopher] Digital Echoes and Unquiet Minds
___________________________________________________________________
Digital Echoes and Unquiet Minds
Author : delaugust
Score : 159 points
Date : 2025-03-28 20:29 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.chrbutler.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.chrbutler.com)
| gchamonlive wrote:
| Byung-Chul Han in burnout society introduces the concept of
| hyperattention, which is the kind of attention that seems
| efficient at first, because it gives the impression of enabling
| you to multitask, but in reality it robs you from any deep and
| meaningful connection to anything around you.
|
| That's is pretty much what happens with anything tech nowadays.
| Because we see technology as a pure feat of rationality where in
| fact what we consume are nothing more than cultural artifacts,
| which will invariably reflect the fundamental problems of the
| society in which these artifacts are forged. In our case, in the
| Burnout Society, it's potentializing hyperattention.
| l33tbro wrote:
| Is he really saying anything new here with this concept? I've
| read a few of his books, and I can't think of one original or
| incisive idea or framework that is genuinely interesting or
| provocative. Eg, he talks about us today being aspirational
| subjects in a neoliberal world. I do agree, but this is not
| exactly illuminating .
|
| I don't mean to dump on him, but he's mentioned so often now
| when subjects like this are brought up.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| Maybe he's just not for you. This is actually really unfair
| to anyone writing philosophy these days. That the dude has to
| revolutionize the way we think with some deep and original
| insight otherwise his work is worthless. Is that really the
| only value taken from philosophy? How about hermeneutics or
| social communication? I believe Han excels in the latter and
| is bringing more and more thinkers from different fields to
| think about the fundamental problems of society, people with
| technical and scientific backgrounds that would otherwise not
| join the debate and help design a better society.
| l33tbro wrote:
| It's a fair question. I'm not sure that I need to have my
| mind blown. There's certainly philosophy I read where
| somebody will be writing broadly about a school of thought
| or a niche aspect. I think what I find dull about Byung-
| Chul Han is that he writes with the affect of gusto, but
| there is no insightful pay-off to match. There's nothing to
| grab on to, at least for me.
| popalchemist wrote:
| IMO this means that your internal "algorithm" is over-
| trained for novelty.
|
| The truth, once discovered, ceases to be new. Does that
| mean the truth is not worth anything after an initial
| moment of discovery? Or (this is rhetorical, obviously),
| is it possible that the things that our mind tells us are
| worth pursuing/engaging and those things that are
| ACTUALLY worth pursuing/engaging are not always (or even
| OFTEN) commensurate?
| 9dev wrote:
| The way I see it, engagement with concepts that you have
| fully understood is meaningless in that you'll only
| marvel at your ability to understand things, rather then
| come up with a new insight from the engagement.
|
| But most of the time, we don't actually fully understand
| things, and intimately reflecting on something will often
| yield new facets, insights you didn't have before, and
| deepen your understanding.
| l33tbro wrote:
| Maybe I didn't make myself clear enough. I read all kinds
| of philosophy (time permitting!) and it certainly doesn't
| have to be novel. However, when a philosopher adopts a
| rhetorical tone, I expect there to be some kind of
| catalyzing payload to justify it. Is that not reasonable?
|
| I'd say truth is always being either discovered and
| recovered, and there's usually not too much difference.
| There's rarely anything new under the sun.
| facile3232 wrote:
| You can just use simple, gut-level curiosity to justify
| this. It's directly satisfying to check out things that
| look interesting. No rationality or neuroticism about
| truth necessary. I don't know why you're making new
| problems to torture yourself with.
| TimorousBestie wrote:
| > I believe Han excels in the latter and is bringing more
| and more thinkers from different fields to think about the
| fundamental problems of society, people with technical and
| scientific backgrounds that would otherwise not join the
| debate and help design a better society.
|
| He had one hit book fifteen years ago and now exists
| primarily as a meme. One doesn't really see people deeply
| engaging with his arguments; they tend to agree that
| whatever the object of the new book is "a problem" and fill
| in the details with their own ideology.
|
| Or maybe I'm wrong! I'd be interested in a link to someone
| actually taking him seriously, whether within or without
| philosophy.
| l33tbro wrote:
| I think he's taken pretty seriously. He was tenured at
| UdK for a while, which is a very prestigious European
| university. But somehow he has pushed Chomsky off the
| mantle to become the poster-boy for the criticism of
| neoliberalism. This is really not helping him shed the
| meme of being some kind of K-pop philosopher.
| TimorousBestie wrote:
| By "taking him seriously" I meant "engages with his
| ideas/texts/critiques deeply, on more than a surface
| level" which is different than "acknowledges him as a
| competent, popular, professional philosopher."
| -__---____-ZXyw wrote:
| Geez, how did I miss this. I must be underexposed to
| whatever medium this is happening on.
|
| On which platform is Han considered to be Chomsky 2.0?
| Any links to this, or to other "hip" critiques of
| neoliberalism, from him or others? Memes welcome.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| Why do you need a proxy? Can't you just go read his
| materials and see for yourself if you should take him
| serious or not? Do the work if you are really that
| interested, I think you won't be disappointed.
| imska wrote:
| If his notion of psychopolitics (as opposed to Foucault's
| still dominant notion of biopolitics) is nothing new, than
| what do you consider new? I also remember what he wrote about
| AI and I have not heard anyone else bring a phenomenological
| argument forward against the "AI can think" hype.
| prisenco wrote:
| Burnout Society came out back in 2010 so maybe it's a
| _Seinfeld Isn 't Funny_ situation.
| -__---____-ZXyw wrote:
| I (somehow) hadn't came across this fellow. Thanks for
| mentioning it. In spite of the dismissive nature some of your
| repliers, I think he looks very interesting, and will be
| investigating.
|
| For anyone else who wants to read a bit about the man, I found
| this very provocative:
|
| https://english.elpais.com/culture/2023-10-08/byung-chul-han...
| tines wrote:
| > The "digital echo" is more than just the awareness of this; it
| is the cognitive burden of knowing that our actions generate data
| elsewhere.
|
| I don't really feel any burden of this myself, I don't feel
| weighed down by the data generated by my actions. If someone else
| wants to clutter up their database with some useless info, that's
| on them. I mainly feel the "direct" burden of distraction.
| chuckadams wrote:
| Just came from a thread where people are discussing Foucault's
| literal panopticon (Bentham really but Foucault popularized it)
| and it seems relevant here. Just knowing that someone is
| watching changes how you behave.
| ta8645 wrote:
| But that is not always a bad thing, and it might not change
| how people behave _enough_.
|
| This one minute Youtube short, gives an example of a guy
| dancing, without regard to being watched. And how a large
| internet crowd reacted to him being shamed by others at the
| dance.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/shorts/n2rtYzzSgL0
|
| I think we tend to focus on the negative effects of constant
| surveillance, without giving a nod to the positive once in a
| while.
| tines wrote:
| I guess that's what I'm saying: I don't feel like I'm being
| watched. I don't feel as though some website recording my
| clicks is burdensome to me. I leave them to their little
| games and microoptimizations, and I don't take their bait---I
| have much more important things going on.
| saint_fiasco wrote:
| Have you ever accidentally clicked on a YouTube video and
| then had your recommended videos turn into pure garbage for
| a little while?
|
| It doesn't have to be a high stakes situation, sometimes
| small annoyances can add up
| -__---____-ZXyw wrote:
| If someone grows up in some panopticon-like structure from
| birth, they by definition cannot feel like they're being
| watched - to even register the fact of being watched, one
| must know the feeling of not being watched.
|
| I don't mean that in any abstract or airy-fair way either,
| just matter-of-factly. It's a major cultural change. Kids
| often have no lived experience of privacy - privacy
| sometimes simply means social non-existence for them, and
| is thus deemed a non-option.
|
| It's playing out in many areas now, as we've lots of people
| who lived before the internet, and at the same time, loads
| of human beings who _only_ know a world of constant
| surveillance, a world of _views = value_ , a world of
| constantly caressing your phone, pawing at it at every
| available opportunity. A world of quiet buses, people
| getting dressed up for their phone and pretending to go on
| a night out but never leaving their bedroom, other people
| at home in their bedroom on their phones liking that
| "story", etc etc.
| tines wrote:
| I didn't grow up in the internet age so your point falls
| flat a bit.
| handfuloflight wrote:
| It does seem you _grew into_ it?
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| Not even the fact that someONE is watching in the moment. I'm
| 1/8E9 - there's too much concurrent data from all of us
| "ants" for anyone to observe for me to care too much.
|
| It's the fact that online my data isn't ephemeral and someone
| COULD watch in the future, if they care - or deploy someTHING
| to do their watching for them - and I'm unsure of what will
| be cared about by "the powers that be" in the future. I'm
| sure someone could dig up my embarrassing ideas about music
| and religion from 30 years ago on usenet. But people probably
| don't care enough, and that data may or may not still be
| available. And there wasn't a ton of political discussion -
| and certainly nothing about (now) current politicians.
|
| But right now, if I say "A sucks", it's probably saved online
| forever, and depending on where I say it, it's easily
| available to LLM-derived bots. Including to those currently
| tearing down civilization who might have taken a bribe from
| "A" without my knowledge to punish anyone who dislikes them -
| or who take a bribe from "A" in the future.
|
| And "LLM agents" will be deployed to scour the 'net for such
| sentiments, find those who they can easily connect to a real
| identity, and possibly punish them retroactively.
|
| At this point, I'm keeping my head "down" 100x more than I
| did just 6 months ago. Heck, I worry if even this post is too
| much and I'll regret it later.
|
| I used to go online as a kid to "escape a not-so-great
| reality" (geek/nerd, not a great athlete, not popular, etc).
| These days, I long to "disconnect" to escape. But I'm a
| software guy, and if I get off the "keep up with the latest
| tech" treadmill too long, I risk losing my livelihood..
| chuckadams wrote:
| Whenever I post, I always have that Violent Femmes lyric in
| my head: "I hope you know that this will go down on your
| permanent record."
| gchamonlive wrote:
| I agree. It's less like treating data as something alien and
| pathologic, and more like an extension of yourself and your
| identity that's just harder to control and to maintain.
| Aerroon wrote:
| The problem isn't the data, it's how other people react to
| it.
| crawsome wrote:
| This reminds me of when the news channels back in 2014 always
| said "Harmless metadata" as damage control after the Snowden
| leaks.
|
| Compromised smart devices has been leveraged to hurt people all
| around the world. Do you think you are immune?
|
| A very low-key life would really help, but the next bored
| hacker is waiting for the right metadata to be combined and
| they will leverage it against you.
| genewitch wrote:
| My favorite was "hashed minutae of your biometrics"
| gblargg wrote:
| I often find myself relying on my "digital echoes" to piece
| together something I did, and when. It's useful to make up for
| one's lack of logging what they do.
| doright wrote:
| I think there is a more interesting point made by the essay than
| "digital echoes," which are pretty abstract in comparison to day-
| to-day distractions that tangibly reduces time.
|
| It's that there's a notion of a device that has so many features
| that it becomes "too useful." There is only so much time you can
| devote to so many features. Yet it's clear, for example observing
| the uptick in sci-fi computer interfaces in movies and such at
| the time, that crossing a threshold of "enough features" at once
| was useful at a certain point - having a pocket-sized Internet-
| capable device with a small-format camera that didn't suck for
| one thing.
|
| There was also the essay posted recently that argued for a macOS
| release focused on bugfixes and stability over the disruption of
| new features with accompanying issues.
|
| I've been wondering for a long time now, at what point will so
| much innovation have already happened since the 90s-00s that
| there won't be enough actually useful features to tack on to the
| next release of X thing except ones that solve problems we didn't
| have? Has that point already passed? I remember some iDevice
| releases weren't as notable upgrades as their predecessors for
| example.
|
| In my opinion, if the AI revolution hadn't happened exactly when
| it did a couple years ago, this problem of diminishing tech
| returns would have been much more obvious than it is already. In
| fact, I think the current LLM rampage of sorts acted as a flood
| to fill the drought of incremental innovation that would have
| otherwise occurred.
| randmeerkat wrote:
| > In fact, I think the current LLM rampage of sorts acted as a
| flood to fill the drought of incremental innovation that would
| have otherwise occurred.
|
| We've been running on the remnants of research from the 50s -
| 70s for awhile now. Businesses have slow rolled the tech as
| long as they could, but the truth is, we're at the end of the
| research that's been accomplished. Given that and the exodus of
| researchers to go do things like optimize ads, I think the tech
| landscape will be fairly flat for the foreseeable future.
| Humans sailed for thousands of years before the steamship was
| realized. Our level of advancement over the past 100 years has
| been impressive, and there's a lot we can do with it, if we
| don't wipe ourselves out, but I expect this to be humanity's
| current limit for the foreseeable future. I believe the next
| big breakthrough that is needed to realize a technical
| breakthrough is a societal one. We need to value education,
| research, and stop fighting with one another over every single
| thing that exists. Whatever form of society that looks like,
| will be when humanity finally breaks free of its limits.
| ddq wrote:
| >...if we don't wipe ourselves out, but I expect this to be
| humanity's current limit for the foreseeable future. I
| believe the next big breakthrough that is needed to realize a
| technical breakthrough is a societal one. We need to value
| education, research, and stop fighting with one another over
| every single thing that exists. Whatever form of society that
| looks like, will be when humanity finally breaks free of its
| limits.
|
| What mechanism is capable of driving such a societal paradigm
| shift? It seems so abundantly obvious to so many rational,
| intelligent, informed people that one is desperately needed,
| yet it's seemingly impossible to imagine how we could
| possibly achieve it before the current global system of
| systems undergoes a full or partial collapse? The
| acceleration toward cascading failure leaves little time even
| to figure out _how_ to slow everything down, constrain the
| powers that be, and begin to repair, let alone time enough to
| actually make it happen. From what I 've observed, the
| Cassandras warning of the clear dangers of our trajectory
| have mostly resigned themselves to hoping they survive
| whatever cataclysm first befalls us and rebuild afterward.
| This seems ill-advised when the accelerationist elites hope
| for the same thing and are planning and preparing far more
| insidiously.
|
| I feel like we're living in an era of mass derealization. As
| consensus reality crumbles into post-truth, we collectively
| disregard the sheer unfathomable risk we are taking by, on a
| planetary and historical level, moving fast and breaking
| things in prod with no version control. There is no planet B.
| randmeerkat wrote:
| > What mechanism is capable of driving such a societal
| paradigm shift?
|
| I don't know, if we had experienced it, we wouldn't be in
| this conundrum...
| upheaval wrote:
| In the past, it was belief. Belief in there being more to
| this world.
|
| In the future, it will be the same. Cultures cycle.
|
| Our magic bullet this time around is AI. The possibility
| for it to create a unifying belief system that's like an
| infinite venn diagram of all the best parts of past,
| present, and future religions - and people are free to
| pick and choose.
|
| Point is people need their spirits back
| nehal3m wrote:
| >I've been wondering for a long time now, at what point will so
| much innovation have already happened since the 90s-00s that
| there won't be enough actually useful features to tack on to
| the next release of X thing except ones that solve problems we
| didn't have?
|
| I think we've passed that point a while ago. 4K is a smidgen
| beyond what most eyes can resolve, the smartphone has not seen
| the revolutions the early years did for a long time (since
| iPhone X I guess?), VR did not bring the Metaverse, NFT's
| flopped. I suppose the cloud was a shift in how we do things
| though.
|
| Before I read your last paragraph I thought you were going to
| comment on how AI was not the revolution that was promised.
| There's some use cases and it's amazing that the tech works as
| well as it does, but I just don't see the mass adoption in the
| numbers or around me at all.
|
| I used to be wide-eyed and excited for tech. I was an early
| adopter of all manner of gadgets from the Palm Pilot to the
| iPad, but the phenomenon described in the article as well as
| enshittification and the constant hype trains have
| disillusioned me. I buy a phone because it does everything I
| need to do life admin and it takes nice pictures, but like the
| article describes I wish it wasn't a data mine and an attention
| draining rectangle. I feel like there's more people at work
| trying to drain my brain and my wallet than building cool tech.
|
| Back when not everything was connected to everything else by
| default all the time, the avenues for stealing my attention
| just weren't there and selling me a gadget had to be done on
| its merits. Maybe that's why innovation in the sense of utility
| is down and out.
| c22 wrote:
| I think the writing's been on the wall for a while. This is why
| so much software is taking the 'as a service' route. You simply
| can't rely on customers buying the next version of your
| software because any new features are de minimus.
| degun wrote:
| I wonder if this is why BlackBerry phones (best ones ever made)
| went extinct. Because the media used to grab attention more
| aggressively, images and short videos essentially, are better
| experienced on a bigger screen. That's why there are no more
| iPhone minis. It's either convenient for Big Tech to keep us
| engaged to that type of media, or just simply user preference.
| Guess I'll never know, but I do miss smaller phones, and
| especially a physical keyboard.
| jgust wrote:
| I've never been able to type on a touch screen as efficiently
| as my blackberry 9000 keyboard. RIP
| crawsome wrote:
| >That's why there are no more iPhone minis.
|
| I think the minis have a 5.4" screen, meanwhile the SE has a
| 4.7" screen. I own and prefer an SE.
|
| >I do miss smaller phones, and especially a physical keyboard.
|
| There's these "Clicks" but it's a rubber slip case that has an
| extended keyboard at the bottom. They're pretty hideous.
|
| I also wanted a physical keyboard, so I waited and found on
| EBay a Moguls Mobile iPhone 6 Keyboard case, which actually fit
| the SE after I dremeled-out the camera hole a little! My rose
| tinted glasses were a bit strong though, because swype is
| faster than thumb physical qwerty.
|
| I fondly miss when HTC was making innovative devices, when
| everything was up in the air. I had the G1, a mytouch4g slide,
| A Samsung Galaxy S relay. All QWERTY slider phones and all
| amazing experiences.
| smu3l wrote:
| The last SE had a smaller screen but the actual device was
| larger than the last mini (13 mini). Both are discontinued
| now, sadly.
|
| The 16e is the smallest phone in the current lineup, which is
| bigger than both.
|
| I really like the 13 mini, I had been on Android since since
| maybe iphone 4. Not sure what I'll do when my current phone
| dies, I don't like having a big phone in my pocket.
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| > a device that has so many features that it becomes "too
| useful."
|
| I don't think it is the features, it is that too much
| information comes into the phone and then distracts us, because
| the senders of the information really want to you to listen to
| them.
|
| If a "feature" is useful it is good to have it available when
| you NEED it.
|
| Consider the feature "flashlight" on my phone. It's great to
| have it when you need it.
|
| Or Clock. And Alarm. And Timer. I use them all the time.
| phrotoma wrote:
| I'm convinced BB went extinct because despite having first
| mover advantage in their game changing blackberry messenger
| app, RIM refused to make it cross platform. Instead of becoming
| Whatsapp, they built a moat around themselves thinking it would
| sell more handsets but instead everyone just walked away from
| their castle.
| stevenAthompson wrote:
| The author is largely correct, and I've personally been doing
| something similar to him for the last few year: purchasing
| physical media, shunning unnecessary smart gizmos that I don't
| directly control, and otherwise trying to just be disconnected
| for a period of time each day.
|
| Each time I find some small anachronistic way to be offline a
| little more I can feel myself relax just a bit.
|
| A well lived life is not an exercise in optimization, but our
| phones lead us to live that way. So, I think I'm done looking for
| the best way to do things for awhile, and I'm going to focus on
| finding the most enjoyable way to do them.
| jgust wrote:
| Have you tried putting your phone in "grayscale" mode? Works
| wonders for turning your smartphone back into a "tool" instead
| of a "toy".
| icedchai wrote:
| Disabling or dialing back notifications for various apps also
| helps a bunch. I'm fine with a Slack popup notification, but
| I don't want a sound or vibration.
| BeetleB wrote:
| On Android I used to have an app that would just kill most
| notifications. If you got a notification, the app would put
| its own notification on the bar, and not turn the light on
| or ping you.
|
| So even if I got 3 text messages, 2 missed calls, and other
| random notifications, the bar would show only _one_
| notification, and I would not get a sound /light. You'd
| have to click on it to see the actual notifications you
| missed.
|
| You could, of course, have whitelists to let certain
| notifications through.
|
| Best. App. Ever. It's great to be able to work or do
| whatever for hours, knowing that your phone _can 't_
| interrupt you (unless someone calls, which they rarely do).
|
| Sadly stopped working after some Android update. I'm sure
| there are similar apps, though.
| Pyrodogg wrote:
| At least apps have to ask permissions for notifications
| now, and you can deny it outright from the start. In
| years prior I remember trying to hack things with Tasker
| and extensions, but it's just not needed to nearly the
| same degree now.
|
| And if the app is good, it will categorize it's
| notification types in a user-centric way and allow you to
| enable only specific categories.
| stevenAthompson wrote:
| I actually did try this for awhile, and it helped a bit. I
| tried several other methods as well, but none were really
| effective for me.
|
| However, the thing that finally did the trick for me was
| something called "brick" (https://getbrick.app/). It's
| basically an nfc tag, that works with a tiny app that uses
| Apples screentime API to either allow/deny list specific apps
| or websites. Once "bricked" you have to physically scan the
| NFC tag device to unlock those apps/websites. I used it to
| block the things I found detrimental, but which were too
| difficult to completely remove from my life. Then I put the
| device in my car.
|
| Keeping it in the car makes scanning it a bit of a chore.
| Which means I have time to stop and think about it on the way
| to the car. This forces me to make a conscious choice, rather
| than automatically reaching for the phone every time there's
| a dull moment.
|
| I hear there's another similar device called Unpluq that has
| more features, and works on Android as well, but I think it
| comes with a subscription fee. Brick is more just a "thing
| you buy once".
| layer8 wrote:
| That doesn't do much about the "echo" problem that the
| article is pointing out, it only affects the "direct"
| distraction.
| mentalgear wrote:
| See also: "How Phone Use Alters the Formation of Memories and
| Makes Time Pass Faster".
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZi0fUocGyo
| tamad wrote:
| > It turns out I don't want a phone at all, but a camera that
| texts -- and ideally one smaller than anything on the market now.
| I know I'm not alone, and yet this product will not be made.
|
| See the Light Phone III released this week.
| pmg101 wrote:
| Thanks for the tip, I went to investigate. I like everything
| about it except for the lack of third party messaging. I need
| to meet my friends where they are and that is on Signal or
| WhatsApp.
|
| Maps is also non negotiable, having maps in your pocket is one
| of the true wins of a smartphone imo, giving you freedom to
| explore.
| tamad wrote:
| No problem. 3rd party messaging does seem like the biggest
| need being voiced by potential users right now. It does have
| a navigation app, by the way, but don't know details yet.
| handfuloflight wrote:
| It does less but costs the same as those devices that do more.
| I'll go with practicing self discipline, thanks.
| HellDunkel wrote:
| I agree to a lot of this. But there is something even more
| disturbing than the constant surveillance. With the rise of AI we
| can no longer be sure if what we devote our attention to is an
| artefact of culture or just some derivative that has been
| automatically created to keep our attention up. And we ultimately
| have to ask ourselfs what the hell are we doing here? If history
| is removed from the artefact it becomes meaningless but how do we
| evaluate that and what is the consequence? Live music and theatre
| plays instead of movies and video games?
| garyrob wrote:
| > The penultimate "smartcar" drives itself.
|
| Er... the second-to-last one?
| c22 wrote:
| The ultimate smart car doesn't drive, it just advises you to
| take the bus.
| genewitch wrote:
| I bet there are billions of people no where near a bus. I'm
| one of them.
| divan wrote:
| > It turns out I don't want a phone at all, but a camera that
| texts -- and ideally one smaller than anything on the market now.
|
| RayBan Meta glasses is quite close to it, seriously.
| divan wrote:
| Also just saw Light Phone announcement yesterday:
| https://www.thelightphone.com
| makeitdouble wrote:
| The "digital echoes" naming is perhaps the most attracting part
| of this piece.
|
| It's interesting that there is no parallel drawn to the more
| bland and every effects of our actions, the non digital echoes,
| where buying corn soup at the supermarket generates data on which
| brand sold what to who (in particular if it was paid by credit
| card or with a loyalty number attached). Or how public service
| attendency is usually tracked in very rough numbers, so going or
| not to your local library has rippling effects. Or how choosing
| to bike instead of driving at a place will impact one's town
| urban policies etc.
|
| We' be always been part of an ecosystem, and our mere presence
| has effects on it. Caring too much about it will becomes an
| unsurmountable source of stress, and I feel that's where kids
| getting a natural sense of it earlier on probably avoids these
| kind of very late waking up to reality.
| ronbenton wrote:
| A dumb phone with good camera, texting, etc seems like a good
| product idea. Has it been done?
| netsharc wrote:
| I feel like it would suffer feature-creep.
|
| Personally I'd want WhatsApp and Google Maps.
|
| And if you want to deal with QR codes that redirect you to a
| restaurant menu or ticket ordering portal (I was visiting a
| country once, it had a long queue for visas on arrival, but it
| also had a QR code where I could get said visa online), it
| would need to have a web browser, well there you go, a portal
| to distraction has been opened.
|
| And then there's a need to have the payment app for the WeChat-
| esque "Scan QR code to pay" payment system that exists where I
| live...
| ronbenton wrote:
| Yes this is what I was thinking too. Everyone's "must have"
| features will be different. Once we add them all, we'll be
| looking at an iPhone.
| getnormality wrote:
| So what we really need is good parental controls. This will
| benefit not only parents but also adults who need to parent
| themselves sometimes.
| ronbenton wrote:
| I actually do have some websites blocked on my iphone
| using the "block adult websites" feature
| tamad wrote:
| Good camera is relative, but Light Phone III that launched this
| week seems to fit this bill.
| keybored wrote:
| Digital information has affordances. One of them is potential
| infinite permanence. You put something out there and it can be
| perfectly replicated forever. In a conversation you have the ear
| witnesses and just multiple levels of hearsay after that. Not so
| for data. So now you are one copy-paste from leaking your diary
| to the Wayback Machine.[1]
|
| Everyone talks about this affordance in how it makes things
| better. People also talk about how digital information is easy to
| leak. But few seem to talk about it as a direct and irrevocable
| burden.
|
| Smartphones can do everything. So now you have to put in a lot of
| effort for it to do less.
|
| For smartphones though it is less inherent. You can make software
| that limits it so that a million people don't have to go through
| the same procedure. We could make a real concerted effort towards
| that, as a society. But not right now. Because companies won't
| make money from _less_ attention or less things bothering people
| and whatever else. So we can't do it as a society. Because there
| is no business model and that is what dictates what the projects
| that ultimately impacts normal people should be taken on.[2] But
| there will be projects though. There will be at least a dozen
| projets on GitHub that only software enthusiasts will use.
|
| We could make a better world if we put our minds to it. A better
| world for normal people as well.
|
| [1] Eight years from now some bot is going to connect this
| sentiment I've shared here, find similar sentiments from other
| accounts, cross-reference them with other similarities, and then
| maybe ultimately find out who I "really am".
|
| [2] Instead we can bicker about the usual anti-consumer topics.
| They chose this. They bought the smartphones. Huh, if people
| _really_ cared they would have bought a dumbphone. What, they
| need a smartphone for work? To use their bank? Then they would
| have bought a dumbphone as well for their analog (relatively
| speaking) weekends.
| nextts wrote:
| A testiment to how broken it all is is trying to set up oncall on
| my phone.
|
| There is a tug of war whereby I want most things to be silenced
| at night DnD. Even phone calls could be scammers and spammers
|
| But I want the alert and only that alert to wake me.
|
| A dumber phone in a simpler time would make this easy. Just leave
| it on full volume and call my number!
| jedimastert wrote:
| I had this problem as well. "Luckily" for me, the Android work
| profile on my phone seems to bypass do not disturb settings.
| nextts wrote:
| Mine does but it won't override silent mode. So I just need
| to make sure I am not silent before going to sleep. But
| getting this to work to that extent wasn't trivial and
| require a phone call. An app from a different device profile
| can't pierce it.
| jedimastert wrote:
| Also "thankfully" our on call system (Pagerduty) can be
| configured to call you if you don't answer the notification
| quickly enough
| djoldman wrote:
| Is this a situation where you are trying to set up a work app
| on your personal phone? If so, does your employer offer
| employer-owned phones?
| 4b11b4 wrote:
| I have been feeling this for some time. I think it is covered
| tangentially here https://www.nateliason.com/blog/de-atomization-
| is-the-secret...
|
| by the term "atomization"
| c54 wrote:
| You may enjoy the book Atomized by Michel Houellebecq, he
| coined the term in the late 90's in a similar vein of what Nate
| is referencing in his post.
| viveknathani_ wrote:
| "interfaces that respect attention rather than constantly
| competing for it" - beautiful!
| j1elo wrote:
| > _I hope to see operating systems truly designed around focus
| rather than multitasking, interfaces that respect attention
| rather than constantly competing for it_
|
| I wish disabling automatic focus changes was a consistently
| available feature. I'd want that emergent windows, pop-ups,
| dialogs, or newly opened applications that had been loading in
| the background, are NEVER able to steal the windows focus.
|
| It's been an instinctive rejection since a child; opening an app
| that takes some time to load, and during those seconds, keep
| writing some text in a notepad, only to end up with half phrase
| mistakenly written onto the program that finally loaded and stole
| the windows focus. I've always despised that behavior, really.
| Yeah, I'm _fast_ in my interactions with my machines.
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