The argument being made seems plausible but it’s complete fear mongering. The surveillance mechanisms already exist and are in play and people can be identified in endless ways.
States have broad power to do what is being feared in the thread and haven’t already and to think that they’re waiting for this final piece of the puzzle to enact some insane regime is laughable. They could do that right now without the internet at all.
Social media is probably not healthy and kids should probably not be on social media. Age verification and age limits for social media will be a good thing for kids.
Instead of fear mongering, finding a middle ground, like governments adding some rules and protections on how this information or system is used is probably a better response.
I might be in the minority, but I think incorporating an identity layer into the internet itself should happen with the right protections for users and should have happened at the beginning of the net and is probably a result of lack of foresight by the creators of ARPANET.
Social Media is not a thing at all. Social media is a website. Websites are not health or unhealthy. Food is healthy or unhealthy. Websites are light and potentially sound, not something with health effects.
Go look directly at the sun without any protection or go listen to sounds of 120dB if you want to test your hypothesis that light and sound can't be unhealthy.
Or maybe you aren't being litteral and are just saying that what children see and hear has no influence on their developmemt. Either way, total bullshit.
This is simply false -- the literature is full of discussion about the health effects of social media.
More generally you're committing I believe two separate fallacies of ambiguity? Like one in going from the institution of social media to its reification in the form of specific websites, and then a second fallacy when you go from the specific websites to all websites in general? Like if you said "Gun ownership is not a thing at all. Gun ownership is a piece of metal. Pieces of metal cannot be healthy or unhealthy." OK but, you owning a gun is known in the scientific literature to significantly correlated with a bunch of very adverse health effects for you, such as you dying by suicide or you dying from spousal violence or your protracted grief and wasting away because your child accidentally killed themselves. Like to say that it's impossible for the institution to have adverse health effects because we can situate the objects of that institution into a broader category which doesn't sound so harmful, is frankly messed up.
[1]: Bernadette & Headley-Johnson, "The Impact of Social Media on Health Behaviors, a Systematic Review" (2025) https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12608964/ - the content you consume can promote healthy or unhealthy behaviors
[2]: Lledo & Alvarez-Galvez, "Prevalence of Health Misinformation on Social Media: Systematic Review" (2021) https://www.jmir.org/2021/1/E17187/ is notable not just for its content but also like a thousand papers that cite it getting into all of the weeds of health influencers sharing misinformation to make a buck
[3]: Sun & Chao, "Exploring the influence of excessive social media use on academic performance through media multitasking and attention problems" (2024) https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10639-024-12811-y was a study of a reasonably large cohort showing correlations between social media usage and particular forms of multitasking that inhibit academic performance -- more generally there's broad anecdata that the current "endless scrolling constant dopamine hits" model that social media gravitates to, produces kids that are "out of control" with aggressive and attentional difficulties -- see Kazmi et al. "Effects of Excessive Social Media Use on Neurotransmitter Levels and Mental Health" (2025) (PDF warning - https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Sharique-Ahmad-2/public...) for more on the actual literature that has probed those questions
[4]: The APA has a whole "Health advisory on social media use in adolesence" https://www.apa.org/topics/social-media-internet/health-advi... which is pretty even-handed about "these parts of social media are acceptable, those parts can maybe even be downright good -- but here are the papers that say that for adolescents, it can mess with their sleep, it can expose them to cyberhate content that measurably promotes anxiety and depression, it has been measured to promote disordered eating if they use it for social comparison..."
Consciousness is still a pretty hollow concept. And it sounds like, at least in Finch's analysis, that it's being treating as a normative good. It also sounds like both Pollan and Finch are circling the functionalist versus essentialist debate.
Let's say for the sake of the argument it turns out that the brain tunes in to some quantum-level forces for computation and there are some other side effects to this that add to the mystery of what we call consciousness, it effectively changes nothing about this picture.
Humans or animals in general may be unique in how they accomplish consciousness but it is unlikely that it's the only pathway. To put it another way, even if humans and animals are special in their method, it doesn't mean we are special in our result.
Dictionaries are a mixed bag at best. If you apply David Kaplan’s character/content distinction from Demonstratives, you have to ask: should pure indexicals, which are essentially 'contentless' pointers be treated the same way as standard words? Let alone the thousands of rigid designators in this dataset that map directly to specific objects in the real world. At a certain point, is there no room left for encyclopedias?
Karl Popper's warnings are more relevant now than ever as we continuously trade one version of a top-down, engineered Kallipolis for another. Plato failed to institute his own utopian blueprint, and it should have died in Syracuse. Instead, we endured a thousand years of the Catholic Church's theological adaptation, and today we are accelerating toward a technocratic iteration – essentially operating on a secularized Catholic hangover.
The most dangerous element of this cycle is how casually contemporary politics has embraced the noble lie. It twists a classical philosophical concept into a cynical excuse for leaders to deceive the public for our own supposed good. Often sanitized in intro political science courses as a pragmatic reality of governing, in practice, it functions as a corrosive mechanism for elites to control narratives and dodge accountability.
It has never worked, and it never will.
I remember a philosophy professor telling me we're studying philosophia, not philaletheia, and that really struck me. Truth has not been the primary objective of this equation for over 3,000 years. We desperately need Popper's demand for an open, truth-seeking society to break us out of this historicist trap.
At least Plato did the work in attempting to describe the qualities (of the soul) and structure necessary to erect a just society; the problem is that we have not cultivated the frame of mind to produce people with "philosopher king" traits. As we advance further in our technological development, we will need to think carefully about how we form societies that cultivate responsible stewards of technology. After all, not everyone is equal in their capacity to manage certain technologies responsibly. Plato made a serious attempt at addressing this problem. If we have failed in realizing his vision, it is because we forgot how to attend to our soul.
I use YouTube’s AI to screen podcasts, but I’ve noticed it has been glazing over large sections involving politically sensitive or outlandish topics. Although the AI could verify these details when pressed, its initial failure to include them constitutes a form of editorializing. While I understand the policy motivations behind this, such omissions are unacceptable in a tool intended for objective summarization.
I’m pretty sure YouTube’s built-in AI summary is also biased towards not “spoiling” the video.
Like if the title is a clickbait “this one simple trick to..” the ai summary
right below will summarize all the things accomplished with the “trick” but they still want you to actully click on the video (and watch any ads) to find out more information. They won’t reveal the trick in the summary.
So annoying because it could be a useful time saving feature. But what actually saves time is if I click through and just skim the transcript myself.
The ai features are also limited by context length on extremely long form content. I tried using the “ask a question about this video” and it could answer questions about the first 2 hours in a very long podcast but not the last third hour. (It was also pretty obviously using only the transcript, and couldn’t reference on-screen content)
This is a delicate balance to achieve. I hate how cowardly most LLMs are about controversial topics but if you aren't careful you have grok saying insane things.
In Republic I, Socrates distinguishes the art of medicine from the art of wage-earning. One is about the work; the other is about getting paid. Historically, the craft was the primary goal, and the money was an extrinsic side effect.
Today, the money-making side has staged a hostile takeover.
The attention conundrum is just a symptom of a deeper financialization. Multi-billion dollar companies have turned profit into a data-driven science – analytically turning the screws on every script, product, and interaction to optimize for extraction. This is the destruction of the art of making things.
The real issue is that you cannot compete with an entity that has no respect for the art. When a platform replaces the integrity of the work with the logic of a metric, the independent creator is no longer an underdog – they are functionally excluded. You can be the best at any art, but in a system that prioritizes sheer extraction over excellence, your craft effectively ceases to exist.
It seems that we have forgotten how to distinguish between value and profit, and now celebrate the latter instead of the former. Currency enables ever broader and more niche markets, but the financialization of everything is the Faustian bargain; we gained niche hobbies but lost our souls?
Not only value and profit, but also assets, cash flow and debt.
Altogether in terms of currency, very hard to distinguish in the most meaningful way.
It's too easy for the real non-dollar value element to slip through the cracks, and even end up completely gone, in a system where true value itself is not prominent enough to be recognized as the source of highest growth, like it often happens so many times but has been forgotten.
Success can spoil you too.
Once you've got so much more cash than value at any one time because you've been leveraging a productive opportunity well, and taking profits aside regularly, if you're not careful the currency amount alone can seem like enough on its own.
I recently tested Swiftkey after Typewise is sadly abandoned. It's sooooo much better than the stock keyboard. Not only is the auto-correct working incredibly well (garbage like witjoit is correctly transformed to without, which Apple Keyboard can't), Swiftkey also manages multi-language typing astonishingly well. Last but not least, I can customize it. I am also not signed in to my account, so no settings or whatever is stored on Microsoft servers.
Is this an actual bug or is this just a corrupt database or corrupt setting? What steps were taken to try to alleviate the issue, basics like resetting the keyboard dictionary? DFU restore of the phone? If you're not willing to troubleshoot an issue on your phone, rather than just throw it away and buy an Android, trying a 3rd party keyboard seems sensible to me.
Ultimately, Apple is responsible here but I don't think this is an intractable issue baked into the software. And yeah, maintenance is required despite what the perception might be. Apple even offers great support services for people who are not able to do it themselves.
What are you even talking about? DFU mode? For a keyboard ussue? My brither in christ, it is a keyboard, it is the one thing that must just work. Oh yeah, let me just dump a sysdiagnose for the 50th time today because the keyboard chose to autocorrect my spelling into nonesense. I submit enough bugs as is, I receive radio silence enough, I ain’t got time to do unpaid qa or pr for a billion dollar company. What is so dofficult about observing that the touch inputs and the touch feedback does not match the characters that end up produced into the text input field.
Does it even matter if it is a corrupt setting or not? Why would it matter? As far as I am concerned, I am seeing every iOS user around me suffering from this. The root cause does not matter here.
The sad part is, that Apple used to make somewhat stable, functional software. I started with the iPhone 3 and a bit later with Mac OS Snow Leopard.
It all started when Mr Cook decided to serve the shareholders, instead of focusing on Apple's core values. The software went downhill in such a speed in just a few years. And moving out of the ecosystem is a painful, if not unbearable, task that barely anyone loves to do. At least I can't even think about moving back to Android.
Telling anybody to install third party shit to fix first party shit should have been a hint to you that what you're saying is laughable.
Throwing random nonsense about 'general/keyboard' settings (that don't exist, btw) because you yourself can't think of anything specific should have been another.
The keyboard, specifically the Autocorrect, is fucked and has progressively worsened over the past 5 years. It's atrocious today. This is a first party problem that shouldn't need 3rd party solutions, end of story.
I have to remind myself to stay within the two to three cups a day recommendation.
There was a study in 2021 that found that drinking more than six cups of coffee a day was associated with a 53% increased risk of dementia and smaller total brain volume.
States have broad power to do what is being feared in the thread and haven’t already and to think that they’re waiting for this final piece of the puzzle to enact some insane regime is laughable. They could do that right now without the internet at all.
Social media is probably not healthy and kids should probably not be on social media. Age verification and age limits for social media will be a good thing for kids.
Instead of fear mongering, finding a middle ground, like governments adding some rules and protections on how this information or system is used is probably a better response.
I might be in the minority, but I think incorporating an identity layer into the internet itself should happen with the right protections for users and should have happened at the beginning of the net and is probably a result of lack of foresight by the creators of ARPANET.
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