by komali2 | 2025-06-14 04:56:16+00:00
> It’s hard to imagine a socialist order run by device-addicted zombies, increasingly disconnected and semi-literate

I agree that smartphones are harming us. I also agree that capitalism has at best served out its purpose and needs to be replaced with another means of organizing society and distributing material and labor.

However, the Soviet Union banned blue jeans and rock and roll and a very resentful population thus smuggled these things and associated them with counter culture and revolutionary mindedness, basically the opposite of what a socialist would want - we're supposed to be freeing you from the company that wants to wage enslave you and reward you with a drip feed of treats you don't really need, not making you want the treats even more!

Banning doesn't seem to work. I banned myself from reddit and got addicted to twitter, banned myself from Twitter and got myself addicted to Hacker News, then YouTube, then BlueSky, then nextdoor... Clearly there's a root issue I should be targeting instead, similar to how all my exercise is for naught if I can't get my diet in order. I think these kinds of behaviors are similar to the things that plague a capitalist society - we seem to know that smartphones and doom scrolling are bad for us, but we seem unable to stop. Some of us are trying dumb phones, or apps that limit time on certain apps. The best solutions we can come up with exist within the system we're addicted to - we need a company or app developer to save us from ourselves, and by the way the new Light phone is 600$. The incentives will never be aligned - the best (under capitalism) dumb phone manufacturer will be the one that can have the highest sales volume through addicting people to their phones and building in enough obsolescence to require people to get new ones. Or Light phone will just get cannibalized by a trillion dollar company it has no resources to resist at some point.

I think one of the key things leftists (using the global definition, not the Americanized version) need to figure out this century to accomplish our goals is how to help people empower themselves to escape the things they know are bad for them, or enjoy these things to a certain point but not be dragged beyond that point by profit-minded capitalist entities.

I see efforts on this front in the FOSS/fediverse space. Self hosted Instagram that lets you sort new posts by recent and doesn't try to psyop you with boobs blood or rage into staying on the app longer than intended. Alternative clients for YouTube that let you aggregate creators from other platforms and block channels you never want to see (did you know this isn't possible on YouTube?).Music sharing platforms that give the majority of revenue to the artists.

I think these efforts are good and might be the solution. I like Cory Doctorow's anarchist-aligned philosophy in "Walkaway" that basically amounts to "build alternative ways to be for people that make them ask why'd they bother with the capitalist mode at all."

I still think there's some more fundamental psychological angle we need to figure out, a human-centric something that doesn't need any distribution other than word of mouth that can help people resist the psychofauna capitalist entities use to ensnare people. Maybe I just have utopian thinking or maybe I read Snow Crash too many times have have magical thinking about the power of language and ideas. I certainly would love some magical way to finally solve my addictions and maladaptive behaviors.