If iPhones and web2 mechanisms hadn’t been invented in 2007, we’d have seen a different “addiction” moral panic in the 2010s. Linked to laptops or bicycles or something. The whole two-decade-long discourse confuses effects for causes. The causal path was subprime mortgage crisis —> GFC —> zirp era —> odd “free” product form factors —> addiction behaviors.

Yes there is an independent line of “evidence” based on psychology studies, but modern notions of “well-being” are themselves artifacts of mid-century industrial psychology models designed to stabilize well-adjusted factory workers, not noble notions of worthwhile lives that the profession miraculously found through divine revelation and stewards selflessly for the rest of us against tech forces they somehow perspicaciously analyze more wisely than the rest of us. So when the profession claims widespread harm you can’t take it at face value.

I’m convinced of two things 1) the median effect of phones and social media on lives has been unambiguously positive, and 2) if you think otherwise you’re either too young to remember how much pre-internet life sucked in ways social media solved or are nostalgically romanticizing that suckage OR you have an agenda that benefits from the moral panic whether or not you admit it

The addictive harm levels are not significantly different from older media. The differences are almost entirely explainable by zirp effects.

Zero or negative cost of capital is fundamentally toxic regardless of how you produce and distribute it. QE, MMT, UBI, natural resource dividend checks, sovereign fund payouts… the mechanism or politics don’t matter much. Healthy new money supply is printed as a function of non-zero-risk-adjusted expectations of positive futures, where positive and negative scenario zones of the future distribution both have nonzero weight. This cost of capital cannot be zero under such expectations unless someone somewhere is making utopian simplifications somewhere. Interest is the price of expected wrongness about the future. If you set that price to zero, some part of society will act as though their eschaton has been immanetized and get punched in the face by reality.

We make this mistake because we mistake sudden technological surpluses as free lunches and print free money to represent the presumed unencumbered upside that we think we can spend freely like a lottery win. Hell, even lottery wins don’t work that way.

Tech surpluses don’t arrive in the form of free lunches that politicians get to divvy up advised by self-appointed humanists who know better than the techies who dream up the devices that produce them. They arrive in the form of new games to play that are more interesting and rewarding to play than existing games. You have to learn to play the new games each time. Game rules changing means some people who figure it out first will win a lot for a while, and very easily, and it will look like they’re taking all the supposed “free lunch” for themselves.

Tech is the infinite game. It’s how we figure out how to continue playing. Not how we magically create high-value participation trophies for everyone.