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authorNicholas Johnson <mail@nicholasjohnson.ch>2025-02-05 00:00:00 +0000
committerNicholas Johnson <mail@nicholasjohnson.ch>2025-02-05 00:00:00 +0000
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@@ -11,7 +11,7 @@ Why is it that policies which poll well among most Americans either never come t
The reason for this is America has been steadily moving towards plutocracy for about half a century now. Plutocracy is an illegitimate form of government where the wealthy dictate politics and the will of the majority is ignored.
# Money in Politics
-Robert Reich's main preoccupation in life is to spread awareness on the issues of inequality, money in politics, and plutocracy. He's the former U.S. Secretary of Labor and political commentator who does a lot of important work on these issues and should be promoted. He has a [website](https://robertreich.org/), [Youtube channel](https://yewtu.be/channel/UCuDv5p8E-evaRSh542hDV5g?dark_mode=true), and [Twitter](https://x.com/rbreich). He has made podcasts and written articles and books about these subjects which you can find on the media outlet he founded, [Inequality Media](https://www.inequalitymedia.org/).
+Robert Reich's main preoccupation in life is to spread awareness on the issues of inequality, money in politics, and plutocracy. He's the former U.S. Secretary of Labor and political commentator who does a lot of important work on these issues and should be promoted. He has a [website](https://robertreich.org/), [YouTube channel](https://yewtu.be/channel/UCuDv5p8E-evaRSh542hDV5g?dark_mode=true), and [Twitter](https://x.com/rbreich). He has made podcasts and written articles and books about these subjects which you can find on the media outlet he founded, [Inequality Media](https://www.inequalitymedia.org/).
I'd like to include his latest tweet:
@@ -58,7 +58,7 @@ The same thing is happening with focused attention all over the world. Johann Ha
Whenever I see very young children playing on Ipads all day, giving their childhood to these huge companies that profit off of them, it depresses me. It's wrecking their brains. The thousands of engineers at Google and Netflix and Facebook have figured out how to hijack the brain's reward system and profit off of it. We are puppets pulling our own strings and we have no idea the long term implications of this on mental health.
-It's to the point you can't even watch a full movie or have a meal with people any more without them pulling out their phones to watch some mindless Tiktok because they're not entertained for two split seconds. And I can't even be mad at them because they're victims. These online platforms have destroyed their ability to pay focused attention to anything. Professors don't even ask students to read books any more. They tell them to go watch short Youtube videos because they know their students' attention can't stay on any one thing for too long. People just live in this blur of constant stimulation and switching tasks, incurring the overhead of context switching and exhausting their brain.
+It's to the point you can't even watch a full movie or have a meal with people any more without them pulling out their phones to watch some mindless Tiktok because they're not entertained for two split seconds. And I can't even be mad at them because they're victims. These online platforms have destroyed their ability to pay focused attention to anything. Professors don't even ask students to read books any more. They tell them to go watch short YouTube videos because they know their students' attention can't stay on any one thing for too long. People just live in this blur of constant stimulation and switching tasks, incurring the overhead of context switching and exhausting their brain.
One of the most important points Johann Hari makes in his book Stolen Focus, which by the way I plan to dedicate an entry to, is that unchecked capitalism leads to overconsumption and attention problems. The more focused attention people spend on one single task at a time, the less they will be task switching. The less people task switch, the less ads and media they see and the less products they'll consume. After you've saturated the consumer base for a product and you cannot raise prices any more, the only thing you can do is make people consume more. Make them interrupt their day more often doing what you want them to do. That necessarily means less attention dedicated to more important things.
@@ -67,7 +67,7 @@ So extreme capitalism is literally incompatible with the ability to pay focused
We have to make it easier for people to pay focused attention not by shaming them for "lacking willpower", but by removing the environmental factors that caused the problems in attention to begin with. To expect individual "willpower" to prevail on the whole over a systemic society-level problem is a strategy that will always fail. Should individuals still do everything they can? Absolutely. But we shouldn't be so focused on individual actions that we forget the true cause of the problem, which demands a collective solution.
## Bullshit Jobs
-Extreme capitalism also means an unthinkable amount of human intelligence and creativity go to waste performing [bullshit jobs](/2022/01/22/automation-bullshit-jobs-and-work/) that either harm society or don't provide any real value. If you do find some job which uses your intelligence and creativity, then it might still be for evil purposes. For example, if you're a Google engineer tasked with making Youtube even more addictive to children.
+Extreme capitalism also means an unthinkable amount of human intelligence and creativity go to waste performing [bullshit jobs](/2022/01/22/automation-bullshit-jobs-and-work/) that either harm society or don't provide any real value. If you do find some job which uses your intelligence and creativity, then it might still be for evil purposes. For example, if you're a Google engineer tasked with making YouTube even more addictive to children.
When your population is drowning in student debt and medical debt they can never get out from under and paying sky high rent because of zoning laws and because there's no low income housing, you force intelligent creative people who would otherwise be helping society to do demeaning bullshit clerical and administrative work which doesn't really need done.