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What Eddy Burback got wrong about his phone... [Discussion of Fediverse as an alternative within]
(videos.abnormalbeings.space)
this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2025
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I like Eddy. And at first I’ve liked this essay subject from other creators, but now I just find it shortsighted. The phone isn’t the problem, just like the television and radio weren’t the problem. It’s the content you put on it.
You can watch great TV shows—documentaries, masterpiece dramas, etc. Or you can watch slop.
You can do incredible stuff with your phone—get directions, listen to almost any song ever recorded, learn about the night sky, watch documentaries anywhere you are, write, create your own content, sky’s the limit. Or you can install slop and brain rot apps like Twitter.
You don’t have to pull a stunt like locking your phone away. Just delete the slop. Be more mindful of what an app and the company behind it are, and either limit your use of it or simply don’t install it at all.
I disagree. Yes there can be good intermediate steps, but deleting slop is not even half as healthy as locking a phone away.
Not just phone calls or texts, but things like typing an email on the phone and then seeing a text or having the GPS interrupt your train of thought by yelling "Continue straight for 5 miles". Brains hate interruptions. Those are still going to exist even when the slop is gone.
Turning off the dopamine machine (not eating candy) is one thing. But Eddy was showing something a lot bigger than that; deleting his access to the temptation. He didnt know the code to unlock the phone.
I disagree. Most people are able to self-regulate in more instances than you give credit for. In instances where someone is unable to do so, I would agree that a full prohibition probably makes sense; such as with alcoholics who are unable to stop themselves, but this is not the case for most people.
Interruptions - fear not the notification, for you hold the power to calibrate your notifications to the level that suits you. I'm particularly aggressive about disabling notifications and especially notification categories that do not add value, and you can too.
Resisting - many humans have reported experiencing even more enjoyment engaging in activities they enjoy if they delay their engagement until meeting a predetermined goal. If you know that scrolling through your favorite app for 5 min will give you a dopamine hit, you can choose to delay using the app until after you've completed a chore, for example, and that may offer enough incentive to complete more tasks than you might otherwise be able to perform.
Those are really good points, and I appreciate the input. I could see why alcohol being on someones desk isn't a problem, e.g. depending on the person its possible the bottle doesn't have a "gravity" tempting them.
I'm going to guess that reality is somewhere between my points and your points. Notifications can be configured, but my grandmother isn't going to figure it out. Having a bottle of alcohol on every person's desk is probably completely neutral for a lot of people, but could be detrimental to others. Etc
Agreed. As with most things, the answer is neither black, nor white, but some shade of grey.
I feel like this kind of misses the point. To be clear: If someone absolutely cannot avoid installing slop apps and enabling notifications for everything, I can see their need for an ultra minimal device or other solution. But I also think that speaks to a larger, personal discussion about discipline and possibly addiction, but that’s outside the realm of this thread.
My point is we can choose which apps, notifications, features, and algorithms are allowed to get our attention. It’s easy to turn off all notifications or never even allow them in the first place—after all, apps have to ask for that permission in the first place.
But the choice is the point. If someone is traveling somewhere they probably want maps to tell them important information about the journey. Otherwise why turn on directions at all? That’s the entire point.
We even have the ability to disable all texting notifications but also choose to allow them from certain people if they’re important enough. These devices are simply tools and we have the power to choose how they operate. The device isn’t the problem, it’s our choices.
I think addiction is a key aspect. Like with gambling there is of course that aspect of responsibility, but regulation to minimize harm is also important.
All the major social media apps being designed to exploit that dopamine response is kind of like junk foods being the most common due to being subsidized; of course people just shouldn't eat junk food, but we should make healthy options the most prevalent and common instead.
Of course that would require a government that would actually force corporations to implement harm reductive measures, instead of one bought by and working for corporations...
FOSS alternatives like Lemmy, Pixelfed, and Loops should be much healthier due to no algorithm working to maximize engagement. I also think social isolation is a big part of the addiction aspect, at least in America
I'm saying one of the big downsides has nothing to do with self discipline.
Merely living in a world covered in advertisements, living next to a delicious smelling candy bowl, living 30 seconds away from memes, rage-bait, doom scrolling, sports gambling, and other slop -- just living next to those things are bad for our mental health.
Some sources if you're curious on the research behind it. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4731333/
https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.2105/AJPH.2013.301694
https://scholarworks.uark.edu/mgmtuht/31/
This is kind of like blaming the founder of knives because criminals use them to murder people.
It's dumb.