Douglas Rushkoff Says Tech Gurus Don’t Want You To Know What They Know
Dr. Vivek Murthy, this week warned that the effects of social media on adolescent mental health were not fully understood. While it can be beneficial to some users, “There are ample indicators that social media can also have a profound risk of harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents.
”, the report recommends that families keep mealtimes and in-person gatherings free of devices to help build social bonds and promote conversation. It suggested creating a “family media plan” to set expectations for social media use, including boundaries around content and keeping personal information private. Dr. Murthy also called on tech companies to enforce minimum age limits and to create default settings for children with high safety and privacy standards. And he urged the government to create age-appropriate health and safety standards for technology platforms. Adolescents “are not just smaller adults,” Dr. Murthy said in an interview after the report came out. “They’re in a different phase of development, and they’re in a critical phase of brain development.”have found that up to 95% of teens reported using at least one social media platform, while more than one-third said they used social media “almost constantly.” As social media use has risen, so have self-reports and clinical diagnoses among adolescents of anxiety and depression, along with The advisory noted that technology companies have a vested interest in keeping users online, and that they use tactics that entice people to engage in addictive-like behaviors. “Our children have become unknowing participants in a decades-long experiment,” the advisory states.That last paragraph takes us back to Douglas Rushkoff, who said that warnings like the one from the Surgeon General are belated. “What happened to the cigarette companies will eventually happen to the social media companies,” he predicted. “They’ve had all the research for 20 years, and they’ve been knowingly saying this stuff is not harmful when they know it to be harmful.” He says the self-anointed gods of the tech world are “not getting off the planet, they’re not going to live forever. They’re just living out their fantasies. They are eugenicists. There’s a reason why they got along with Jeffrey Epstein and Richard Dawkins — people who say genes are the only things that matter. We live in an entirely material universe. There is no soul. Humans can be auto-tuned and anything between the ones and zeros is just noise. “It’s a pure form of the same sort of sociopathic capitalism that we saw from the British East India Company or Hobbs talking about Native Americans. But now they have a technology that amplifies sociopathic tendencies.”The tech revolution began with Johannes Gutenberg, whose printing press made the Bible accessible to ordinary people — at least those who could read. For the first time, people could read the holy book for themselves instead of relying on priests to tell them what it meant. Nevertheless, monarchs had the text modified to support their political agendas in order to solidify their power. More people have died in religious wars than from atomic weapons. Next, radio promised to keep us all informed, and then television offered the same golden promise. It brought us TV dinners and tray tables that obliterated the dinner table conversations that had become so essential to transmitting human culture to impressionable young minds. Now siblings sit in the back seat of the family car and text each other while the scenery whizzes by outside. Though all of this information revolutions, entrepreneurs like William Randolph Hearst, Henry Luce, Willam Paley, and Rupert Murdoch figured out how to monetize the distribution of information in order to make themselves incredibly wealthy while keeping their audiences amused and generally ill informed. The tech billionaires today are focused on one thing and one thing only — increasing their wealth by controlling the flow of information to the masses. Elon Musk now wants to create a “
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