On a personal level I have become more anxious and it has become more difficult to deal with my tendency to procrastinate the more screen time I have and the more I am exposed to social media. I have in essence deleted the vast majority of my social media accounts years ago, but stayed a passive and rather anonymous consumer on Reddit, X and YouTube. A few weeks ago I blocked them too. I would say in totality I read more than I read growing up, but it was usually in the form of short content. Same goes for watching things. Unlimited access to short form content of any form has made my monkey brain feel a resistance to longer form content and that annoys and scares me. It’s like having free hyper palatable but unhealthy food in front of you at all times while you know that there are fresh ingredients for a proper healthy meal in the fridge. And as absurd as it sounds as a 30 something year old, I am now actively working on getting into the habit of reading books again and watching movies in one go to work on that specific problem. And talking ti my friends and family it looks like many of them struggle with similar problems.
I am less worried about the classics or the depth of wisdom that I miss. I am worried about the addiction that is dangled in front of my face and normalised completely now.
As for society, I think this is an uphill battle that I don’t see a real and lasting solution for it - and by “it” I mean us fellow humans in aggregate escaping this vortex of what I feel is ultimately self-harming behaviour. I hope for better regulation. I hope for better education. I hope for people realizing how harming it all is and turning around but my sense is that the shape of the world right now will make that so difficult in practice that it won’t happen.
> I have in essence deleted the vast majority of my social media accounts years ago, but stayed a passive and rather anonymous consumer on Reddit, X and YouTube
Most of the people I’ve known who struggled with doomscrolling had established a similar set of social media sites at their worst point.
I think we’ve seen so many articles about how social media is bad that reference mainstream sites like Facebook and Instagram that it feels safer to retreat to sites like Reddit
Yet the most doomer, anxious, and cynical people I’ve known who got stuck in social media doom spirals were getting it primarily from Reddit, often with a helping of YouTube, X, or Twitch streamers on the side.
They would be convinced that they were “off of social media” because they didn’t consider those sites among the bad ones, but they’d open their phones or laptops and feed streams of doom straight into their brains for hours every day.
Cutting the cord on those sites was a good move if you realized you were having problems with social media. They’re not typically grouped into “social media” by people who create narrow definitions of what that means (profile picture, real names, etc) but those distinctions mean nothing for doom scrolling. When it comes to the doom part of doom scrolling, Reddit especially can be even worse than traditional social media. The content popular on that site is almost designed to fill you with dread and doom and depression.
I have a predisposition for that, and Reddit is indeed poison for some of us. I blocked it with pihole, along with most other social media sites, years ago.
Just the friction of a dns record (that yes, I can easily override) was enough to keep myself away from all of it.
And when I need the rare bit of practical information from one of them, I can hit the 5m override from a widget on the phone.
It’s ultimately self control, but that’s easy for me when there’s just a tiny bit of hassle in the loop.
PiHole was my solution as well, and then Reddit decided to help. The "new" Reddit interface is still horrible and unusable, so old.reddit.com was always my go to. I don't have or want a Reddit account, I just wanted to follow a few sub-reddits. Now old.reddit.com is blocked for users without an account and they appear to be rolling out something similar to the site in general. You can see a few posts, and the a pop-up appears and requires you to sign in.
Maybe I'm just getting old, but I used to enjoy Imgur and Reddit, but both "communities" have become increasingly hostile and less inclusive. So now I avoid both and I mentally feel much more positive about people in general.
I'm a frequent Reddit user. Recently they have been bringing some of the more poisonous elements of social media over to their platform. Pushing a "for you" feed, and prioritizing a "Best" sorting algorithm over "new" or "hot".
Reddit is a site which I would only recommend to someone I truly hated. It's poison on every level imaginable, more so than basically any other social media I've ever used.
People will say Twitter is worse, but the Twitter algo with actually listen to you (in my experience) when you tell it what you do/don't want to see. My feed was nearly 100% furry artwork because I refused to interact with anything else.
And it doesn't feel like poison. I haven't used Reddit in several years so I don't know how it is now, but I used to feel yucky if I visited Facebook or Instagram, but not Reddit.
It's one thing when randos on the internet choose to express something vile and stupid, it's an entirely different thing when people you know express something vile and stupid.
I tried to use it a year ago just to see what it was really like.
It ended rather quickly with me staring at my own comment looking for ways to twist what I wrote into something ban worthy. Then it happened again! LOL!
1985 Johannes Paulus II visited the Netherlands and some comedians made a song about it that was on TV. The song text is roughly that he enjoys his job and that he has to visit NL.
The real offence is posting without being a bot. The subreddit has to look a certain way, idk what they have in mind but always something, they use bots to make it look that way, you can also post if you contribute to the project but if you ever go against their unstated wishes, then bam!
All of this existed before, all the way back to BBS culture (minus the bots mostly). What Reddit did was hyperscale it. People are tribal and they enforce adherence to their chosen tribe's ways. It's pretty depressing to look back and see that one of the quickest paths to three commas was to monetize it.
BBS people weren't conspiring to create the appearance that everyone on the BBS thinks a certain way and talks about certain topics. If an operator was doing that, he didn't need real accounts to fake posts.
Reddit sucks so much if you use the defaults or follow any remotely "controversial" subreddit. If you follow subreddits for your hobbies and so on it's generally okay, I have no issues with the various Warhammer subreddits I follow...
The problem with Reddit is that all the news subs and all the politics subs are just massive echo chambers and there is simply no way to interact with them unless you follow the agreed upon views espoused by the mods.
If you go on a conservative sub and say that you agree with 90% of what they offer but not the last 10%, you'll just be branded as a commie/socialist and the opposite is true on the left wing subs.
Nuanced comments are few and far between and the worst of all for me as someone living in Europe is /r/Europe which is very left-wing and honestly reminds me a cult of some sort. US bad, Europe great, left is good, right is bad. It is just insufferable.
I think on the contrary X/Twitter is more balanced as I can choose to follow different people on opposite sides of the aisle without fearing getting banned when I comment on some of their posts with views that may not be shared by the original poster.
> When it comes to the doom part of doom scrolling, Reddit especially can be even worse than traditional social media.
It can be, but it can also (still) be sanitized.
I typically visit old.reddit.com once every day or two on a desktop browser without ads to check the subreddit for the city I live in. No doomscrolling is really possible.
There's no way to consume meta/tiktok content in a comparable way.
My opinion, anything driven by an algorithm is inherently bad. It’s hard giving up those sites, not because that’s where the people are but because we are all addicted to them. If you switch to mastodon or pixelfed, you’ll find good stuff there, but you won’t engage with it as much because it’s not algo driven, which to me is a win.
> My opinion, anything driven by an algorithm is inherently bad.
I really like this simple statement. It gets to the heart of what is bad about social media (at least to me). Its one thing if a site has the same content that I have to actually go and crawl through myself to find things that interest me, its another when the site thinks it knows what I want/like and guides me.
The former forces me to engage my brain and explicitly engage with content (good or bad) the latter enables my brain to implicitly engage with content (good or bad).
A time posted sort is an algorithm too. But that's obviously not what's meant here even if the "gotcha" is there for that too. It's the combination of profitability motivations and manipulation of dopamine responses that are the outcomes people object to.
With an open API, there are IMO paths to an LLM* cultivating one's algorithmic feeds to only show you what you actually want to see as opposed to engaging you by enraging you, but without regulation, the social media companies will block that by any means necessary.
And then, even if you did achieve a truly personalized feed, there will be accusations you're limiting your worldview to a filter bubble**. And sure, you are. Still beats algorithmic rage-baiting. It's up to you to figure out how much you wish to engage IMO, not some tech company or virtue signaling concern troll influencer.
ATM the killer product would be a "bring your own algo" message board/socio thing/infinite scroll endorphin generator/etc
I run a simple badword filter on my rss aggregator and it already outperforms anything big tech can come up with by a very large margin.
Back when advertisements weren't 40 minute long I one time fell asleep while watching youtube on auto play. It was already very horny for Donald Trump as the US election was coming up but after watching a few of those the algo became convinced I wanted to watch nothing else. When I woke up ~8 hours later it had filled the entire front page and all side bar video suggestions with the face of that unbearable retard. I'm convinced this is how youtube changes all of us into ufologists.
After this came a period where I more-carefully picked the videos I watched. Before I would watch anything that spiked my curiosity. This changed into "Do I want this in my feed for the next 3 weeks?". I just looked for an example and my feed has a bitcoin video. I've been waiting for those to go away for 15 years. I don't question someone is interested in those.
My own word filter is like, go ahead, say it once, say the word, say bitcoin one time, try me. Oddly, if an article consistently calls it BC without explaining what it refers to it might actually be worth reading.
I suggest someone creates something like an app store or extension platform where the user can pick or buy their own algorithms each with their own exotic brand of configuration screen.
You could entirely create one that costs thousands per month to run and is actually worth it. Have it take in my browser history, my investment portfolio, the books I own, the conversations my phone listened in on, check my agenda how much time I have for doomscrolling and my activity for how much time I actually sink into it. Dump a bunch of llm tokens into the task. Run some complicated prompts.
yes, the fundamental BS assumption of algorithmic social media is that human desire and curiosity is legible, and can be calculated in a straightforward way.
X is honestly among the worst of the worst. People give purposefully bad takes just for the engagement and it's overall super toxic
Reddit is awful too, completely accurate things can get downvoted to oblivion because of the hive mind
YouTube is still overall decent but mostly brainrot I habitually watch/listen to in the background to such a high degree it's hard to even imagine completely cutting it out of my life
I'm mostly passive on reddit these days but really struggle to leave it as I do enjoy seeing things like cool projects people are making on /r/selfhosting and such. Every time I think of leaving it I just think well I cant because where will i find out about cool new projects now.
I know it’s not the same but I watch stuff like hackaday and others with an rss reader, now. Old school approach. It helps jail the types of content I passively consume. I blocked reddit and most other social media with the pihole I was using anyway.
After having been away from Reddit for a couple years now, I think it was a good trade. But obviously that’s a very personal thing.
LinkedIn is up there too, the reality distortion and appearance of everyone being a self made trillionaire can make the strongest of minds feel like they’re utter failures. It’s of course not true and 90% seem to be pure bullshit, but who has time to investigate ever thought leader post they get shoved in their face
I’m on X for tech interest, new hardware, robotics, coding. If X didn’t allow blocking words/phrases, I could not use it! And yes, my blocklist is huge..
Not just the hivemind, Reddit has been thoroughly astroturfed for a long time now. The vast majority of large subreddits have at least 1-2 mods who stifle/amplify discourse in the service of companies, think tanks, and certain Levantine pariah nations.
Subs with names like /r/wowlookatthis are posting blatant "west bad" propaganda. Making USA and EU people feel bad.
Yet I walk outside in Sweden and I'm in one of the best functioning and beautiful nations in the world. Yet Swedish Reddit will post "west bad" propaganda on how everything is right wing doom. I mean from their perspective, sure... but so so so wrong they are. I just hope they get some refugees in their houses.
I have some curated subreddits I use for work related stuff. For politics it is suffering. Now watch the left think it is due to right wing dominance. Wake up. All default subs are left wing crazy.
Is the topic of Israel and Palestine truly that decisive across some binary party lines? I know people with a wide range of opinions both sides. I feel like it's more loud social media echo chambers than some sort of political schism.
I understand, but I don't agree the with GP's implication. I don't truly believe the opinions on Israel is enough to categorize one sub as being left or right wing. It's a delicate and highly debated topic, hence why I would consider Worldnews to be an echo chamber, at least on that particular topic.
One problem for me about leaving social media is that it limits my chances of getting updates about jobs, and if I start a business, social media is a good way of promoting the business.
I wish I was in a financial position where I didn't have to bother about this.
I've been limiting my use of social media (aside Reddit and HN) for almost two weeks now and I've been reading books and doing other things with my time rather than consuming content that isn't beneficial to me.
Check out the Wikipedia article - The Shallows
"""
The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. The book claims research shows "online reading" yields lower comprehension than reading a printed page. The Shallows was a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction.
One of my problems with blocking things like YouTube is that there’s so much outstanding long form content that’s not always available elsewhere. I love watching semi popularized physics lectures like from Sean Carroll but I can’t help but click on the mindless content next to it after, or even during, my wholesome viewing.
the semi popularized physics lectures are also mindless content. It's infotainment, it might be worse than junk because it disguises itself as learning.
People will consume thousands of hours of that stuff and not be able to solve one physics problem. Endless exercise and fitness science videos and still be out of shape. Watch language learning content and never speak another language. Endless programming tutorials without ever being able to program.
As the author of the article points out, Neil Postman correctly observed that the Sesame Street didn't teach people anything but how to watch television. People watch "education YouTube" but don't get a tangible education, they learn how to watch YouTube.
I first got interested in and learned to cook from cooking shows (Alton Brown, Emeril Lagasse). Of course I had to do my own cooking, but watching them made me realize it wasn't so hard. I'm a shade tree mechanic, but without the service manual, it's helpful to find a video replacing whatever part I'm about to deal with for the first time (Chilton manuals are crap). A few years ago I needed to pull the double-oven out of my cabinet to replace the heating element... I'm sure glad there was a video for that too. What's the right form for a kettlebell swing or a push up? How do I tie that knot again?
Yeah, there's lot of junk on YouTube. You might even say 90% of it. But there's tons of useful content too if you go searching for it.
3blue1brown helped me quite a bit when I needed to learn calculus ahead of school curriculum, the same could be said for circuit design and a few other things.
In general most that an edutainment can give you is awareness that something exists and a bit of motivation to get you going and there is some value in that. Whether on the whole it’s a positive thing is a bit harder to say.
There are degrees of mindless! I know one can't substitute watching lectures for serious study, but it's a great substitute for the far more mindless and addictive content I would be tempted by otherwise. There are lots of interesting topics in the foundations of physics and areas of mathematics my undergrad didn't cover that came to my attention this way. I enjoy getting a sampler now while I don't have the time/energy after work to study them for real, and they will inform what I study when I get and/or make time for them in my life soon.
If you paint with such a broad brush that watching anything on a screen is equally bad, that's a backdoor way to justify scrolling through TikTok ragebait videos since "it's all poison anyway".
Edutainment is a spectrum, while you are correct that everyone should understand they can't "learn quantum theory" in a way that can be applied meaningfully by watching videos, sparking intellectual curiosity and learning new topics/areas of interest is a good thing in general. And most edutainment that isn't so flawed/simplistic as to be wrong is better than watching an influencer whose dayjob is churning out weekly content with some alluring hook to grab viewers and mostly just inane lowest common denominator filler around it.
Sesame Street isn't nearly as harmful for young kids as 2 minute TikTok AI videos that next play into God knows what. It has interesting inoffensive characters teaching useful language and social skills.
There was a time, not that long ago, when cocaine was 100% normalized. It was a regular ingredient used in everything from basic OTC remedies to, most famously Coca Cola which was Cocaine + Kola nut. And Coca Cola itself was based on Vin Mariani, a wine mixed with cocaine that was drunk or endorsed by everybody from Popes to Thomas Edison and Ulysses S Grant. It was also regularly offered for free to laborers by employers because it was seen to observe productivity, and all other sorts of stuff.
So we were pretty much a nation of coke heads. It's probably much more difficult to see the harm in things when its so normalized. But of course people did and so the tide gradually shifted against it. We're already seeing the exact same process play out with social media and, more generally, digital addictions. But it's a relatively unprecedented technology in that it's essentially a digital drug that can't be especially well defined. But I expect these things are well on there way out. The age restrictions will likely come with broader prohibitions if they are positive outcomes from such, and we're already seeing exactly that in places like Australia.
Government and intelligence agencies desire to use it for mind control or whatever will probably quickly fade once they realize the same concept (which I think is quite frankly absurd - hence my sardonic term) could just as well be used against them, were it possible.
> most famously Coca Cola which was Cocaine + Kola nut.
That's a common misleading myth.
Early coca cola was coca leaves and kola nut. Yes, the former contained cocaine alkaloids. But it's different from saying you take a soda and mix it with cocaine. The dosage wasn't comparable to a snorted line today.
If the dosage wasn’t doing anything tangible, which is what OP says, why does Coca Cola make an effort to decocainate coca leaves, making it a very expensive ingredient?
I think this is akin to arguing that saying coffee has caffeine in it is misleading, because it's not the same amount as one might get in a powdered concentrate of pure caffeine. Yeah, but it does have caffeine in it and Coke did have cocaine in it. And the effective dose was significant.
It was marketed precisely on this point; it being a "nerve stimulant", "brain tonic", cure all for hysteria, melancholy, and more. There's a great article on it here. [1] Coke also got defensive on this point because not only was it referred to as "dope" and other such drug implicit terms, but people also began pointing out the issues with coke and cocaine.
Nobody knows exactly how much cocaine was in the original concoctions, but it is known that they began rapidly reducing the amount once the issue started being discussed. Of course I can also see that being argued as evidence of them having a bunch (oyyy, shut it down!), or indeed having a negligible amount (bahh, let's nip this nonsense in the bud). Either way it had a very non-zero amount, and people were consuming it in absurd quantities. If you believe Coke's response, 90% of all businessmen were "constant patrons."
The point is you're arguing that it was diluted rather than concentrated cocaine. Sure, but it was indeed cocaine all the same. Cocaine tolerance is also, oddly enough, based on quantity rather than consistency. And so people taking small doses over time likely had negligible tolerance contrasted against a cokehead of today going for a bump as a warmup.
Its exact potency are going to be impossible to assess because the only people that knew how much cocaine was in each serving, early on, took it to the grave with themselves. But the thing we can say is that (1) it was very non-zero and (2) consumption of said non-zero amount of cocaine was relatively widespread.
Again I think it works very well as an analog to modern times. It's fairly certain that companies have run internal studies on addictiveness since 'engagement' is already little more than a euphemism for such, kept at arm's reach. Those studies will never see the light of day, and have almost certainly been long since wiped, so we'll never know exactly how much they knew. Other than they obviously knew and know that they're intentionally creating and providing a product that is extremely addictive, and exploiting that for economic benefit.
If it increased productivity, it doesn't sound that bad to me. I also doubt that so many Americans were really coke heads, or that the situation was so dire.
How much caffiene do you consume?
I had just been prescribed a script for an ssri for generalised anxiety, was scared of the side effects, decided to try cutting out coffee instead.
Anxiety gone.
I was only having 2-3 filter cups a day, probably less mg than a single large energy drink but that was enough.
This is interesting? Do you have any other sources of caffeine in your diet? For instance I would have a regular can of coke maybe once a week and English breakfast tea at least once a day. Only coffee seems to really affect me though. I don't really need the affect but I do like the taste and now probably have 3 or 4 coffees a week rather than 2 a day and it seems to be helping.
One of the most insidious realities of the introduction of AI is that we've taken our eye off of tech's original sin - the algorithmic feed forensically designed to hijack the brain. I don't see how it's any different than opium and why the regulations should be any different. Even the problem of "AI slop" is mostly that it invades the algorithms, weaponizing them even more.
I'm not a huge fan of heavy-handed regulation, but some clinical regulation like making "Explore" tabs or feeds irrelevant to your social networks, opt-in by default would have such a Pareto improvement to all our brains.
Instead we are getting endless whinging over water usage in data centers ironically flooding our algorithmic feeds.
During the marijuana prohibition days the resounding chorus in the discourse was that marijuana was not physically addictive like other drugs, and therefore we must treat it differently. There were problems with that argument if you got into the details, but it did establish the idea that not all drugs are equally harmful and therefore treating them all equally was not logical.
It’s funny now to see these equivalencies where we’re supposed to believe that social media is no different than extremely powerful drugs that have severe withdrawal syndromes and wreak havoc on their user’s bodies. The equivalence is obviously false to anyone who has been in the sad position of knowing an opioid addict.
It’s possible to make arguments about social media that don’t depend on obviously false equivalence to powerful drugs.
A long time ago on the forum I hang out with, I said something like "this is amazing, this is like heroin!" about whatever (not even a substance, probably something silly like a song or a video game). A guy who I knew as nothing but laid back and gracious scolded me in a way I remember to this day... not the exact words, but part of it was that he knew a couple who just handed off their new born baby for adoption to get their next shot. And I could tell there was a lot unsaid, too. Sorry for the tangent, but I guess, fuck heroin etc., and all the power to anyone struggling with it, things like it, or has loved ones or friends that do.
Ah I get it but you can't also just self censor for everyone left and right, and we have no right to get others to self censor. We will quickly run out of words to describe anything offensive. It's just outrage culture, I mean you can't restrict words just because things have happened to you or people around you. It's just an absurd thing to even begin to suggest.
"Yes, I know heroin is scary, but no, I am using it as a metaphor, and that couple has very little to do with me and you, so whats the problem? It's not like they sold you or me off." Is probably what I'll say.
It also brings to mind the OG of drug metaphors: "Religion is the opiate of the masses" nobody really chided him when he wrote that.
Not sure about passively consuming it, but people with an audience certainly can get very addicted and engage in very self-destructive behaviour. But we can just call it those things without calling it heroin or opium etc. right?
> "we’re supposed to believe that social media is no different than extremely powerful drugs that have severe withdrawal syndromes and wreak havoc on their user’s bodies"
For someone nitpicking on details surely you noticed that nobody said that. This is a strawman you created to drag the parent poster's point off-topic.
> "The equivalence is obviously false"
And Opium is obviously not an "algorithmic feed forensically designed to hijack the brain", so clearly the poster who "sees no difference" does actually see differences, just not in the point they are making.
I'm comparing to Opium not for exact chemical effect equivalence but for the level of Government urgency required. There's been a fair bit of work down now to identify clear physiological withdrawal symptoms too[1]. The main damage though is on cognitive strengths (far more pronounced than Marijuana).
For those who would minimize the effects of social media on teens, I would highly recommend looking at this report of Meta's own research on the matter, published after it was revealed in discovery by States AGs.
Yeah, I have stopped basically all consumption except from youtube, which itself also has a tendency to expand to fill all available time. I dont use shorts that much, but there is just much good content being released as well.
The proliferation of AI content is making these platforms so disgusting to me that I'm actually quitting, and for real this time.
I guess it works like putting bitterant in cans of compressed air to stop people from huffing them.
It started as you expect, with more and more bot accounts pretending to be real people to either act as sleeper agents for future causes or to actively promote politics and products, except they're now interactive so you're tricked into engaging with them.
But the tipping point for me was when real people started using AI to write their posts and comments for them. And I'm not just talking about randos but about real people you follow who have written tech books and such. I've seen a few of them admit to this when confronted and they use the same excuse, that these are their thoughts and they stand by them, they're just improved by AI.
And I'm not just talking about long posts or comments. You see it with one liner responses which leads me to think that their reddit experience has now been automated and that at the most they hit approve on a queue.
So I've become cynical, almost in a state of solipsism, about every post and comment that I see, assuming everything is AI by default until I've checked which is now almost impossible with the private history. And at that point being on reddit is just like chatting with an LLM but with extra deception, so why even try.
It's how our brain works. I don't think anyone can see long term success cutting out things that stimulate our brain in just the right way. If you cut a few out, you'll just discover some others.
Things were a lot better for the brain when information wasn't coming in as an unending stream that even sometimes responds to what you have to say.
It’s quite infuriating that all those sites you mention have gone with the race to the bottom to just hook in users with garbage content.
Just last week, Youtube took even more steps in hiding your subscriptions homepage on iOS, and on desktop the shorts (content made for phones in portrait mode) is front and centre.
Aye, but it's also possible to waste an incredible amount of time on HN. I'd call it my main internet vice after lichess. Both are outwardly better than say, TikTok or Reddit, but if you're spending hours a day flitting unstructured between content, you're subject to both the fragmentation and time sink problems. Same as someone who spends the same amount of time caning TikTok. A little healthier (maybe not lichess) and less intense, but I'd argue also damaging.
lichess and HN are definitely on my "wasting time online" list. HN totally is social media. It has an "algorithm" it has gamification (upvotes/downvotes/flag/vouch/karma). It feeds you endless content which is mostly of questionable quality. It interacts with the same systems giving you dopamine highs and lows and chasing the next little boost.
When I'm traveling and I'm less online I don't miss either. Life feels simpler.
One thing I try to do more on lichess is to just do puzzles so I don't really get the same dopamine hit of games. I guess very long time controls might be better as well. I do make the excuse that it's at least using my brain and I have gotten much better at chess.
YouTube is really the other big problem. There is a lot of actually great content and then there's a lot of garbage. I don't do Reddit or TikTok at all.
I am less worried about the classics or the depth of wisdom that I miss. I am worried about the addiction that is dangled in front of my face and normalised completely now. As for society, I think this is an uphill battle that I don’t see a real and lasting solution for it - and by “it” I mean us fellow humans in aggregate escaping this vortex of what I feel is ultimately self-harming behaviour. I hope for better regulation. I hope for better education. I hope for people realizing how harming it all is and turning around but my sense is that the shape of the world right now will make that so difficult in practice that it won’t happen.