Zoë > Recent Status Updates

One of the more ridiculous things I've heard: Bolsonaro claimed that his main opponent wanted to make all children gay, and would accordingly distribute penis-shaped bottles in kindergartens (? daycares), and this fabricated story helped sway the election.

But it also shows how Hari can be a bit loose with the facts: he's making a point about social media algorithms, but apparently a lot of this was on WhatsApp.

"Do you ever wonder whether being born into money has stunted us? ... It's just—lately I've been wondering whether having all of our material needs met from birth has been a positive aspect of our lives. It seems to me it may have resulted in some absence of yearning or striving in us.... When one's parents or grandparents have already quested and conquered, what is there for subsequent generations to do?"

"Who knew the origins of the word [panic]? ... But no one raised a hand.

She explained. It came from the Greek god Pan: the god of the woods. He liked to trick people, to confuse and disorient them until they lost their bearings, and their minds.

To panic, T.J. said, was to make an enemy of the forest. To stay calm was to be its friend."

"You could have all this technology... but not design it to be maximally distracting. In fact, you could design it with the opposite goal: to maximally respect people's need for sustained attention, and to interrupt them as little as possible. You could design the technology not so that it pulls people away from their deeper and more meaningful goals, but so that it helps them to achieve them."

" 'What started to really concern me over the years,' he told me, 'was just watching my friends who had originally gotten into this business because they thought they could make the world better, [and now] were caught in this arms race to manipulate human nature.' "

My takeaway from this was to check my phone time, and try to reduce it. I already got rid of the Instagram app in August, and I know Facebook should be next.

"I looked at social media and thought, I don't want this. I flicked through Twitter and felt like I had stood on a termites' nest. When I looked up, three hours had passed.

I left it behind & went to eat. When I got back, people had started replying to my texts and emails, and despite myself, I felt a little rush of affirmation. In the next few weeks, I started to post... and I felt myself become cruder and meaner"

"I realized that email breeds email, and if you just stop, it stops. I would like to say I felt calmed and soothed by this. In truth, I felt affronted—like my ego had been poked by a knitting needle. All this mania, all these demands on my time, I realized, made me feel important. I wanted in a sudden rush to send emails in order to get emails back—to feel needed again."

Unrelated to the message of this book, I find this sentence so interesting as an example of how the direct-object pronoun is changing to "who" while the indirect object remains "whom"!

"It still impacts where they can live and work, who they can trust, with whom they can be their full selves."