[api]

The right question is: how can some small organically grown thing compete for attention?

If everyone is engaged with addiction machines nobody will use it.

Engineered addiction is mind control. It is abuse. Hacking the human brain is violence — a term that has been robbed of its impact through overuse for things that are not violence, but this is.

Engineering of addiction in any form should not be legal for the same reason that kidnapping someone and raping them or forcing them to do my labor is not legal.

Fix this problem — remove the mind control and violence — and a market niche opens up for honest business models. As it stands nobody can compete with these platforms because volition can’t compete with violence and honest commerce can’t compete with slavery through dopamine system hacking.

BTW if you work for these companies, quit. Ten to fifteen years ago ignorance was an excuse. I don’t think the original inventors of this nightmare knew quite what they were doing. Ignorance is no longer an excuse. If you are “optimizing engagement” in this context and in these ways you are a bad person.

[andrei_says_]

It’s interesting that the examples you provided - kidnapping and forced labor - are somewhat legal in the U.S. in the context of the treatment of people of color by law enforcement and incarceration industry.

Similarly, suppression of wages, taking away healthcare, food, employee protections (at-will employment), legally required vacation days and maternity leave, and any meaningful safety nets for employees, pushes the social contract for workers toward violent nonconsensual extraction.

Maximizing extraction inevitably requires violence and cruelty.

[zbentley]

Yes. Given that, how can we do what GP suggested and move the perception and legal treatment of these behaviors towards “ethically repugnant” rather than “conditionally (and, as you pointed out, very unequally) socially permitted”?