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by grocery_stores
44 days ago
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I'll agree and add on: doesn't every for-profit enterprise want their products to be as addictive as possible (retrofitting that word in various ways to suit whatever their context)? If I'm making bicycle wheels, I want all my customers thinking "these are the best bicycle wheels. I don't want them from any other supplier ever again and actually I want some that I don't even need just in case." I want them up at night thinking about how great my bicycle wheels are, looking at pictures of them on their phones. I'm not sure how people are squaring the circle where companies are supposed to meet market demand by giving people what they want, but, uh, "not like that." If a product people want is really that bad for them, vote for the government to regulate it. We've read this story before. |
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The market is the thing we create, and its effective functioning is what competition and regulation is meant to enable. It is through the functioning of the market that effective resource allocation occurs.
> A market economy is meant to generate the best allocation of resources and the biggest benefits for consumers. For these promises to be fulfilled, consumers must be able to see and choose alternatives deliberately; compare them on undistorted dimensions; form preferences that reflect actual interests; and switch freely. Cognitive exploitation undermines all four of these. Infinite scroll captures attention. Dark patterns distort comparison. Dopaminergic loops manufacture compulsion. Addiction engineering blocks effective switching.
> Securities regulation offers an instructive analogy. When a trader manipulates stock or derivatives prices, the law treats the crime as a structural harm to the broader market; the corrupted price no longer tells the truth. Cognitive exploitation should be seen in the same light, at a much larger scale. When platforms systematically manufacture the preferences of billions of users, consumer signals no longer point anywhere useful. That is a structural failure.