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Javier E

The Sex Addiction Epidemic - The Daily Beast - 0 views

www.thedailybeast.com/...he-sex-addiction-epidemic.html

sex addiction meaning psychology health

shared by Javier E on 26 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • The potential for abuse of online porn is well documented, with research showing that chronic masturbators who engage with online porn for up to 20 hours a day can suffer a “hangover” as a result of the dopamine drop-off. But there are other collateral costs. “What you look at online is going to take you offline,” says Craig Gross, a.k.a. the “Porn Pastor,” who heads XXXChurch.com, a Christian website that warns against the perils of online pornography. “You’re going to do so many things you never thought you’d do.”
  • He also learned that his fixation on sex was a way of avoiding his insecurities and tackling the emotional issues that first led to his addictive behavior. “The addiction will take you to a place where you’re walking the streets at night, so keyed up, thinking, ‘Maybe I’ll just see if there’s anybody out there,’” he says. “Like looking for prey, kind of. You’re totally jacked up, adrenalized. One hundred percent focused on this one purpose. But my self-esteem was shot.”
  • Max Dubinsky, an Ohio native and writer who went through a torturous 14-month period of online-pornography dependence. He says a big problem with his addiction was actually what it prevented him from doing. “I couldn’t hold down a healthy relationship. I couldn’t be aroused without pornography, and I was expecting way too much from the women in my life,”
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  • the overwhelming majority of self-identifying addicts—about 90 percent—are male. Women are more often categorized as “love addicts,” with a compulsive tendency to fall into dependent relationships and form unrealistic bonds with partners. That’s partly because women are more apt than men to be stigmatized by association with sex addiction
  • “Sex addiction” remains a controversial designation—often dismissed as a myth
  • “sex addiction isn’t really about sex,” as Weiss puts it; it’s about “being wanted.” X3LA’s Steven Luff says, “Sex is the perfect match for that. ‘I matter right now. In this moment, I am loved.’ In that sense, an entire culture, an entire nation is looking for meaning.”
  • between 3 and 5 percent of the U.S. population—or more than 9 million people—could meet the criteria for addiction. Some 1,500 sex therapists treating compulsive behavior are practicing today, up from fewer than 100 a decade ago, say several researchers and clinicians, while dozens of rehabilitation centers now advertise treatment programs, up from just five or six in the same period.
  • Sex addicts are compelled by the same heightened emotional arousal that can drive alcoholics or drug addicts to act so recklessly, say addiction experts. Research shows that substance abusers and sex addicts alike form a dependency on the brain’s pleasure-center neurotransmitter, dopamine. “It’s all about chasing that emotional high: losing yourself in image after image, prostitute after prostitute, affair after affair,
  • The demographics are changing, too. “Where it used to be 40- to 50-year-old men seeking treatment, now there are more females, adolescents, and senior citizens,”
  • The worst part, he says, was that his sex drive ultimately changed “what I think is normal,” as his tolerance grew for increasingly hard-core forms of pornography. “It really is like that monster you can’t ever fulfill,” says Harper, 30, who has avoided dating for the past eight months and attends a recovery group. “Both with the porn and the sex, something will be good for a while and then you have to move on to other stuff.
  • An estimated 40 million people a day in the U.S. log on to some 4.2 million pornographic websites, according to the Internet Filter Software Review. And though watching porn isn’t the same as seeking out real live sex, experts say the former can be a kind of gateway drug to the latter.
  • The website AshleyMadison.com promises “affairs guaranteed” by connecting people looking for sex outside their marriages; the site says it has 12.2 million members
Javier E

Can you resist all the addictions modern life throws at you? Only if you're rich enough... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-you-only-if-youre-rich-enough

addiction modern life wealth protection

shared by Javier E on 13 Oct 24 - No Cached
  • hey are problems of success, really, these modern ills. Social media addiction, gaming disorders, the compulsive over-eating of sugar and processed gloop: they are products of a society with more than enough food, leisure time and boredom, and without the life-or-death excitement that kept our ancestors busy.
  • Only a species that is this superfluously good at survival could afford to hack its own anti-survival neural circuitry, targeting the pathways that instead make it more likely to die
  • But the troubling fact is that a large portion of the economy now runs on addiction.
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  • Problems of success are harder, not easier, to deal with, of course – you wouldn’t want to reverse the conditions that got us here
  • The path of incentives is easy to trace: an addicted customer is a reliable customer – and why settle for mere consumption of your product when you could get overconsumption instead?
  • David Courtwright calls this “limbic capitalism”: named for the part of the brain responsible for emotional processing. Global industries, he says, are starting to aim right at it.
  • In this country, we are at last regulating away some of the older vices, such as nicotine and alcohol.
  • many new vices are popping up in their stead. Food companies mine and refine their products for addictive properties: ultra-processed food, thought to encourage compulsive eating, now makes up two-thirds of the calorie intake of adolescent Britons
  • Gaming addiction is soaring. We hear less about workaholics than we used to, but perhaps only because the condition is so common – instead, we hear about burnout, the end result.
  • Then of course there are smartphones, teaching us to crave for the next ping of a message, or the bright notification of a retweet
  • These in turn link us to the thousands of addictive products being pumped out by the largest tech companies on the planet. There are gambling apps, gaming apps and one-click shopping apps – even addiction to fitness-tracker apps is on the rise. Then of course there is social media, to which almost half of British teens now feel addicted.
  • For a few, it is possible to buy your way out, back into old-fashioned reality
  • a new kind of luxury is emerging: freedom from cravings.
  • The ultimate example might be the rapid growth of semaglutide drugs
  • they also seem to reduce cravings for alcohol, nicotine and opioids, and perhaps even compulsive gambling and online shopping.
  • semaglutides such as Wegovy and Ozempic reduce the release of dopamine in the brain’s striatum, the region that motivates you to take another bite of something delicious but also to take another puff of your cigarette. They appear to act not on the digestive system, but on craving itself.
  • It’s hard to imagine – having a smartphone without needing to check it, putting down a tube of Pringles halfway through. For this is the major struggle of modern life: self-control in the face of addictive products. It’s becoming harder and harder to do
  • most cannot afford to anyway
  • Ozempic is mostly known as a “Hollywood phenomenon”, available only to the rich.
  • The income divide is there, too, when it comes to resisting online addictions. As time away from screens becomes a scarce commodity, some companies are monetising it in the form of off-grid digital detox weekends or curiously expensive dumbphones.
  • This summer, Eton announced it would ban smartphones – giving new pupils Nokia “bricks” instead. Meanwhile, children from lower-income backgrounds spend on average two more hours a day on their phones than their peers.
  • money shelters you from many of the conditions that encourage addiction in the first place. Junk food appeals most when you do not have the time, money or the emotional energy to access healthy alternatives: chasing their likely customers, fast food joints spring up in deprived areas. As do betting shops.
  • We sometimes pretend that resisting gambling, social media, sweet treats and retail therapy is mostly a matter of willpower – as if the economy weren’t built on pushing us these things. Instead, it’s becoming a privilege few can afford.
Javier E

What Cookies and Meth Have in Common - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-and-meth-have-in-common.html

food addiction drug stress plasticity reward environment psychology research brain science

shared by Javier E on 03 Jul 17 - No Cached
  • Why would anyone continue to use recreational drugs despite the medical consequences and social condemnation? What makes someone eat more and more in the face of poor health?
  • modern humans have designed the perfect environment to create both of these addictions.
  • the myth has persisted that addiction is either a moral failure or a hard-wired behavior — that addicts are either completely in command or literally out of their minds
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  • Now we have a body of research that makes the connection between stress and addiction definitive. More surprising, it shows that we can change the path to addiction by changing our environment.
  • Neuroscientists have found that food and recreational drugs have a common target in the “reward circuit” of the brain, and that the brains of humans and other animals who are stressed undergo biological changes that can make them more susceptible to addiction.
  • In a 2010 study, Diana Martinez and colleagues at Columbia scanned the brains of a group of healthy controls and found that lower social status and a lower degree of perceived social support — both presumed to be proxies for stress — were correlated with fewer dopamine receptors, called D2s, in the brain’s reward circuit
  • The reward circuit evolved to help us survive by driving us to locate food or sex in our environment
  • Today, the more D2 receptors you have, the higher your natural level of stimulation and pleasure — and the less likely you are to seek out recreational drugs or comfort food to compensate
  • people addicted to cocaine, heroin, alcohol and methamphetamines experience a significant reduction in their D2 receptor levels that persists long after drug use has stopped. These people are far less sensitive to rewards, are less motivated and may find the world dull, once again making them prone to seek a chemical means to enhance their everyday life.
  • Drug exposure also contributes to a loss of self-control. Dr. Volkow found that low D2 was linked with lower activity in the prefrontal cortex, which would impair one’s ability to think critically and exercise restraint
  • Food, like drugs, stimulates the brain’s reward circuit. Chronic exposure to high-fat and sugary foods is similarly linked with lower D2 levels, and people with lower D2 levels are also more likely to crave such foods. It’s a vicious cycle in which more exposure begets more craving.
  • At this point you may be wondering: What controls the reward circuit in the first place? Some of it is genetic. We know that certain gene variations elevate the risk of addiction to various drugs. But studies of monkeys suggest that our environment can trump genetics and rewire the brain.
  • simply by changing the environment, you can increase or decrease the likelihood of an animal becoming a drug addict.
  • The same appears true for humans. Even people who are not hard-wired for addiction can be made dependent on drugs if they are stressed
  • Is it any wonder, then, that the economically frightening situation that so many Americans experience could make them into addicts? You will literally have a different brain depending on your ZIP code, social circumstances and stress level.
  • In 1990, no state in our country had an adult obesity rate above 15 percent; by 2015, 44 states had obesity rates of 25 percent or higher. What changed?
  • What happened is that cheap, calorie-dense foods that are highly rewarding to your brain are now ubiquitous.
  • Nothing in our evolution has prepared us for the double whammy of caloric modern food and potent recreational drugs. Their power to activate our reward circuit, rewire our brain and nudge us in the direction of compulsive consumption is unprecedented.
  • The processed food industry has transformed our food into a quasi-drug, while the drug industry has synthesized ever more powerful drugs that have been diverted for recreational use.
  • Fortunately, our brains are remarkably plastic and sensitive to experience. Although it’s far easier said than done, just limiting exposure to high-calorie foods and recreational drugs would naturally reset our brains to find pleasure in healthier foods and life without drugs.
Javier E

Silicon Valley Worries About Addiction to Devices - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...bout-addiction-to-devices.html

tech addiction

shared by Javier E on 24 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • founders from Facebook, Twitter, eBay, Zynga and PayPal, and executives and managers from companies like Google, Microsoft, Cisco and others listened to or participated
  • they debated whether technology firms had a responsibility to consider their collective power to lure consumers to games or activities that waste time or distract them.
  • Eric Schiermeyer, a co-founder of Zynga, an online game company and maker of huge hits like FarmVille, has said he has helped addict millions of people to dopamine, a neurochemical that has been shown to be released by pleasurable activities, including video game playing, but also is understood to play a major role in the cycle of addiction. But what he said he believed was that people already craved dopamine and that Silicon Valley was no more responsible for creating irresistible technologies than, say, fast-food restaurants were responsible for making food with such wide appeal. “They’d say: ‘Do we have any responsibility for the fact people are getting fat?’ Most people would say ‘no,’ ” said Mr. Schiermeyer. He added: “Given that we’re human, we already want dopamine.”
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  • “The responsibility we have is to put the most powerful capability into the world,” he said. “We do it with eyes wide open that some harm will be done. Someone might say, ‘Why not do so in a way that causes no harm?’ That’s naïve.” “The alternative is to put less powerful capability in people’s hands and that’s a bad trade-off,” he added.
  • the Facebook executive, said his primary concern was that people live balanced lives. At the same time, he acknowledges that the message can run counter to Facebook’s business model, which encourages people to spend more time online. “I see the paradox,” he said.
  • she believed that interactive gadgets could create a persistent sense of emergency by setting off stress systems in the brain — a view that she said was becoming more widely accepted. “It’s this basic cultural recognition that people have a pathological relationship with their devices,” she said. “People feel not just addicted, but trapped.”
  • Richard Fernandez, an executive coach at Google and one of the leaders of the mindfulness movement, said the risks of being overly engaged with devices were immense.
  • anonymous on 26 Jul 12
     
    First, I would like to point out that I read this article while distracted from my Extended Essay. Paradoxical, I know. The article points out many of the negative qualities of the glamorous lure of the internet. I found it interesting that internet usage can actually stimulate the production of dopamine in the body, making our attraction to the computer both a "high" and a true addiction. Not only have I seen an increasing number of articles on this topic in the past week or so, but I have also seen a rather large amount of articles pertaining to the "depression inducing" effect of the internet. Drawing from another article, logging onto social networking sites automatically bombards us with pictures of people we know having fun. Their pictures are beautiful and their status updates are witty. It is easy to see all of this content and immediately think something along the lines of: "why isn't my life that fun/hilarious/exciting?" or "I really wish that I were vacationing in Bora Bora". What we need to remember is that people choose what goes online, and, therefore, only choose to share the most glamourous sides of their lives. And let's not forget that those pictures most likely have at least one or more Instagram filter on them...
anonymous

Trump Administration Allows Doctors Flexibility To Prescribe Buprenorphine : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...be-drug-to-fight-opioid-addict

shared by anonymous on 15 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • The Trump administration introduced new addiction treatment guidelines Thursday that give physicians more flexibility to prescribe a drug to patients struggling with opioid addiction.
  • The Department of Health and Human Services is eliminating the requirement that physicians obtain a special federal waiver in order to prescribe buprenorphine,
  • The obstacle discouraged doctors from pursing buprenorphine as an addiction treatment for patients, despite evidence it was highly effective in preventing a relapse,
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  • "The medical evidence is clear: access to medication-assisted treatment, including buprenorphine that can be prescribed in office-based settings, is the gold standard for treating individuals suffering from opioid use disorder,"
  • The administration's move comes at a time when the U.S. is again facing record levels of drug overdose deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
  • More than 83,000 people died of drug overdoses in the U.S. in the 12 months ending in June 2020, the CDC said.
  • "As emergency physicians, we see every day the devastating effects that the opioid crisis has had on the communities we serve—a crisis that has unfortunately only worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic,"
  • The American Medical Association also praised the move, saying it will allow earlier intervention by doctors treating patients suffering addiction.
  • "With this change, office-based physicians and physician-led teams working with patients to manage their other medical conditions can also treat them for their opioid use disorder,"
  • Harris also said allowing doctors to treat opioid addiction as they treat other medical conditions, without additional regulatory hurdles, will reduce the stigma that has often shaped the healthcare response to substance use disorders.
  • doctors who possess a Drug Enforcement Administration registration will still be limited to treating no more than 30 in-state patients with buprenorphine for addiction treatment at any one time.
  • The guidelines are not considered a new law or federal regulation, making it very easy for the President-elect Joe Biden administration to walk back this policy if so desired. Giroir told Stat News that he thinks that scenario is unlikely, saying, "I doubt it seriously."
Javier E

Vaping made me realise addiction forces you to confront how pathetic and powerless you ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...pathetic-and-powerless-you-are

addiction vaping

shared by Javier E on 17 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Nicotine, vaping helps you to realise, is a pretty pathetic drug. When you strip away the ritual of lighting up and scorching your lungs, you realise that the ritual and the scorching of the lungs were a large part of the appeal.
  • Which is not to say that vaping isn’t addictive. In fact, I found it far more addictive than smoking because, for all its many faults, smoking is an analogue technology that involves lighting something on fire. This imposes certain inbuilt consumption limits. Smoking sets off smoke detectors and landlords and makes your soft furnishings smell, so you generally avoid doing it indoors. It leaves a foul taste in your mouth and clogs your lungs, so you try not to do it every minute of the day.
  • This is not true of vaping
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  • It is a supremely well-designed little addiction stick.
  • Soon I was spending a good part of each day enduring pressure headaches brought on by too much nicotine. They would clear up if I went for a walk, but that was easier said than done. Much easier to lie on the couch, helplessly Juuling through my discomfort.
  • Vaping was making me feel just as bad as smoking. Addiction, whether to cigarettes or alcohol or liquid nicotine, forces you to confront how pathetic and powerless you are, how little agency you have, how the idea of free will is a bad joke in the face of the body’s needs.
Javier E

At the Tribeca Film Festival: A message to you from a West Virginia town ruined by Oxyc... - 0 views

www.capitalnewyork.com/...-virginia-town-ruined-oxyconti

drug addiction community documentary

shared by Javier E on 03 May 13 - No Cached
  • "Nothing here but Oxy and coal," says one of the subjects of Sean Dunne's mournful documentary Oxyana. The "here" is Oceana, a once-bustling mining town in West Virginia, now decimated by Oxycontin addiction to the point where the media have rebranded it "Oxyana.
  • An entire generation has been wiped out, and addiction touches everyone's lives. One guy interviewed says, "I'm 23. Half my graduating class is dead." The destruction is almost unbelievable, although it is no secret that painkiller addiction, and Oxy in particular, is a huge problem in America. But Oxyana zooms in on one community, and the result is a powerful documentary, covering well-trodden ground perhaps, but filmed in a way that feels like an elegy.
Javier E

The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nary-science-of-junk-food.html

food nutrition science technology oligopoly economics culture profit addiction

shared by Javier E on 27 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Today, one in three adults is considered clinically obese, along with one in five kids, and 24 million Americans are afflicted by type 2 diabetes, often caused by poor diet, with another 79 million people having pre-diabetes. Even gout, a painful form of arthritis once known as “the rich man’s disease” for its associations with gluttony, now afflicts eight million Americans.
  • The public and the food companies have known for decades now — or at the very least since this meeting — that sugary, salty, fatty foods are not good for us in the quantities that we consume them. So why are the diabetes and obesity and hypertension numbers still spiraling out of control? It’s not just a matter of poor willpower on the part of the consumer and a give-the-people-what-they-want attitude on the part of the food manufacturers. What I found, over four years of research and reporting, was a conscious effort — taking place in labs and marketing meetings and grocery-store aisles — to get people hooked on foods that are convenient and inexpensive
  • the powerful sensory force that food scientists call “mouth feel.” This is the way a product interacts with the mouth, as defined more specifically by a host of related sensations, from dryness to gumminess to moisture release.
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  • the mouth feel of soda and many other food items, especially those high in fat, is second only to the bliss point in its ability to predict how much craving a product will induce.
  • He organized focus-group sessions with the people most responsible for buying bologna — mothers — and as they talked, he realized the most pressing issue for them was time. Working moms strove to provide healthful food, of course, but they spoke with real passion and at length about the morning crush, that nightmarish dash to get breakfast on the table and lunch packed and kids out the door.
  • as the focus swung toward kids, Saturday-morning cartoons started carrying an ad that offered a different message: “All day, you gotta do what they say,” the ads said. “But lunchtime is all yours.”
  • When it came to Lunchables, they did try to add more healthful ingredients. Back at the start, Drane experimented with fresh carrots but quickly gave up on that, since fresh components didn’t work within the constraints of the processed-food system, which typically required weeks or months of transport and storage before the food arrived at the grocery store. Later, a low-fat version of the trays was developed, using meats and cheese and crackers that were formulated with less fat, but it tasted inferior, sold poorly and was quickly scrapped.
  • One of the company’s responses to criticism is that kids don’t eat the Lunchables every day — on top of which, when it came to trying to feed them more healthful foods, kids themselves were unreliable. When their parents packed fresh carrots, apples and water, they couldn’t be trusted to eat them. Once in school, they often trashed the healthful stuff in their brown bags to get right to the sweets.
  • This idea — that kids are in control — would become a key concept in the evolving marketing campaigns for the trays. In what would prove to be their greatest achievement of all, the Lunchables team would delve into adolescent psychology to discover that it wasn’t the food in the trays that excited the kids; it was the feeling of power it brought to their lives.
  • The prevailing attitude among the company’s food managers — through the 1990s, at least, before obesity became a more pressing concern — was one of supply and demand. “People could point to these things and say, ‘They’ve got too much sugar, they’ve got too much salt,’ ” Bible said. “Well, that’s what the consumer wants, and we’re not putting a gun to their head to eat it. That’s what they want. If we give them less, they’ll buy less, and the competitor will get our market. So you’re sort of trapped.”
  • at last count, including sales in Britain, they were approaching the $1 billion mark. Lunchables was more than a hit; it was now its own category
  • he holds the entire industry accountable. “What do University of Wisconsin M.B.A.’s learn about how to succeed in marketing?” his presentation to the med students asks. “Discover what consumers want to buy and give it to them with both barrels. Sell more, keep your job! How do marketers often translate these ‘rules’ into action on food? Our limbic brains love sugar, fat, salt. . . . So formulate products to deliver these. Perhaps add low-cost ingredients to boost profit margins. Then ‘supersize’ to sell more. . . . And advertise/promote to lock in ‘heavy users.’ Plenty of guilt to go around here!”
  • men in the eastern part of Finland had the highest rate of fatal cardiovascular disease in the world. Research showed that this plague was not just a quirk of genetics or a result of a sedentary lifestyle — it was also owing to processed foods. So when Finnish authorities moved to address the problem, they went right after the manufacturers. (The Finnish response worked. Every grocery item that was heavy in salt would come to be marked prominently with the warning “High Salt Content.” By 2007, Finland’s per capita consumption of salt had dropped by a third, and this shift — along with improved medical care — was accompanied by a 75 percent to 80 percent decline in the number of deaths from strokes and heart disease.)
  • I tracked Lin down in Irvine, Calif., where we spent several days going through the internal company memos, strategy papers and handwritten notes he had kept. The documents were evidence of the concern that Lin had for consumers and of the company’s intent on using science not to address the health concerns but to thwart them. While at Frito-Lay, Lin and other company scientists spoke openly about the country’s excessive consumption of sodium and the fact that, as Lin said to me on more than one occasion, “people get addicted to salt
  • the marketing team was joined by Dwight Riskey, an expert on cravings who had been a fellow at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, where he was part of a team of scientists that found that people could beat their salt habits simply by refraining from salty foods long enough for their taste buds to return to a normal level of sensitivity. He had also done work on the bliss point, showing how a product’s allure is contextual, shaped partly by the other foods a person is eating, and that it changes as people age. This seemed to help explain why Frito-Lay was having so much trouble selling new snacks. The largest single block of customers, the baby boomers, had begun hitting middle age. According to the research, this suggested that their liking for salty snacks — both in the concentration of salt and how much they ate — would be tapering off.
  • Riskey realized that he and his colleagues had been misreading things all along. They had been measuring the snacking habits of different age groups and were seeing what they expected to see, that older consumers ate less than those in their 20s. But what they weren’t measuring, Riskey realized, is how those snacking habits of the boomers compared to themselves when they were in their 20s. When he called up a new set of sales data and performed what’s called a cohort study, following a single group over time, a far more encouraging picture — for Frito-Lay, anyway — emerged. The baby boomers were not eating fewer salty snacks as they aged. “In fact, as those people aged, their consumption of all those segments — the cookies, the crackers, the candy, the chips — was going up,” Riskey said. “They were not only eating what they ate when they were younger, they were eating more of it.” In fact, everyone in the country, on average, was eating more salty snacks than they used to. The rate of consumption was edging up about one-third of a pound every year, with the average intake of snacks like chips and cheese crackers pushing past 12 pounds a year
  • Riskey had a theory about what caused this surge: Eating real meals had become a thing of the past.
  • “We looked at this behavior, and said, ‘Oh, my gosh, people were skipping meals right and left,’ ” Riskey told me. “It was amazing.” This led to the next realization, that baby boomers did not represent “a category that is mature, with no growth. This is a category that has huge growth potential.”
  • The food technicians stopped worrying about inventing new products and instead embraced the industry’s most reliable method for getting consumers to buy more: the line extension.
  • He zeroed right in on the Cheetos. “This,” Witherly said, “is one of the most marvelously constructed foods on the planet, in terms of pure pleasure.” He ticked off a dozen attributes of the Cheetos that make the brain say more. But the one he focused on most was the puff’s uncanny ability to melt in the mouth. “It’s called vanishing caloric density,” Witherly said. “If something melts down quickly, your brain thinks that there’s no calories in it . . . you can just keep eating it forever.”
  • Frito-Lay acquired Stacy’s Pita Chip Company, which was started by a Massachusetts couple who made food-cart sandwiches and started serving pita chips to their customers in the mid-1990s. In Frito-Lay’s hands, the pita chips averaged 270 milligrams of sodium — nearly one-fifth a whole day’s recommended maximum for most American adults — and were a huge hit among boomers.
  • There’s a paradox at work here. On the one hand, reduction of sodium in snack foods is commendable. On the other, these changes may well result in consumers eating more. “The big thing that will happen here is removing the barriers for boomers and giving them permission to snack,” Carey said. The prospects for lower-salt snacks were so amazing, he added, that the company had set its sights on using the designer salt to conquer the toughest market of all for snacks: schools
  • The company’s chips, he wrote, were not selling as well as they could for one simple reason: “While people like and enjoy potato chips, they feel guilty about liking them. . . . Unconsciously, people expect to be punished for ‘letting themselves go’ and enjoying them.” Dichter listed seven “fears and resistances” to the chips: “You can’t stop eating them; they’re fattening; they’re not good for you; they’re greasy and messy to eat; they’re too expensive; it’s hard to store the leftovers; and they’re bad for children.” He spent the rest of his memo laying out his prescriptions, which in time would become widely used not just by Frito-Lay but also by the entire industry.
  • Dichter advised Frito-Lay to move its chips out of the realm of between-meals snacking and turn them into an ever-present item in the American diet. “The increased use of potato chips and other Lay’s products as a part of the regular fare served by restaurants and sandwich bars should be encouraged in a concentrated way,”
  • the largest weight-inducing food was the potato chip. The coating of salt, the fat content that rewards the brain with instant feelings of pleasure, the sugar that exists not as an additive but in the starch of the potato itself — all of this combines to make it the perfect addictive food. “The starch is readily absorbed,” Eric Rimm, an associate professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health and one of the study’s authors, told me. “More quickly even than a similar amount of sugar. The starch, in turn, causes the glucose levels in the blood to spike” — which can result in a craving for more.
  • If Americans snacked only occasionally, and in small amounts, this would not present the enormous problem that it does. But because so much money and effort has been invested over decades in engineering and then relentlessly selling these products, the effects are seemingly impossible to unwind.
  • Todd Putman, who worked at Coca-Cola from 1997 to 2001, said the goal became much larger than merely beating the rival brands; Coca-Cola strove to outsell every other thing people drank, including milk and water. The marketing division’s efforts boiled down to one question, Putman said: “How can we drive more ounces into more bodies more often?”
Javier E

Is Junk Food Really Cheaper? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-junk-food-really-cheaper.html

food health cost economics culture policy environment industry

shared by Javier E on 25 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • “Anything that you do that’s not fast food is terrific; cooking once a week is far better than not cooking at all,
  • “It’s the same argument as exercise: more is better than less and some is a lot better than none.”
  • The core problem is that cooking is defined as work, and fast food is both a pleasure and a crutch. “People really are stressed out with all that they have to do, and they don’t want to cook,”
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • “Their reaction is, ‘Let me enjoy what I want to eat, and stop telling me what to do.’ And it’s one of the few things that less well-off people have: they don’t have to cook.”
  • The ubiquity, convenience and habit-forming appeal of hyperprocessed foods have largely drowned out the alternatives: there are five fast-food restaurants for every supermarket in the United States; in recent decades the adjusted for inflation price of fresh produce has increased by 40 percent while the price of soda and processed food has decreased by as much as 30 percent; and nearly inconceivable resources go into encouraging consumption in restaurants: fast-food companies spent $4.2 billion on marketing in 2009.
  • overconsumption of fast food “triggers addiction-like neuroaddictive responses” in the brain, making it harder to trigger the release of dopamine. In other words the more fast food we eat, the more we need to give us pleasure; thus the report suggests that the same mechanisms underlie drug addiction and obesity.
  • This addiction to processed food is the result of decades of vision and hard work by the industry. For 50 years, says David A. Kessler, former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration and author of “The End of Overeating,” companies strove to create food that was “energy-dense, highly stimulating, and went down easy. They put it on every street corner and made it mobile, and they made it socially acceptable to eat anytime and anyplace. They created a food carnival, and that’s where we live. And if you’re used to self-stimulation every 15 minutes, well, you can’t ru
  • Real cultural changes are needed to turn this around. Somehow, no-nonsense cooking and eating — roasting a chicken, making a grilled cheese sandwich, scrambling an egg, tossing a salad — must become popular again
  • HOW do you change a culture? The answers, not surprisingly, are complex. “Once I look at what I’m eating,” says Dr. Kessler, “and realize it’s not food, and I ask ‘what am I doing here?’ that’s the start. It’s not about whether I think it’s good for me, it’s about changing how I feel. And
  • we change how people feel by changing the environment.”
  • Obviously, in an atmosphere where any regulation is immediately labeled “nanny statism,” changing “the environment” is difficult. But we’ve done this before, with tobacco.
  • Political action would mean agitating to limit the marketing of junk; forcing its makers to pay the true costs of production; recognizing that advertising for fast food is not the exercise of free speech but behavior manipulation of addictive substances; and making certain that real food is affordable and available to everyone.
Javier E

Why Americans Are Dying from Despair | The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...ericans-are-dying-from-despair

despair crisis death rate mortality economic inequality income health-care

shared by Javier E on 01 May 20 - No Cached
  • Outside of wars or pandemics, death rates for large populations across the world have been consistently falling for decades
  • Yet working-age white men and women without college degrees were dying from suicide, drug overdoses, and alcohol-related liver disease at such rates that, for three consecutive years, life expectancy for the U.S. population as a whole had fallen. “The only precedent is a century ago, from 1915 through 1918, during the First World War and the influenza epidemic that followed it,”
  • Between 1999 and 2017, more than six hundred thousand extra deaths—deaths in excess of the demographically predicted number—occurred just among people aged forty-five to fifty-four.
  • ...50 more annotations...
  • their explanation begins by dismantling several others.
  • Was the source of the problem America’s all-too-ready supply of prescription opioids?
  • About a million Americans now use heroin daily or near-daily. Many others use illicitly obtained synthetic opioids like fentanyl.
  • As Case and Deaton note, most people who abuse or become addicted to opioids continue to lead functional lives and many eventually escape their dependence
  • The oversupply of opioids did not create the conditions for despair. Instead, it appears, the oversupply fed upon a white working class already adrift.
  • although opioid deaths plateaued, at least temporarily, in 2018, suicides and alcohol-related deaths continue upward.
  • Could deaths of despair be related to the rising incidence of obesity?
  • Case and Deaton report that we’re seeing the same troubling health trends “among the underweight, normal weight, overweight, and obese.”
  • Is the problem poverty?
  • Overdose deaths are most common in high-poverty Appalachia and along the low-poverty Eastern Seaboard, in places such as Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Delaware, and Connecticut. Meanwhile, some high-poverty states, such as Arkansas and Mississippi, have been less affected. Black and Hispanic populations are poorer but less affected, too.
  • How about income inequality? Case and Deaton have found that patterns of inequality, like patterns of poverty, simply don’t match the patterns of mortality by race or region.
  • A consistently strong economic correlate, by contrast, is the percentage of a local population that is employed
  • In the late nineteen-sixties, Case and Deaton note, all but five per cent of men of prime working age, from twenty-five to fifty-four, had jobs; by 2010, twenty per cent did not.
  • What Case and Deaton have found is that the places with a smaller fraction of the working-age population in jobs are places with higher rates of deaths of despair—and that this holds true even when you look at rates of suicide, drug overdoses, and alcohol-related liver disease separately. They all go up where joblessness does.
  • Conservatives tend to offer cultural explanations
  • People are taking the lazy way out of responsibilities, the argument goes, and so they choose alcohol, drugs, and welfare and disability checks over a commitment to hard work, family, and community. And now they are paying the price for their hedonism and decadence—with addiction, emptiness, and suicide.
  • Yet, if the main problem were that a large group of people were withdrawing from the workforce by choice, wages should have risen in parallel.
  • Case and Deaton argue that the problem arises from the cumulative effect of a long economic stagnation and the way we as a nation have dealt with it
  • For the first few decades after the Second World War, per-capita U.S. economic growth averaged between two and three per cent a year. In the nineties, however, it dipped below two per cent. In the early two-thousands, it was less than one per cent. This past decade, it remained below 1.5 per cent.
  • Different populations have experienced this slowdown very differently
  • Anti-discrimination measures improved earnings and job prospects for black and Hispanic Americans. Though their earnings still lag behind those of the white working class, life for this generation of people of color is better than it was for the last.
  • Not so for whites without a college education. Among the men, median wages have not only flattened; they have declined since 1979. The work that the less educated can find isn’t as stable: hours are more uncertain, and job duration is shorter
  • Among advanced economies, this deterioration in pay and job stability is unique to the United States.
  • The United States has provided unusually casual access to means of death.
  • The problem isn’t that people are not the way they used to be. It’s that the economy and the structure of work are not the way they used to be
  • Today, about seventy-five per cent of college graduates are married by age forty-five, but only sixty per cent of non-college graduates are
  • Nonmarital childbearing has reached forty per cent among less educated white women.
  • Religious institutions previously played a vital role in connecting people to a community. But the number of Americans who attend religious services has declined markedly over the past half century, falling to just one-third of the general population today.
  • Case and Deaton see a picture of steady economic and social breakdown, amid over-all prosperity.
  • climate—the amount of social and economic instability not only in your life but also in your family and community—matters, too. Émile Durkheim pointed out more than a century ago that despair and then suicide result when people’s material and social circumstances fall below their expectations.
  • why has the steep rise in deaths of despair been so uniquely American
  • In the past four decades, Americans without bachelor’s degrees—the majority of the working-age population—have seen themselves become ever less valued in our economy. Their effort and experience provide smaller rewards than before, and they encounter longer periods between employment.
  • The availability of opioids has indeed played a role, and the same goes for firearms
  • The U.S. has also embraced automation and globalization with greater alacrity and fewer restrictions than other countries have. Displaced workers here get relatively little in the way of protection and support.
  • And we’ve enabled capital to take a larger share of the economic gains. “Economists long thought that the ratio of wages to profits was an immutable constant, about two to one,” Case and Deaton point out. But since 1970, they find, it has declined significantly.
  • A more unexpected culprit identified by Case and Deaton is our complicated and costly health-care system.
  • The focus of Case and Deaton’s indictment is on the fact that America’s health-care system is peculiarly reliant on employer-provided insurance.
  • As they show, the premiums that employers pay amount to a perverse tax on hiring lower-skilled workers.
  • According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, in 2019 the average family policy cost twenty-one thousand dollars, of which employers typically paid seventy per cent.
  • “For a well-paid employee earning a salary of $150,000, the average family policy adds less than 10 percent to the cost of employing the worker,” Case and Deaton write. “For a low-wage worker on half the median wage, it is 60 percent.”
  • between 1970 and 2016, the earnings that laborers received fell twenty-one per cent. But their total compensation, taken to include the cost of their benefits (in particular, health care), rose sixty-eight per cent. Increases in health-care costs have devoured take-home pay for those below the median income.
  • this makes American health care itself a prime cause of our rising death rates.
  • we must change the way we pay for health care. Instead of preserving a system that discourages employers from hiring, retaining, and developing workers without bachelor’s degrees, we need to make health-care payments proportional to wages—as with tax-based systems like Medicare.
  • So far, the American approach to the rise in white working-class mortality has been to pour resources into addiction-treatment centers and suicide-prevention programs. Yet the rates of suicide and addiction remain sky-high. It’s as if we’re using pressure dressings on a bullet wound to the chest instead of getting at the source of the bleeding.
  • Case and Deaton want us to recognize that the more widespread response is a sense of hopelessness and helplessness. And here culture does play a role.
  • When it comes to people whose lives aren’t going well, American culture is a harsh judge: if you can’t find enough work, if your wages are too low, if you can’t be counted on to support a family, if you don’t have a promising future, then there must be something wrong with you
  • We Americans are reluctant to acknowledge that our economy serves the educated classes and penalizes the rest. But that’s exactly the situation, and “Deaths of Despair” shows how the immiseration of the less educated has resulted in the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives, even as the economy has thrived and the stock market has soared.
  • capitalism, having failed America’s less educated workers for decades, must change, as it has in the past. “There have been previous periods when capitalism failed most people, as the Industrial Revolution got under way at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and again after the Great Depression,” they write. “But the beast was tamed, not slain.”
  • Today, the battles are over an employer-based system for financing health care, corporate governance that puts shareholders’ interests ahead of workers’, tax plans that benefit capital holders over wage earners.
  • We are better at addressing fast-moving crises than slow-building ones. It wouldn’t be surprising, then, if we simply absorbed current conditions as the new normal.
lmunch

Former White supremacist: This is how to tackle hate and bigotry (Opinion) - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

extremism culture US crisis Policy

shared by lmunch on 12 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • According to the US Department of Homeland Security, White supremacy is the biggest security threat facing the United States today based on the number of violent crimes committed. It eclipses all other types of extremism.
  • I would know -- because that was me. After serving in Afghanistan, I officially joined the White Knights of the KKK in 2014. The skills that I learned in the military, like a heightened level of mental and tactical awareness, are exactly what groups like this valued for the purpose of training new members. I was a prime target to be groomed and recruited.
  • During my service in Afghanistan, my best friend was killed in an unexpected attack on a routine drill. He died in my arms, and I blamed Muslims for his death. We were trained to see them as the enemy. I came home with a hatred for Islam as well as an addiction to the painkillers I was prescribed after a back injury. I had been trained in the military to serve with duty and loyalty. I would have done anything to show my loyalty to the White Knights of the KKK. It gave me a sense of purpose that I was missing after I came home.
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  • Additionally, the government often cannot act if a crime hasn't been committed. That is why Parents For Peace's work is so important. The organization focuses on prevention and intervention to keep people from becoming extremists or committing extremist acts. Our work is challenging, and the outcomes are positive but silent.
  • As a former White supremacist and drug addict, I started to wonder if it was possible to be addicted to hate the way I was addicted to drugs as a coping tool. Based on this, I have spent the last two years developing two programs aimed at addressing the root causes of hate with Parents For Peace, which takes a public health approach to preventing radicalization, extremism, and violence.
  • Because of the love and compassion they showed me, I was able to move forward in my life and give back. Now I help people disengage from hate groups, return to their families, and live healthy and happy lives.
  • If we think of hate as a public health crisis and a disease, we should treat it as such. It is the only way to effectively combat the rise of extremism.
xaviermcelderry

Ending America's Opioid Crisis | The White House - 0 views

www.whitehouse.gov/opioids

opioid crisis

shared by xaviermcelderry on 14 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • When President Trump took office, the opioid crisis was devastating communities across America. Nearly 64,000 Americans died from a drug overdose in 2016 alone. Opioid overdoses accounted for more than 42,000 of these deaths, more than any previous year on record.
  • Part 1 is reducing demand and over-prescription, including educating Americans about the dangers of opioid misuse. Part 2 is cutting down on the supply of illicit drugs by cracking down on the international and domestic drug supply chains that devastate American communities. Part 3 is helping those struggling with addiction through evidence-based treatment and recovery support services.
  • In terms of helping those struggling with addiction, there has been a 20 percent increase in young adults receiving outpatient treatment. And in 2017, America had an increase in the number of patients age 12 and older with illicit drug-use disorders being treated at specialty facilities and private provider offices.
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  • The landscape of addiction in America looks different today than it did decades ago. Now, we have a real chance to flip the script on opioid abuse. “I learned because of Fred. I learned,” President Trump says. “It is time to liberate our communities from this scourge of drug addiction.”
Javier E

This vape craze should never have been allowed to happen - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...a-b0fc-62cc38411ebb_story.html

vaping paternalism regulation

shared by Javier E on 30 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • White confessed recently that his prosperous district is in the midst of an epidemic. “In my 35 years in education, I’ve never seen anything that has been so rapid and devastating to the health and well-being of students, nor so disruptive to the daily work of teachers and administrators in educating our students,
  • The Blue Valley schools serve a relatively upscale population in the suburbs of Kansas City. On an average day, more than 95 percent of Blue Valley students are in school. The graduation rate is 97 percent. The dropout rate, less than 1 percent. Every student in grade three and above has a computer.
  • in suing the company behind Juul, an insidious electronic nicotine delivery system designed to resemble a pocket-size data storage flash drive. The districts are joining other school boards across the country in seeking to recover their costs in time, trouble and technology spent fighting a public health disaster.
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  • Vaping
  • The school district lawsuits are added to the catalogue of woes besetting the cynical opportunists who undid decades of good work to create a new generation of nicotine addicts
  • the company founded by Bowen and Monsees set about fine-tuning their idea. It developed a vaporizer that resembled a high-tech gadget rather than the cylindrical cigarette look-alikes and bong-like pipes already on the market. And in a major chemical breakthrough, it perfected a “vape juice” based on nicotine salts rather than free-base nicotine. This allowed the company to deliver more of the addictive drug without the harsh effect that makes new smokers gag and hack.
  • When Juul debuted in 2015, the clever little rectangle wasn’t aimed exclusively at existing smokers — people who might receive a net health benefit from switching their addiction to a smokeless device. Eye-catching ads, viral hashtags and social media celebrities pushed the product into America’s high schools and middle schools.
  • Use of tobacco-related products by teenagers was falling at the time of Juul’s launch, according to the National Youth Tobacco Survey, but that hopeful trend is ruined now. Overall use by high school students rose 38 percent from 2017 to 2018, driven by a 78 percent rise in the daily use of e-cigarettes.
  • “Juuling” is a verb known to tens of millions of American children today; more than 3 million of them Juul daily.
  • Sadly, the horse is out of the barn. Anyone who has experienced nicotine addiction can report that kicking the habit is easier to pledge than to accomplish
  • An untold number of those 3 million-plus high school Juulers will be battling to quit for years, perhaps decades, to come.
  • get this: We know nothing of the long-term health effects of vaping. Nicotine’s potential harm to the development of young brains is well-documented, but the downstream toll will accrue over time.
  • This vape craze should never have been allowed to happen. It is a double failure: a failure of governance on the part of federal regulators who should never have permitted a new nicotine delivery system to proliferate without oversight, and a moral failure by investors willing to peddle drugs to kids.
Javier E

Portugal's drug decriminalization faces opposition as addiction multiplies - The Washin... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...decriminalization-heroin-crack

drug liberalisation portugal

shared by Javier E on 08 Jul 23 - No Cached
  • Cocaine production is at global highs. Seizures of amphetamine and methamphetamine have exploded. The multiyear pandemic deepened personal burdens and fomented an increase in use.
  • In the United States alone, overdose deaths, fueled by opioids and deadly synthetic fentanyl, topped 100,000 in both 2021 and 2022 — or double what it was in 2015.
  • Across the Atlantic in Europe, tiny Portugal appeared to harbor an answer. In 2001, it threw out years of punishment-driven policies in favor of harm reduction by decriminalizing consumption of all drugs for personal use, including the purchase and possession of 10-day supplies.
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  • Consumption remains technically against the law, but instead of jail, people who misuse drugs are registered by police and referred to “dissuasion commissions.” For the most troubled people, authorities can impose sanctions including fines and recommend treatment. The decision to attend is voluntary.
  • Other countries have moved to channel drug offenses out of the penal system too. But none in Europe institutionalized that route more than Portugal. Within a few years, HIV transmission rates via syringes — one the biggest arguments for decriminalization — had plummeted. From 2000 to 2008, prison populations fell by 16.5 percent. Overdose rates dropped as public funds flowed from jails to rehabilitation. There was no evidence of a feared surge in use.
  • None of the parade of horrors that decriminalization opponents in Portugal predicted, and that decriminalization opponents around the world typically invoke, has come to pass,” a landmark Cato Institute report stated in 2009.
  • But in the first substantial way since decriminalization passed, some Portuguese voices are now calling for a rethink of a policy that was long a proud point of national consensus. Urban visibility of the drug problem, police say, is at its worst point in decades and the state-funded nongovernmental organizations that have largely taken over responding to the people with addiction seem less concerned with treatment than affirming that lifetime drug use should be seen as a human right.
  • “At the end of the day, the police have their hands tied,” said António Leitão da Silva, chief of Municipal Police of Porto, adding the situation now is comparable to the years before decriminalization was implemented.
  • the percent of adults who have used illicit drugs increased to 12.8 percent in 2022, up from 7.8 in 2001, though still below European averages
  • Overdose rates have hit 12-year highs and almost doubled in Lisbon from 2019 to 2023. Sewage samples in Lisbon show cocaine and ketamine detection is now among the highest in Europe, with elevated weekend rates suggesting party-heavy usage
  • even proponents of decriminalization here admit that something is going wrong.
  • In Porto, the collection of drug-related debris from city streets surged 24 percent between 2021 and 2022, with this year on track to far outpace the last.
  • Crime — including robbery in public spaces — spiked 14 percent from 2021 to 2022, a rise police blame partly on increased drug use
  • When crack pipes are available, the social workers give them out. There’s no judgment, few questions, and no pressure to embrace change.
  • Summing up the philosophy, Luísa Neves, SAOM’s president, said: “You have to respect the user. If they want to use, it is their right.”
  • Police deployed in force to the area three months ago to crack down on dealers, who can be and are being arrested. Patrol cars are now stationed in the neighborhood 24 hours a day, scattering people using drug
  • overdoses this year in Portland, the state’s largest city, have surged 46 percent.
  • “When you first back off enforcement, there are not many people walking over the line that you’ve removed. And the public think it’s working really well,
  • “Then word gets out that there’s an open market, limits to penalties, and you start drawing in more drug users. Then you’ve got a more stable drug culture, and, frankly, it doesn’t look as good anymore.”
  • An eight-minute walk uphill from Porto’s safe drug-use center, in a neighborhood of elegant two-story homes with hedgerows of roses and hibiscus, neighbors talk of an “invasion” of people using drugs since the pandemic
  • In Oregon — where the policy took effect in early 2021 openly citing Portugal as a model — attempts to funnel people with addiction from jail to rehabilitation have had a rough start. Police have shown little interest in handing out toothless citations for drug use, grants for treatment have lagged, and extremely few people are seeking voluntary rehabilitation
  • We have to do something with the law. We know they can’t stay here forever. What happens when the police leave?”
  • Porto’s mayor and other critics, including neighborhood activist groups, are not calling for a wholesale repeal of decriminalization — but rather, a limited re-criminalization in urban areas and near schools and hospitals to address rising numbers of people misusing drugs.
  • In a country where the drug policy is seen as sacred, even that has generated pushback — with nearly 200 experts signing an opposition letter after Porto’s city commission in January passed a resolution seeking national-level changes.
  • ave today no longer serves as an example to anyone.” Rather than fault the policy, however, he blames a lack of funding.
  • After years of economic crisis, Portugal decentralized its drug oversight operation in 2012. A funding drop from 76 million euros ($82.7 million) to 16 million euros ($17.4 million) forced Portugal’s main institution to outsource work previously done by the state to nonprofit groups, including the street teams that engage with people who use drugs. The country is now moving to create a new institute aimed at reinvigorating its drug prevention programs.
  • Twenty years ago, “we were quite successful in dealing with the big problem, the epidemic of heroin use and all the related effects,” Goulão said in an interview with The Washington Post. “But we have had a kind of disinvestment, a freezing in our response … and we lost some efficacy.”
  • Of two dozen street people who use drugs and were asked by The Post, not one said they’d ever appeared before one of Portugal’s Dissuasion Commissions, envisioned as conduits to funnel people with addiction into rehab
  • “Why?”
  • “Because we know most of them. We’ve registered them before. Nothing changes if we take them in.”
Javier E

Georgia's War on Drugs: How Its Subutex Addiction Ended | New Republic - 0 views

www.newrepublic.com/...ow-its-subutex-addiction-ended

drugs solution addiction

shared by Javier E on 11 May 13 - No Cached
  • Ultimately, the solution to the drug problem might be the solution to the problem of life, which is how to navigate our time here with minimal suffering. Unfortunately, the policy that offers that solution will be not a drug policy but an existential one, and it remains as elusive as ever. 
Javier E

Screen Addiction Is Taking a Toll on Children - The New York Times - 0 views

well.blogs.nytimes.com/...n-is-taking-a-toll-on-children

addiction screen tech children electronics

shared by Javier E on 06 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • “children have to know that life is fine off the screen. It’s interesting and good to be curious about other people, to learn how to listen. It teaches them social and emotional intelligence, which is critical for success in life.”
  • Children who are heavy users of electronics may become adept at multitasking, but they can lose the ability to focus on what is most important, a trait critical to the deep thought and problem solving needed for many jobs and other endeavors later in life.
  • An earlier Pew study found that teenagers send an average of 34 texts a night after they get into bed, adding to the sleep deprivation so common and harmful to them. And as Ms. Hatch pointed out, “as children have more of their communication through electronic media, and less of it face to face, they begin to feel more lonely and depressed.”
Javier E

Goodbye, trolley problem. This is Silicon Valley's new ethics test. - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...9-b2fc-721718903bfc_story.html

ethics silicon valley tech culture

shared by Javier E on 10 Apr 19 - No Cached
  • In the 1980s, when finance fell off the moral bandwagon, business schools reacted by requiring students to take courses on Kant and other philosophers that had little to do with daily management worries. The field is becoming irrelevant now, when the dominant industry — technology — is decentralized and able to grow $40 billion companies in just 18 months.
  • Marijuana and other legal cannibinoids have sucked up nearly $1 billion in private investment dollars since 2012, raising the question: What kind of dopamine hits aren’t we comfortable with?
  • Addiction has become another ethical landmine where dopamine hits — and how one administers them — are the key to a company’s growth. E-cigarette maker Juul Labs, founded in 2017 and now the fastest growing start-up in history, with a valuation of $38 billion, is largely responsible for a grave new statistic: about 20 percent of teens have admitted to vaping in school.
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  • Juul is the logical extension of the Silicon Valley growth-hacking playbook: Design a flawless product, add a dopamine response, stir in some influencers and watch your product, game or app go viral.
  • Consider the outcry last week when TechCrunch reported that Facebook had been paying people (including teens) $20 a month to download an app that monitors a user’s mobile and web activity. Apple, long a privacy advocate and favored troll of Facebook, reacted swiftly by cutting off “Facebook Research” and the company’s internal apps. Tech Twitter, however, seemed largely perplexed: In the future, won’t we all sell our data rather than give it away for free?
  • If Silicon Valley was once converging on a moral cohesion of sorts — where progressive values and wokemanship acted as a loose ethical framework — it’s now becoming harder to avoid the varying ethical debates concerning privacy, addiction and growing geopolitical discord.
  • For the virtuous founders avoiding addictive products and invasive data-gathering, even they have to worry about who’s getting on their equity ownership table.
  • founders have to wonder whether that seemingly diverse venture capital fund is backed by regimes where women, minorities and dissidents are killed for expressing themselves.
  • of course, the morality of a company often depends on the morality of the people in charge
Javier E

Washington Monthly | How to Fix Facebook-Before It Fixes Us - 0 views

washingtonmonthly.com/...ix-facebook-before-it-fixes-us

fb google propaganda social media disinformation monopoly regulation crisis politics

shared by Javier E on 28 Feb 18 - No Cached
  • Smartphones changed the advertising game completely. It took only a few years for billions of people to have an all-purpose content delivery system easily accessible sixteen hours or more a day. This turned media into a battle to hold users’ attention as long as possible.
  • And it left Facebook and Google with a prohibitive advantage over traditional media: with their vast reservoirs of real-time data on two billion individuals, they could personalize the content seen by every user. That made it much easier to monopolize user attention on smartphones and made the platforms uniquely attractive to advertisers. Why pay a newspaper in the hopes of catching the attention of a certain portion of its audience, when you can pay Facebook to reach exactly those people and no one else?
  • Wikipedia defines an algorithm as “a set of rules that precisely defines a sequence of operations.” Algorithms appear value neutral, but the platforms’ algorithms are actually designed with a specific value in mind: maximum share of attention, which optimizes profits.
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  • They do this by sucking up and analyzing your data, using it to predict what will cause you to react most strongly, and then giving you more of that.
  • Algorithms that maximize attention give an advantage to negative messages. People tend to react more to inputs that land low on the brainstem. Fear and anger produce a lot more engagement and sharing than joy
  • The result is that the algorithms favor sensational content over substance.
  • for mass media, this was constrained by one-size-fits-all content and by the limitations of delivery platforms. Not so for internet platforms on smartphones. They have created billions of individual channels, each of which can be pushed further into negativity and extremism without the risk of alienating other audience members
  • On Facebook, it’s your news feed, while on Google it’s your individually customized search results. The result is that everyone sees a different version of the internet tailored to create the illusion that everyone else agrees with them.
  • It took Brexit for me to begin to see the danger of this dynamic. I’m no expert on British politics, but it seemed likely that Facebook might have had a big impact on the vote because one side’s message was perfect for the algorithms and the other’s wasn’t. The “Leave” campaign made an absurd promise—there would be savings from leaving the European Union that would fund a big improvement in the National Health System—while also exploiting xenophobia by casting Brexit as the best way to protect English culture and jobs from immigrants. It was too-good-to-be-true nonsense mixed with fearmongering.
  • Facebook was a much cheaper and more effective platform for Leave in terms of cost per user reached. And filter bubbles would ensure that people on the Leave side would rarely have their questionable beliefs challenged. Facebook’s model may have had the power to reshape an entire continent.
  • Tristan Harris, formerly the design ethicist at Google. Tristan had just appeared on 60 Minutes to discuss the public health threat from social networks like Facebook. An expert in persuasive technology, he described the techniques that tech platforms use to create addiction and the ways they exploit that addiction to increase profits. He called it “brain hacking.”
  • The most important tool used by Facebook and Google to hold user attention is filter bubbles. The use of algorithms to give consumers “what they want” leads to an unending stream of posts that confirm each user’s existing beliefs
  • Continuous reinforcement of existing beliefs tends to entrench those beliefs more deeply, while also making them more extreme and resistant to contrary facts
  • No one stopped them from siphoning off the profits of content creators. No one stopped them from gathering data on every aspect of every user’s internet life. No one stopped them from amassing market share not seen since the days of Standard Oil.
  • Facebook takes the concept one step further with its “groups” feature, which encourages like-minded users to congregate around shared interests or beliefs. While this ostensibly provides a benefit to users, the larger benefit goes to advertisers, who can target audiences even more effectively.
  • We theorized that the Russians had identified a set of users susceptible to its message, used Facebook’s advertising tools to identify users with similar profiles, and used ads to persuade those people to join groups dedicated to controversial issues. Facebook’s algorithms would have favored Trump’s crude message and the anti-Clinton conspiracy theories that thrilled his supporters, with the likely consequence that Trump and his backers paid less than Clinton for Facebook advertising per person reached.
  • The ads were less important, though, than what came next: once users were in groups, the Russians could have used fake American troll accounts and computerized “bots” to share incendiary messages and organize events.
  • Trolls and bots impersonating Americans would have created the illusion of greater support for radical ideas than actually existed.
  • Real users “like” posts shared by trolls and bots and share them on their own news feeds, so that small investments in advertising and memes posted to Facebook groups would reach tens of millions of people.
  • A similar strategy prevailed on other platforms, including Twitter. Both techniques, bots and trolls, take time and money to develop—but the payoff would have been huge.
  • 2016 was just the beginning. Without immediate and aggressive action from Washington, bad actors of all kinds would be able to use Facebook and other platforms to manipulate the American electorate in future elections.
  • Renee DiResta, an expert in how conspiracy theories spread on the internet. Renee described how bad actors plant a rumor on sites like 4chan and Reddit, leverage the disenchanted people on those sites to create buzz, build phony news sites with “press” versions of the rumor, push the story onto Twitter to attract the real media, then blow up the story for the masses on Facebook.
  • It was sophisticated hacker technique, but not expensive. We hypothesized that the Russians were able to manipulate tens of millions of American voters for a sum less than it would take to buy an F-35 fighter jet.
  • Algorithms can be beautiful in mathematical terms, but they are only as good as the people who create them. In the case of Facebook and Google, the algorithms have flaws that are increasingly obvious and dangerous.
  • Thanks to the U.S. government’s laissez-faire approach to regulation, the internet platforms were able to pursue business strategies that would not have been allowed in prior decades. No one stopped them from using free products to centralize the internet and then replace its core functions.
  • To the contrary: the platforms help people self-segregate into like-minded filter bubbles, reducing the risk of exposure to challenging ideas.
  • No one stopped them from running massive social and psychological experiments on their users. No one demanded that they police their platforms. It has been a sweet deal.
  • Facebook and Google are now so large that traditional tools of regulation may no longer be effective.
  • The largest antitrust fine in EU history bounced off Google like a spitball off a battleship.
  • It reads like the plot of a sci-fi novel: a technology celebrated for bringing people together is exploited by a hostile power to drive people apart, undermine democracy, and create misery. This is precisely what happened in the United States during the 2016 election.
  • We had constructed a modern Maginot Line—half the world’s defense spending and cyber-hardened financial centers, all built to ward off attacks from abroad—never imagining that an enemy could infect the minds of our citizens through inventions of our own making, at minimal cost
  • Not only was the attack an overwhelming success, but it was also a persistent one, as the political party that benefited refuses to acknowledge reality. The attacks continue every day, posing an existential threat to our democratic processes and independence.
  • Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other platforms were manipulated by the Russians to shift outcomes in Brexit and the U.S. presidential election, and unless major changes are made, they will be manipulated again. Next time, there is no telling who the manipulators will be.
  • Unfortunately, there is no regulatory silver bullet. The scope of the problem requires a multi-pronged approach.
  • Polls suggest that about a third of Americans believe that Russian interference is fake news, despite unanimous agreement to the contrary by the country’s intelligence agencies. Helping those people accept the truth is a priority. I recommend that Facebook, Google, Twitter, and others be required to contact each person touched by Russian content with a personal message that says, “You, and we, were manipulated by the Russians. This really happened, and here is the evidence.” The message would include every Russian message the user received.
  • This idea, which originated with my colleague Tristan Harris, is based on experience with cults. When you want to deprogram a cult member, it is really important that the call to action come from another member of the cult, ideally the leader.
  • decentralization had a cost: no one had an incentive to make internet tools easy to use. Frustrated by those tools, users embraced easy-to-use alternatives from Facebook and Google. This allowed the platforms to centralize the internet, inserting themselves between users and content, effectively imposing a tax on both sides. This is a great business model for Facebook and Google—and convenient in the short term for customers—but we are drowning in evidence that there are costs that society may not be able to afford.
  • Second, the chief executive officers of Facebook, Google, Twitter, and others—not just their lawyers—must testify before congressional committees in open session
  • This is important not just for the public, but also for another crucial constituency: the employees who keep the tech giants running. While many of the folks who run Silicon Valley are extreme libertarians, the people who work there tend to be idealists. They want to believe what they’re doing is good. Forcing tech CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg to justify the unjustifiable, in public—without the shield of spokespeople or PR spin—would go a long way to puncturing their carefully preserved cults of personality in the eyes of their employees.
  • We also need regulatory fixes. Here are a few ideas.
  • First, it’s essential to ban digital bots that impersonate humans. They distort the “public square” in a way that was never possible in history, no matter how many anonymous leaflets you printed.
  • At a minimum, the law could require explicit labeling of all bots, the ability for users to block them, and liability on the part of platform vendors for the harm bots cause.
  • Second, the platforms should not be allowed to make any acquisitions until they have addressed the damage caused to date, taken steps to prevent harm in the future, and demonstrated that such acquisitions will not result in diminished competition.
  • An underappreciated aspect of the platforms’ growth is their pattern of gobbling up smaller firms—in Facebook’s case, that includes Instagram and WhatsApp; in Google’s, it includes YouTube, Google Maps, AdSense, and many others—and using them to extend their monopoly power.
  • This is important, because the internet has lost something very valuable. The early internet was designed to be decentralized. It treated all content and all content owners equally. That equality had value in society, as it kept the playing field level and encouraged new entrants.
  • There’s no doubt that the platforms have the technological capacity to reach out to every affected person. No matter the cost, platform companies must absorb it as the price for their carelessness in allowing the manipulation.
  • Third, the platforms must be transparent about who is behind political and issues-based communication.
  • Transparency with respect to those who sponsor political advertising of all kinds is a step toward rebuilding trust in our political institutions.
  • Fourth, the platforms must be more transparent about their algorithms. Users deserve to know why they see what they see in their news feeds and search results. If Facebook and Google had to be up-front about the reason you’re seeing conspiracy theories—namely, that it’s good for business—they would be far less likely to stick to that tactic
  • Allowing third parties to audit the algorithms would go even further toward maintaining transparency. Facebook and Google make millions of editorial choices every hour and must accept responsibility for the consequences of those choices. Consumers should also be able to see what attributes are causing advertisers to target them.
  • Fifth, the platforms should be required to have a more equitable contractual relationship with users. Facebook, Google, and others have asserted unprecedented rights with respect to end-user license agreements (EULAs), the contracts that specify the relationship between platform and user.
  • All software platforms should be required to offer a legitimate opt-out, one that enables users to stick with the prior version if they do not like the new EULA.
  • “Forking” platforms between old and new versions would have several benefits: increased consumer choice, greater transparency on the EULA, and more care in the rollout of new functionality, among others. It would limit the risk that platforms would run massive social experiments on millions—or billions—of users without appropriate prior notification. Maintaining more than one version of their services would be expensive for Facebook, Google, and the rest, but in software that has always been one of the costs of success. Why should this generation get a pass?
  • Sixth, we need a limit on the commercial exploitation of consumer data by internet platforms. Customers understand that their “free” use of platforms like Facebook and Google gives the platforms license to exploit personal data. The problem is that platforms are using that data in ways consumers do not understand, and might not accept if they did.
  • Not only do the platforms use your data on their own sites, but they also lease it to third parties to use all over the internet. And they will use that data forever, unless someone tells them to stop.
  • There should be a statute of limitations on the use of consumer data by a platform and its customers. Perhaps that limit should be ninety days, perhaps a year. But at some point, users must have the right to renegotiate the terms of how their data is used.
  • Seventh, consumers, not the platforms, should own their own data. In the case of Facebook, this includes posts, friends, and events—in short, the entire social graph. Users created this data, so they should have the right to export it to other social networks.
  • It would be analogous to the regulation of the AT&T monopoly’s long-distance business, which led to lower prices and better service for consumers.
  • Eighth, and finally, we should consider that the time has come to revive the country’s traditional approach to monopoly. Since the Reagan era, antitrust law has operated under the principle that monopoly is not a problem so long as it doesn’t result in higher prices for consumers.
  • Under that framework, Facebook and Google have been allowed to dominate several industries—not just search and social media but also email, video, photos, and digital ad sales, among others—increasing their monopolies by buying potential rivals like YouTube and Instagram.
  • While superficially appealing, this approach ignores costs that don’t show up in a price tag. Addiction to Facebook, YouTube, and other platforms has a cost. Election manipulation has a cost. Reduced innovation and shrinkage of the entrepreneurial economy has a cost. All of these costs are evident today. We can quantify them well enough to appreciate that the costs to consumers of concentration on the internet are unacceptably high.
Javier E

George Soros: Facebook and Google a menace to society | Business | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...google-are-a-menace-to-society

fb social media google criticism democracy surveillance addiction innovation monopoly culture politics

shared by Javier E on 26 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • Facebook and Google have become “obstacles to innovation” and are a “menace” to society whose “days are numbered”
  • “Mining and oil companies exploit the physical environment; social media companies exploit the social environment,” said the Hungarian-American businessman, according to a transcript of his speech.
  • In addition to skewing democracy, social media companies “deceive their users by manipulating their attention and directing it towards their own commercial purposes” and “deliberately engineer addiction to the services they provide”. The latter, he said, “can be very harmful, particularly for adolescents”
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  • “This is particularly nefarious because social media companies influence how people think and behave without them even being aware of it. This has far-reaching adverse consequences on the functioning of democracy, particularly on the integrity of elections.”
  • There is a possibility that once lost, people who grow up in the digital age will have difficulty in regaining it. This may have far-reaching political consequences.”
  • Soros warned of an “even more alarming prospect” on the horizon if data-rich internet companies such as Facebook and Google paired their corporate surveillance systems with state-sponsored surveillance – a trend that’s already emerging in places such as the Philippines.
  • “This may well result in a web of totalitarian control the likes of which not even Aldous Huxley or George Orwell could have imagined,”
  • “The internet monopolies have neither the will nor the inclination to protect society against the consequences of their actions. That turns them into a menace and it falls to the regulatory authorities to protect society against them,
  • He also echoed the words of world wide web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee when he said the tech giants had become “obstacles to innovation” that need to be regulated as public utilities “aimed at preserving competition, innovation and fair and open universal access”.
  • Earlier this week, Salesforce’s chief executive, Marc Benioff, said that Facebook should be regulated like a cigarette company because it’s addictive and harmful.
  • In November, Roger McNamee, who was an early investor in Facebook, described Facebook and Google as threats to public health.
Javier E

A Twitter Addict Realizes She Needs Rehab - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...619343

twitter rehab addiction

shared by Javier E on 09 Jul 21 - No Cached
  • “The mere fact that Twitter exists today is not in itself sufficient a reason for us to preserve it. The only legitimate reason for preserving anything is its goodness. The evils of Twitter are all too evident; therefore, the problem that should be examined is this: Does it contain enough good to compensate for its evils and make its preservation desirable?”
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