Are smartphones the new 'opium of the people'?

https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-48923485

by pseudolus • 7 years ago

88 54 7 years ago

bbc.com

jfk132• 7 years ago

Dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20427323

rimunroe2• 7 years ago

Yours appears to have been submitted after this one.

jfk132• 7 years ago

Curious - is your conclusion based on the id? (Are those sequential?)

I assumed this one was more recent based on the timestamp that shows on the items. Currently, I see "4 hours ago" for this item, and "5 hours ago" for the link I submitted. But maybe there's more to it than that?

api• 7 years ago

Its smart bidirectional opium powered by mass scale machine learning and used to deliver ads and propaganda.

jacknews2• 7 years ago

Obviously the answer must be no, according to Betteridge.

But even if there is a problem, I don't think it's smartphones. More likely social media, amplified by smartphone intimacy

Also, Britain talking about opium ...

Droobfest• 7 years ago

This time it's China making the smartphones.

stkdump• 7 years ago

After the creation of cities and nation states, the smartphone is the next major step for the human race towards becoming a single superorganism. Maybe the last major step, seeing as full integration is probably a matter of many smaller advancements in the future.

justforyou• 7 years ago

Downvoted because people are terrified of the noosphere, or because our borg flavored implementation isn't what Teilhard de Chardin had in mind?

cneurotic• 7 years ago

For me, what's missing from the 'smartphone' // 'religion' analogy is — passion.

The emotional tenor of my relationship with my phone looks — and, I'm sure — very different from the way people relate to their faiths.

Facebook, YouTube, etc don't feel like 'movements' to me, like the article's author said. At least, I don't have the passion that a 'movement' seems to imply.

For me, smartphoning is an emotional gray zone. Most of the time I feel close to nothing. I use it to blot out my worries and deal with the mundanity of my life.

Which makes it more like actual opium, IMO.

buboard8• 7 years ago

Yeah i think this article is textbook case of shooting the messenger

jacknews2• 7 years ago

Absolutely, the phones themselves are only messengers

The real question is something like what are the implications of small-group level intimacy, but on a global scale. Just for starters - there are very many questions raised by this recent capability.

coldtea3• 7 years ago

If the "medium is the message" (that is, the medium dominates and enforces its norms over everything transmitted, e.g. by forcing people to echo bubbles, polarization, and centralized control by its very design regardless of what content is transmitted) then the messenger is the culprit -- and we should shoot the messenger.

taneq2• 7 years ago

Isn't that the whole issue with Skinner-box things, though? They're not something that you care passionately about, they're something that's 'nothing' but you find yourself clicking or scrolling through them anyway.

coldtea3• 7 years ago

Well, religion for most people wasn't a passion either -- that was just for the zealots.

koboll• 7 years ago

Phones are the opium of the masses; religion is the methamphetamine.

dondawest4• 7 years ago

Boom. Fully agree with this analogy. Religion stimulates, smartphones sedate.

samhain• 7 years ago

Have you seen the statistics for young people showing that they are in significant decline for relationships, marriage, sex, drinking? My theory is that they are just sitting at home on their phones.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/has-the...

mmmBacon• 7 years ago

Agreed. Would you go to war over your phone? I think the analogy to faith kind of breaks down when you ask that question. I seriously doubt that anyone would be rioting in the streets over loss of access to Facebook. However I do think phones are like an “opiate” in that they have produced a lot of undesirable behavior in people.

buboard8• 7 years ago

TV was worse. People looking at the box for hours really looked like junkies, motionless, blurred look, mouth open. At least phones are asynchronous in nature and the ~~addict~~ err people can still function.

I think the real opium of people nowaday is politics, no matter what politics. People really want to protest the hell out of something. It gives meaning and purpose, it unites, but also makes them very vulnerable to manipulation.

cagenut2• 7 years ago

you might be interested to dig into who "opium of the people" comes from. he's somewhat political!

KineticLensman• 7 years ago

Indeed he is ... Karl Marx [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_of_the_people

[Edit] Note to self - check other threads before posting links?

buboard8• 7 years ago

Yep, but even Marx must have surely noticed the addictive nature of his theories

paulcole• 7 years ago

Thanks to the pharmaceutical companies, here in the US opium is the new opium of the people.

spassbold23• 7 years ago

Unlike opium smartphones do not make you physically addicted and they do not have negative health effects in the same order of magnitude.

So what's the problem?

claudiawerner• 7 years ago

That's missing the point of the analogy, though; when Marx said that religion is the opium of the people, he wasn't referring the the addictive or negative health effects of opium. I'm not sure whether the point the article is making holds up to what Marx was getting at, but he wasn't saying that religion is literally an addictive drug; he was referring to the ability of opium to be used as a retreat from the stresses of life under capitalism. The full quote[0] is clearer:

[Religion] is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.
Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

[0] Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Karl Marx, 1843.

codingdave• 7 years ago

This article comes off far more as an author who doesn't actually understand religious groups than anything having to do with technology. I'm not sure they understand why people get addicted to the internet either. They clearly wanted to make a point, but it fell flat on all counts from my reading.

taneq2• 7 years ago

Getting "addicted to the internet" is like getting addicted to glasses or getting addicted to cars. It's a vehicle and the special thing about it is where it takes you.

kevinSuttle• 7 years ago

No opium is the new opium

joncrane• 7 years ago

I always thought it was "opiate of the masses."

kazinator• 7 years ago

Marx had it as "das Opium des Volkes"; so the "opium" translation is justifiable.

foobarbecue• 7 years ago

Me too. I suppose this formulation is easier for people to understand if they're seeing it for the first time.

onion2k• 7 years ago

It was 'opium' in the original German, but that means both opium and opiate when it's translated in to English. If you read the full quote[1] it's fairly obvious Marx meant opium in the sense of the drug derived from poppies that was commonly used in his era rather than the whole class of drugs in the more modern sense.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_of_the_people

fapi1974• 7 years ago

Watched an interesting Ken Burns documentary on Prohibition the other day. At the time of banning alcohol it was blamed for all kinds of complex social issues, from the breakdown of the family to the loss of moral rectitude. Really, though, it was just a very visible scapegoat for things like changing economic structures (industrial revolution) and social structures (immigration).

To whit, my take is that the smartphone is the new opiate of the masses only to the extent to which it (and social media) are the newest things we like to blame for far more complex social problems.

Prediction: banning smartphones won't stop kids from being depressed, nor will regulating Facebook fix extreme nationalism.

SomeOldThrow2• 7 years ago

It was certainly eye opening how addicted to alcohol we were before prohibition, and how it was perceived to be linked to domestic abuse (I personally think it was myself).

I wonder sometimes looking around the social scene in SF if more of a abolitionist influence on society today in terms of alcohol would be healthy. Not prohibition but rather being culturally skeptical of drinking in general, especially as we are making strides to legalize marijuana, which can’t kill you and won’t make you beat up your family.

Even as dispensaries opened, the social life still revolves around bars & restaurants which often serve alcohol. The one dispensary I visit which allows consumption on premise is a sterile, retail environment. Bleh. I much preferred the dutch coffee houses.

goto112• 7 years ago

Religion is often used as an analogy to disparage some other phenomenon. Surprisingly perhaps, this is done by both religious and non-religious people. I guess for the non-religious people religion is in general mistrusted, while for religious people it is bad to treat anything beside "true" religion as a religion. So "being like a religion" is generally a bad thing regardless of who uses the phrase.

But using an analogy require you understand the phenomenon you are comparing it to. So what does religion mean? In this article, religion is about

- "a transcendental realm" (and so is youtube)

- meeting in congregations (and so is Google meetup)

- a hierarchy with devoted spiritual advisors at the top (and so is, apparently Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg)

But without even going into what the nature of religion is, it is easy to dispel this analogy. Because even in a highly religious society you can have non-religious organizations, meetups and "transcendental realms" in the form of fiction, music, art etc. So there is clearly a difference. Unless you are going to argue that everything is religion - which you can, of course, given a vague enough definition, but which also makes the term meaningless. If everything is religion then nothing is religion.

rv-de• 7 years ago

Given the stimulating nature of smartphone usage the proper drug analogy would be coke or amphs and not a sedating opioid.

Noumenon72• 7 years ago

Slate Star Codex: Is Everything a Religion? https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/03/25/is-everything-a-religi...

People sometimes anthropomorphize pets, cars, and computers by reacting to them the way we do to people, but that doesn't make them people. We religiomorphize by interacting with communities or ideas the same way we participate in religion, but that doesn't make them religions.

Are smartphones the new 'opium of the people'?

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