My generation grew up with TV shows like The Transformers that got kids to beg their parents for toys.

McDonalds has marketed to children for the better part of a century (and it has followed many people into adulthood).

The medium has changed, but the practices are the same as Edward Bernays and Anna Freud cooked up so many decades ago (Sigmund was never happy with the way his family members used his psychoanalysis research to sell products, even though they used it to help sell the English version of his book).

There is more of it today, yes. Kids don't want toys, and hence we see Toys-R-Us disappear .. they do want games, and it's pretty important for people in tech to teach kids about how absolutely atrocious in-game purchases are and how you should NEVER participate in that rubbish and discourage everyone else from doing so in the hopes it eventually goes away.

But it won't, because there are always people who don't know, or even with full knowledge, can't help those addictions.

It's a complicated problem, but current phones/tech are just the medium.

But the medium can also be the message.

> My generation grew up with TV shows like The Transformers that got kids to beg their parents for toys.

But the addiction component wasn't built-in the way it is now. Everyone remembers "Saturday morning cartoons with cereal" because there was a set time and place for that event. After the episode ended, it didn't auto-play the next episode, or recommend 5 highly similar shows based on your "viewing history".

Consider that "bingeing" is a commonly accepted term when it refers to consuming an entire season of a show in one sitting and companies like Netflix churn out TV shows with a focus on this "bingeability", because that's their differentiator compared to regular TV.

I dunno, I remember losing HOURS sitting in front of a TV. Watching whatever. Whatever they wanted to show me, I'd watch it. Commercials every X minutes.

There have always been TV fanatics, or enthusiasts, sure. I vegged out a lot as a kid. As tech has changed, though, the game is totally different, and people are being actively coerced into binge-watching.

Yesterday, we had Nielsen doing rough tracking of viewership (IIRC, installing a Nielsen box was/is totally optional!), opinion polls, and focus groups. Mostly aggregate data on a program's performance.

Today, we're building elaborate user profiles and tailoring the viewing experience to the individual, using who-knows-what details (demographics, personal viewing habits, Amazon purchase history, eye-tracking data from your smart TV, you get the idea). These companies have a really good idea of what you like, and will use whatever data they can to maximize the time you spend on their platform.

That's how I remember it, but one difference in my experience was that it was understood by everyone that watching lots of TV was considered bad, but we all went ahead and did so anyway. Now it's considered normal to "binge" on TV, and I find it very disconcerting that people are using that word without even being tongue-in-cheek about it.

>Kids don't want toys, and hence we see Toys-R-Us disappear

Toys-R-Us died because the founder left, his successors couldn't keep innovating, they sold out to Bain and KKR, and then it was driven into the ground for margins.

It's not because "Kids don't want toys." You thinking kids don't want toys almost seems more like brainwashing than if kids actually didn't want toys anymore.

A decade ago, we didn't have to fight an always engaged computer acting on a personal level, trying to convince us to not let it go and do something else.

It's a difference only of efficiency, but it is large enough to create completely different kinds of problems.

> We're stuck with Enlightenment age thinking such as "tabula rasa"

Nobody has actually believed in that for decades, and it certainly isn't present in the public consciousness.

Lots of people believe that the human mind is a blank slate and that culture defines humans more than any inherited neural architecture. I disagree with that conclusion, but it certainly is not “nobody”. One need look no further than the angry screeds in response to evolutionary psychology.

I suspect we will learn a lot from evolutionary psychology. Unfortunately it has a long history of "just so" stories, and being used to justify all sorts of racist and misogynist beliefs. It's hard to get rid of that kind of baggage once you've acquired it.

Not all of evolutionary psychology is what people call the "just so" stories. Any understanding that we are born with more than a blank slate that shapes our thinking is "evolutionary psychology". That is an unpleasant conclusion for those who want to believe that all undesirable human behavior is the fault of culture.