Hi pal,
In 2020, I finally found myself with the time to watch a lot of television - I consumed Mad Men, among many others. I found it fascinating to see actors portray some normal behavior in the sixties that would be insane by today’s standards -- like a new mother smoking in her baby’s nursery while the baby drifted off to sleep, for instance.
Scenes like that made me think about today and all the ways we have unknowingly engaged in harmful behavior. Some immediate things that come to mind are the attention economy, our prevalent online lives, and how our personal data has become a commodity.
With smoking, eventually, the surgeon general stepped in to recommend that we shouldn’t smoke in a new baby’s bedroom, because it’s not only bad for them, but also for us.
Given the writing is on the walls – for example, Facebook/Meta’s first whistleblower, an Instagram study that uncovered how their product harms a minority of its users and Apple’s feigned care for consumer privacy (even if they’re only doing it to kill Facebook/Meta) - I wonder if it’s inevitable that social media, like smoking, will eventually come with its own surgeon general warnings. I’m not sure what consumer protections will look like, or how effective they’ll be. I have an inkling though that I’ll one day look back at this time, the wild wild west of the attention economy, with the same fascination I have watching the characters of Mad Men casually drink hard liquor in their offices, at ten-o-clock in the morning.
Your friend,
