Category: Information

Why I Deleted Facebook and Twenty Other Apps from My iPhone

by James Wallace Harris, 4/21/24

Lately, I’ve been encountering numerous warnings on the dangers of the internet and smartphones. Jonathan Haidt is promoting his new book The Anxious Generation. Even though it’s about how there’s increase mental illness in young girls using smartphones, I think it might tangentially apply to an old guy like me too.

Haidt was inspired to write his book because of reports about the sharp rise in mental illness in young people since 2010. That was just after the invention of the iPhone and the beginnings of social media apps. Recent studies show a correlation between the use of social media on smartphones and the increase reports of mental illness in young girls. I’m not part of Haidt’s anxious generation, but I do wonder if the internet, social media, and smartphones are affecting us old folks too.

Johann Hari’s book, Stolen Focus, is about losing our ability to pay attention, which does affect me. I know I have a focusing problem. I can’t apply myself like I used to. For years, I’ve been thinking it was because I was getting old. Now I wonder if it’s not the internet and smartphones. Give me an iPhone and a La-Z-Boy and I’m a happy geezer but not a productive one.

So, I’ve decided to test myself. I deleted Facebook and about twenty other apps from my iPhone. All the ones that keep me playing on my phone rather than doing something else. I didn’t quit Facebook, or other social media accounts, just deleted the apps off my phone. I figure if I need to use them, I’ll have to get my fat ass out of my La-Z-Boy and go sit upright at my desktop computer.

This little experiment has had an immediate impact — withdrawal symptoms. Without Facebook, YouTube, and all the other apps I kept playing with all day long, I sit in my La-Z-Boy thinking, “What can I do?” I rationalized that reading the news is good, but then I realized that I had way too many news apps. With some trepidation, I deleted The Washington Post, Ground News, Feedly, Reddit, Instapaper, and other apps, except for The New York Times and Apple News+.

I had already deleted Flipboard because it was one huge clickbait trap, but couldn’t that also be true of other news apps? They all demand our attention. When does keeping current turn into a news addiction? What is the minimum daily requirement of news to stay healthy and informed? What amount constitutes news obesity?

I keep picking up my iPhone wanting to do something with it, but there’s less and less to do. I kept The New York Times games app. I play Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections, and Sudoku every morning. For now, I’m rationalizing that playing those games is exercise for my brain. They only take about 20-30 minutes total. And I can’t think of any non-computer alternatives.

I still use my iPhone for texting, phoning, music streaming, audiobooks, checking the weather, looking up facts, reading Kindle books, etc. The iPhone has become the greatest Swiss Army knife of useful tools ever invented. I don’t think I could ever give it up. Whenever the power goes out, Susan and I go through withdrawal anxiety. Sure, we miss electricity, heating, and cooling, but what we miss the most is streaming TV and the internet. We’ve experienced several three-day outages, and it bugs us more than I think it should.

One of the insights Jonathan Haidt provides is his story about asking groups of parents two questions?

  1. At what age were you allowed to go off alone unsupervised as a child?
  2. At what age did you let your children go off unsupervised?

The parents would generally say 5-7 for themselves, for 10-12 for their children. Kids today are overprotected, and smartphones let them retreat from the world even further. Which makes me ask: Am I retreating from the world when I use my smartphone or computer? Has the iPhone become like a helicopter parent that keeps me tied to its apron strings?

That’s a hard question to answer. Isn’t retiring a kind of retreat from the world? Doesn’t getting old make us pull back too? My sister offered a funny observation about life years ago, “We start off life in a bed in a room by ourselves with someone taking care of us, and we end up in bed in a room by ourselves with someone taking care of us.” Isn’t screen addiction only hurrying us towards that end? And will we die with our smartphones clutched tightly in our gnarled old fingers?

Is reading a hardback book any less real than reading the same book on my iPhone screen, or listening to it with earbuds and an iPhone? With the earbuds I can walk, work in the yard, or wash dishes while reading. Is reading The Atlantic from a printed magazine a superior experience than reading it on my iPhone with Apple News+?

Is looking at funny videos less of a life experience than playing with my cat or walking in the botanic gardens?

Haidt ends up advising parents to only allow children under sixteen to own a flip phone. He would prefer kids wait even longer to get a smartphone till they complete normal adolescent development, but he doesn’t think that will happen. I don’t think kids will ever go back to flip phones. The other day I noticed that one of the apps I had was recommended for age 4+ the App Store.

Are retired folks missing any kind of elder years of psychological development because we use smartphones? As a bookworm with a lifelong addiction to television and recorded music, how can I even know what a normal life would be like? I’m obviously not a hunter and gatherer human, or an agrarian human, or even a human adapted to industrialization. Is white collar work the new natural? Didn’t we live in nature too long ago for it to be natural anymore?

Aren’t we quickly adapting to a new hivemind way of living? Are the warnings pundits give about smartphones just identifying the side effects of evolving into a new human social structure? Is cyberization the new phase of humanity?

There were people who protested industrialization, but we didn’t reject it. Should we have? Now that there are people rejecting the hivemind, should we reject it too? Or jump in faster?

For days now I’ve been restless without my apps. I have been more active. I seeded my front lawn with mini clover and have been watering and watching it come in. I contracted to have our old bathtub replaced with a shower so it will be safer for Susan. I’ve been working with a bookseller to sell my old science fiction magazines. And I’ve been trying to walk more. However, I’ve yet to do the things I hoped to do when I decided to give up my apps.

It’s hard to tell the cause of doing less later in life. Is it aging? Is it endless distractions? Is it losing the discipline of work after retiring? Before giving up all my apps, I would recline in my La-Z-Boy and play on my iPhone regretting I wasn’t doing anything constructive. Now I sit in my La-Z-Boy doing nothing and wonder why I’m not doing anything constructive. I guess it’s taken a long time to get this lazy, so it might take just as long to overcome that laziness.

JWH

We’re Never Going to Change

by James Wallace Harris, 4/15/24

Years ago, I read This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein. It was a passionate plea to act on climate change because if we didn’t everything would change. Her new book, Doppelganger, is a metaphor about our polarized society and what keeps us from changing even though Klein still makes a case that we need to change.

Between reading these two books I gave up all hope that humanity would change. I read Doppelganger as further proof that we won’t change even though Klein again passionately expresses the rational reasons why we should. I also believe we all need to change, but sadly, I don’t believe we will.

Doppelganger begins with Naomi Klein explaining how people on the internet often confused her with Naomi Wolf, a once respected feminist who is now considered a conspiracy crank. Klein uses the idea of the doppelganger as a metaphor for how to relate to our opposites, whether male/female, black/white, liberal/conservative, religious/atheist, Christian/Jew, Israeli/Palestinian, etc.

Klein goes to great lengths to make the metaphor work in several situations, but I found that distracting. What the book does exceptionally well is to ask: How do we decide what to do when half of us disagree with the other half? We all assume there is one truth, but everyone sees a different side of it.

In many chapters Klein makes Wolf seem ridiculous, but there are quite a few places where Klein recognizes Wolf’s point of view, or even gives her credit for being right.

I believe that extremists on the left act like naive young children, while extremists on the right act like selfish young children. In other words, I believe Klein is unrealistically hopeful, while Wolf is self-centeredly overly positive.

I must assume Klein writes her books believing we can still change. With Doppelganger she’s hoping that if we can get together and endeavor to understand each other we can make rational compromises. That would be lovely if she were successful and right. I believe Klein is right but won’t be successful.

We are doing essentially nothing towards controlling climate change. Wars, collapsing economies, and weather catastrophes are on the increase. Our responses are becoming more irrational, rather than wiser. We must face the fact that evolution works on all levels, and Darwinian conflict will always prevail.

The strong are going to take what they want at the expense of the weak. To solve all the problems Klein covers in her books would require overcoming our Darwinian natures and everyone acting for everyone else’s good. I no longer believe we’re capable of such altruism.

In the early days of Christianity, its philosophy was anti-Darwinian. But modern Christians have lost all their compassion. Christianity has been dissolving for centuries. The compassionate Christians gave up on God and became liberals, and the ones left became conservatives who rewrote Christian ideals with serving rationality that backs evolution.

In other words, I believe early Christianity, and 20th-century secular humanism were two times in history where we tried to fight our Darwinian natures, and in both instances, the movements failed.

We’re not going to change.

Not to end on a completely depressing note, I’ll try to offer a somewhat positive idea. Since we won’t change, the environment will. How can we use our Darwinian nature to build hardened societies that can survive climate catastrophes? Don’t read too much hope into that. What I’m saying is how can the strong survive the coming changes we chose not to avoid?

JWH

How To End Identity Theft

by James Wallace Harris, 3/31/24

The reason we have identity theft is it’s easy to pretend to be someone else with just a credit card number, a password, and a bit of trickery. Because we no longer buy most of what we buy in person, sellers must accept tokens to prove who we are, and it’s easy for others to steal our tokens. We call it identity theft because thieves pretend to be us by using our tokens.

In the old days we had to show up in person to buy what we wanted. The seller was only concerned with the validity of the money. Their concern was counterfeit money, not counterfeit people. Credit cards introduced two problems. They could represent fake money from fake people. That was when the credit card only made an impression on a piece of paper. With electronic validation of funds sellers knew they could get their money, but they couldn’t prove from whom. This was the beginning of modern identity theft.

Thieves had to physically pretend to be someone else when buying in person, but the merchants’ requirements for proving identity weren’t hard to forge. It became even easier on the internet.

To stop identity theft will require perfect identification of a person. And we can’t reply on driver’s licenses, photo IDs, passwords, electronic keys, or other kinds of proofs of identity that can be forged. We need to prove the person is exactly who they are.

Can you prove who you say you are? Even if you had a birth certificate and every piece of printed identity you acquired over your whole lifetime, can you really prove who you are? Who are we really? Identity is an abstract concept. We need to make it physical.

Our bodies are who we are. We can give it any number, password, or electronic key to point to that body, but that won’t stop identity theft.

What the government needs to do is establish identity by having a person visit an agency that establishes physical identity. They record your face, voice, fingerprints, palm print, eye print, DNA, etc. and enter that into a database. Then whenever you need to prove your identity, either in person or online, those identifiers need to be measured again and the results compared to the database.

When validating your identity, it will be vital that no recordings of those biometric factors will be allowed. What’s needed is a machine that sends information back to the database in real time. The database needs to be able to connect to the validation machine and know it’s receiving live data only.

Imagine buying something at a store or at home. You’d have to have an identity validation device. It will include a video camera and a bunch of biometric sensors. You use the device to measure who you are. Since all transactions will also be recorded, I can’t imagine many thieves even wanting themselves measured so closely.

Our phones can do face and fingerprint identification, and it would probably be easy to add voice and eye print recognition. But phones compare input from sensors to previously stored recorded data on the phone. That’s not good enough. The recorded data of your physical identity needs to be in a national identity bank that’s guarded better than banks for money.

The national identity bank needs to be able to take control of remote sensors and verify live input against your recorded identity in the identity bank. If thieves somehow stole recordings of all your biometrics they could pretend to be you, so the key is to create identity recognition machines that can’t input recorded data and prove the data its sending back to the national identity bank is from live sensors.

Think of it this way. The old saying, “Seeing is proof.” That essentially meant you had to see with your own sensors (eyes) to believe. The identity bank will have billions of eyes that work in real time.

Of course, if such an identity system were created it would solve all kinds of problems, but it would also create others. For spending money, voting, buying airline tickets, going through customs, or doing anything where identity is crucial it would be a plus. But for people who want to stay anonymous, or not be tracked, or fool the system, or be somewhere illegally, it will be a negative. In a police state, with universal security cameras and AIs, such a national identity bank will be absolute power that corrupts absolutely.

But aren’t we moving towards such a system anyway? We’re required to get RealID driver licenses. Security cameras are becoming as universal as cockroaches. As we add more biometric sensors to our devices, merchants are bound to start using them. Banks and credit card companies are going to get tired of being responsible for refunding stolen money. They will demand more identity recognition tools. If banks and credit card companies didn’t refund stolen money and we had to cover our own losses, we’d start demanding them too.

I’m not sure we can avoid this future because most people will want it. My guess, is most people favor security over privacy.

JWH

I Gleaned Two Useful Bits of Wisdom from YouTube This Morning

by James Wallace Harris, 3/18/24

The first insight applies to internet addiction. I constantly check several apps on my iPhone all day, and regularly browse YouTube on my television. It’s gotten to be a terrible habit, even though it’s so satisfying.

The first video made an analogy to rats and internet use. If you provide a button to a caged rat that when pressed provides a food pellet, the rat will eat its fill and then stop pressing the button. But if you set the button to randomly provide a food pellet the rat will constantly push the button. The analogy is we constantly check the internet hoping to get a reward, but because we don’t always find something rewarding, we keep checking. I believe that describes my internet habit.

I’m going to take his advice and set a limited time to enjoy browsing. But for the other times I’ll only use the internet when I know I want something specific.

The second piece of advice is about To-Do lists. The guy on the video said if your To-List is too long, you’ll avoid using it. And that’s true for me. I use the same To-Do list app he uses, Todoist. So, I went and rescheduled most of my tasks for the future, and just left five on the main page. I might even reduce it to three. Or even one. I want to try extremely hard and get more things done, even if it’s only one thing a day.

It’s ironic that I found these two insights that are perfect for me by browsing. I think it’s important to do some internet browsing, but I was like a rat in a cage always pushing the button hoping that I’d get a reward. There’s just not that many truly significant rewards to be had on the internet every day.

I hope I can apply these two insights and stick to using them. I might even add them to my habit tracker. Since I started using it, I’ve been doing seven core habits for 151 days straight.

JWH

Will People Change vs. Can People Change?

by James Wallace Harris, 2/28/24

I just finished listening to The Deluge by Stephen Markley, a book that speculates on what the next sixteen years could be like. The book is almost nine hundred pages in print, and over forty hours on audio. Reading this book feels like it’s compressed the last twenty years of polarized political conflict into a forty-hour long disaster film. It’s intense.

Markley uses a large cast of characters to dramatize how people on the left and right will battle for control over the next five U.S. presidential election cycles. Most of the story involves two groups of characters, those working within the political system, and those who decidedly don’t. Markley portrays an ultrasecret ecoterrorist group that works to force change by violent acts versus a dedicated group of political wonks that labor in Washington to influence both parties. Dynamic women characters lead both groups. (By the way, I disliked both women. The only character I cared about was a drug addict in Ohio, who Markley uses as a kind of everyman.)

To further spice up the story, Markley explores the growing power of computer surveillance, artificial intelligence, privacy, and how everyone can be tracked.

I’m not going to review the details of The Deluge because I want to use my reading experience to talk about a specific response to reading the book. I’ll link major book reviews at the end in case you’re considering reading the book. I can say liberals will be terrified by the conservatives in this story, and conservatives will by horrified by these fictional liberals.

The Deluge is about climate change. We could have solved that problem by now if we had acted promptly twenty years ago. The government could have added a tax on all fossil fuels and then raised it slowly month by month. For example, by adding ten cents to the federal tax on gasoline each month. If we had started this in the year 2000, gasoline would be approaching $30 a gallon today. That would have forced people and corporations to make the changes needed.

That tax revenue could have been used to overhaul the power grid and for developing renewable energy technologies. If we had taxed carbon properly, we wouldn’t be fighting over climate change today. That didn’t happen. It didn’t happen because the people who owned trillions of dollars in fossil fuel reserves made sure it didn’t happen. They built a political and religious coalition to fight with them to protect that wealth.

All that’s beside the point now. What Markley envisions is the breakdown of the United States over the next sixteen years so it’s obvious to all we need to do something. The Deluge includes dramatic scenes of a massive fire that destroys Los Angeles, a massive flood that overwhelms the Midwest, and a massive hurricane that devastates east coast states. These events caused the insurance industry to collapse, leading to economic chaos. Markley doesn’t overplay all this. His fictional disasters are realistic, only somewhat larger than what we’ve already experienced, killing just hundreds or a few thousand people in each event, but having an enormous impact on politics and the economy.

Reading The Deluge makes readers ask themselves: Will American change soon? But I ask: Can people change at all?

Before reading this novel, I had seen two insightful videos about climate change that ask the same questions. The first video makes a careful case saying people don’t change and if there is a solution for avoiding climate change it must work with the psychology of how people act. The second video summarizes the first video with impressive summations of it and this tweet. (I wish I could summarize what I watch and read this well.)

Over the two hundred thousand years that our species have existed on this planet, we haven’t changed. Our societies and technologies change, but not us. Over those two hundred thousand years we have developed four major cognitive tools to understand reality: religion, philosophy, mathematics, and science. Only science using mathematics has consistently proven it can consistently describe reality. If you don’t believe that I wouldn’t fly in an airplane.

Science is not black and white. It’s statistical and hard to understand. But science has overwhelmingly shown that adding more CO2 to the atmosphere is turning up the temperature. The parts per million of CO2 in the air acts like a thermostat. Add more CO2 turns up the temperature. The only way to return to the weather we liked in the past is to return to the CO2 levels of the 1960s, but we keep adding more. The only way to stop adding CO2 is to completely stop using fossil fuels. And if we want to turn down the thermostat, we need to remove CO2, which isn’t easy. That’s why taxing carbon is the only way to force us to change, but we won’t do that, because it’s not in our psychology.

However, The Deluge suggests when things get bad enough, we’ll change. It ends hopefully. People even have hope for their children and grandchildren.

Personally, I don’t think we will change. If you want to know what the next sixteen years could be like, read The Deluge. If you believe people can change, and we’ll do the right thing eventually, read The Deluge. If you don’t believe we’ll change, I wouldn’t bother with the book unless you like looking at train wrecks. And if you suffer from depression, I suggest avoiding reading this novel at all costs. I seldom get even the slightest depressed, but this book bummed me out.

Reviews:

JWH