Time Well Spent: From attention tech to time well lived tech (Dec 16 Refresh) (opens in new tab)

Sorry to say, but you lost me when I saw Meetup as one of the exemplars. I tried to use Meetup a couple of times recently, having never used it before, and eventually quit in sheer frustration. Seldom have I encountered a worse UX.

I'm super skeptical of this.

They have been around since Jan 2015. And include Google not in attention companies but in platform companies. This is a strange divide considering Google makes YouTube, and which business is just to intercept as much information as possible, to build a profile of you, to target your attention to advertising and enough value that you don't mind. This is then continued by their recommendation of AdBlock which blocks ads (but not Google's by default, because Google pays them), and not tracking.

Their message seems somewhat to what we have already been hearing from Richard Stallman and Eben Molgen for the past 30 years — https://youtu.be/tbcy_ZxXLl8?list=PLYVl5EnzwqsR20nKqwDCSNONs... — Aral Balkan from Indie for the past 5-10 years — https://ind.ie/ethical-design/ — but packaged up for consumers, blaming tech.

However their delivery seems more at targeting consumers, with the illusion of targeting designers, by blaming those dam malicious tech folk because it is not the consumer's job to accept responsibility of how they spend their time - and instead, it is up to companies to stop wasting the irresponsible and perhaps addicted consumers attention, despite the consumer not wanting to support non-free business models, probably hence why this movement hasn't taken off in its 2 years.

The video seems reminiscent of the rap video by another person, who's message was to consumers, hey there was a time before tech invaded our attention, you can put your phone away you know, perhaps do that. This version seems to be perhaps aimed at children who have never experienced an app-less world, so the expectation of them putting their phone away would perhaps be absurd to them, so hey, let's blame other people instead.

Snodwen, Richard Stallman, Eben Molgen, and Aral Balkan, seem to be having more success in changing this industry's practices. With Snowden more so than anyone else. As with Snowden, it not changing is about the legal and ethical consequences of invading privacy against the consumers will — whereas where invading their privacy for the consumers will, as Google does, is totally okay and sometimes even glorified by consumers.

TimeWellSpent will never solve the Journalism clickbait problem, as the advertising business model, which is the free business model, does not value anything but attention and clicks, which promotes clickbait articles, which promotes shit journalism (publish first, update progressively, and verify at some very later point if ever). Just because consumers expect things for free but expect companies to be ethical. They can’t be ethical if consumers don’t wish to pay for them to be ethical.

It’s kind of like whining that there are no seedless apples, but then when someone engineers a seedless apple and charges money for it, they say, what the hell, you should be free, I’m going to use the unethical clone of you that advertises to me anyway, and screw the R&D you ethical people did.

Thoughts?