
Are smartphones the new 'opium of the people'? - pseudolus
https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-48923485
======
cneurotic
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.

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

~~~
samhain
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...](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/has-the-
smartphone-destroyed-a-generation/534198/)

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buboard
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.

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

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

~~~
cagenut
I confess I have no idea what you're talking about. What "addictive nature" is
there in Marx's theories?

~~~
dondawest
It’s an inherently addictive thought that “the current system is wrong and
there’s another system that would be better if only people would listen.” It
becomes even more addictive when there’s other people willing to give you
dopamine/affirmation for your beliefs. You see its addictive nature today in
the sparse numbers of people who achieve “sobriety” from communism after
becoming addicted to its theories.

~~~
goto11
What thing would not be addictive given that reasoning?

"Dopamine" make it sound sinister, but if everything which gives you enjoyment
or feels meaningful is addictive, then basically everything anybody does by
their own volition would be addictive.

~~~
dondawest
Nothing. All things are addictive including holier-than-thou ideologies such
as communism.

~~~
dang
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? and
especially please not post in the flamewar style, such as
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20434596](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20434596)?
We're trying for a bit better than internet default here.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

~~~
dondawest
I don’t know what to tell you dude. My comments are substantive. What about
them makes you label them unsubstantive? That seems extremely judgmental and
censorious to me. I’m trying for a bit better than internet default too. But I
don’t understand why you label my substantive comments unsubstantive.

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codingdave
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.

~~~
taneq
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.

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fapi1974
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.

~~~
SomeOldThrow
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.

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goto11
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.

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

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

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kevinSuttle
No opium is the new opium

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

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

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spassbold23
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
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.

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

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Noumenon72
Slate Star Codex: Is Everything a Religion?
[https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/03/25/is-everything-a-
religi...](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/03/25/is-everything-a-religion/)

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.

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

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jacknews
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
This time it's China making the smartphones.

------
jfk13
Dupe of
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20427323](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20427323)

~~~
rimunroe
Yours appears to have been submitted after this one.

~~~
jfk13
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?

~~~
rimunroe
Huh. I see what you mean! It was based on when it showed up in my (supposedly
only sorted by time) viewer, but yours definitely appears before the other if
you go through the official “New” submissions list.

