Before eight am this morning, my phone recorded three separate fraudulent messages from companies claiming that our credit card had unauthorized transactions and that tax authorities are coming to arrest us soon if we don’t call back.
If it feels like a fraud, deceit and manipulation, are widespread business models today, that is because they are. Meanwhile, a new UK study joins many others in finding an “explosion” in anxiety over the past decade, with the financial crash, austerity, Brexit, climate change and social media blamed for massive rises in the condition.
To understand more about how companies are selling our personal info, trust and attention as their product while designing technology to fuel addictive behaviour, it is helpful to watch the new Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma; here is a direct video link to the trailer.
The designers won’t let their own children and themselves use what they have made for the rest of us. The documentary talks about things we can do to fight back.
As always, we don’t have to be helpless pawns, but we do have to be thinking, self-disciplined individuals.
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