Every generation has some product/ingredient that they didn’t know was dangerous at the time: tobacco, lead, asbestos, etc. What is that item for this generation?
Every generation has some product/ingredient that they didn’t know was dangerous at the time: tobacco, lead, asbestos, etc. What is that item for this generation?
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Colours. Colours on the screens. Colours on billboards. The colours we wear. The colours of foods we see in pictures. The colours of AI loaded photos we click on smartphones. Dopamine spiking colour abuse started in glossy magazines and street posters of big fashion and food companies, way before social media existed like post 2000s.
The abuse of human psychology using colours is arguably the worst crime committed in the human history, for which specifically USA is responsible. Never before Edward Bernays did this human psychological abuse exist on Earth, and never before has there been an advertising ultracapitalist machine like USA. (I recommend watching Century of The Self by Adam Curtis.)
The typical answer to OP's post would be social media, but the ingredients of social media are human psychological abuse using dopamine spiking colours, infinite scrolling and Vine-style short content. (Tiktok is credited with polished recommendation algorithm, but Vine originally brought about this disease, later in the form of Snapchat Stories, then Instagram stories and then Tiktok. Tiktok is merely the evolution of FrankenVine.)
If you want to conduct a self experiment, just try this for a day.
- On Android and iOS, you can use grayscale mode on your phone screens
- On Windows 10+, you can search "Adjust Color Filters" and enable grayscale filter using Win+Ctrl+C key. (Windows 7 has a tool "Negative Screen" https://zerowidthjoiner.net/Uploads/negativescreen/Binary.zip)
- On Linux, the easiest way for GNOME users is to install the GNOME extension "Colorblind Filters". On KDE, you can install Grayscale Effect or similar tool. (For LXQt users, here is a method https://nevyan.blogspot.com/2018/08/enabling-grayscale-in-gnome-kde-and.html)
- On Mac, you can access grayscale mode using Accessibility settings.
You will be shocked how accurate my observations are, and how less people even realise how long this has been going on for. Literally more than a century.
Edit: since some dishonest, malicious and ignorant people have downvoted and gone ahead to claim its stupid and baseless, I will tell them that their existence is a liability, because they defend these neurological and psychological abuses. Absolute wretched people.
The effects of colours having different kinds of psychological effects are well documented. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4383146/
The neurological and psychological abuses employed on digital screens akin to slot machines is also documented, since social media apps and most audio visual content on computers employ same neurological hack techniques as that of slot machines.
https://neurosciencenews.com/visual-sound-slot-machines-15816/
https://www.fastcompany.com/3046149/applying-the-addictive-psychology-of-slot-machines-to-app-design
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0166432812006456?via%3Dihub
https://www.gatewayfoundation.org/addiction-blog/how-gambling-affects-brain/
Irresistible by Adam Alter is a great book on addiction.
This is some hyperbolic shit right here.
I mean, I think Hitler committed worse crimes, just saying. And DuPont. And a lot of other companies/people.
None of them fucked up billions of people's perceptions to the point people only now chase material pleasure like lab rats, and due to that people have become isolated individualists.
Since you have chosen an emotionally touchy example to downplay this, Hitler's crime was less worse than USA's human psychology abuse en masse, just going off the number scale of 6 million deaths versus atleast 2 billion people who are depressed, lonely, have debts and are unhappy in life. The effects of this abuse have continued into this century and will continue to the next century and beyond.
I think attributing that to the use of color is a dramatic over simplification. The capitalization of human psychology stems from one thing and one thing only, our current form of capitalism which prioritizes maximizing short term shareholder return above all else, with long term shareholder return coming in second.
Also, if you're not going to let me pull the Hitler card in this situation, I can just pull the slavery card. What's worse, a population with a high rate of depression, or a population with a high rate of literally a slave? (We have that too in the US because forced prison labor is a thing and is considered constitutional at the moment)
Or what about when entire ancient civilizations had their history erased when conquered?
Or what North Korea is right now?
Like, seriously, you're telling me the use of bright colors is the worst crime ever committed against humanity? We've been using colors for thousands of years, you could at least pick something like Sugar that's actually addictive and causes disease and depression. Or cigarettes which also do that while also fostering poverty cycles. I could come up with so many things worse than using colors.
Yeah Christ, the complaint here is overstimulation and the capitalization/commercialization of peoples' attention spans, a topic which spans far greater breadth than just "colors". What a weird specific aspect to zero in on. I don't disagree that colors attribute to the issue but man, OP needs to take a step back and huff into a paper bag.
Also, if you’re not going to let me pull the Hitler card in this situation, I can just pull the slavery card.
Your argument is very cheap, hollow and meritless since you do want to engage in these tactics.
This kind of reads like "people in the past lived covered in mud and without color," which is very far from the truth. There is plenty to be said about misleading advertisements and advertisement saturation into our daily lives, but the bad thing about that isn't seeing bright colors.
“people in the past lived covered in mud and without color,”
Never have colours been spiked like this in human history. People did not necessarily live colourless lives (even though video media was colourless), however people surely did not see colour spiked ads the moment they got out of the house, on flashy 200" screens, on their phones and so on.
I live in LA and I don't see 200" screens unless I go downtown. I can't think of anywhere people step outside their homes and see that, unless they live in Times Square.
People have always made bright colors, both for art and for their clothing and homes. If anything our cities are dull compared to garish taste of the Romans, who slapped color on absolutely everything they could.
Those look like very light colours compared to what we see today. It does not prove your point.
They are thousands of years old and have faded; look at recreations and tell me you've been to any neighborhood with half as much color. My neighborhood (all beiges and whites), most urban neighborhoods, and virtually all suburban neighborhoods are significantly desaturated and colorless compared to ancient Rome.
...because physical paint colours on houses are generally chosen to not be as poppy as the ones on screens and billboards.
According to modern sensibilities of taste in some countries. That hasn't always been the case. Would you call a torii dull? Was the stained glass in medieval churches less colorful than today? Have you seen how vibrant basically all of nature is? You're conflating everything bad about advertisements with color itself.
The fun part is how you are the one defending human psychology abuse by West, most likely because I pointed out USA here, and because you live in a Western country. The more interesting part is how you are purposely steering away from the point, by claiming it is about colours, even though the context is completely different. It becomes even more insane when you actually conflate the colours in nature to the colours on billboards and electronic screens.
"Colors become bad when they're displayed on a screen" is some conspiracy shit, not sorry. The only known effect screens and colors have on health is when blue light is disrupting your circadian rhythm. You have failed to provide any evidence of the harm of bright colors coming from a screen on people's psychological state beyond "trust me bro it just makes sense."
You are defending the devil (perhaps also your own addictions) both by utilising a combination of delusional hairsplitting and purposely trying to sway users away from the grayscale experiment, something which takes no more than 10 minutes to convince anyone.
You are the one displaying a lot of intellectual dishonesty here, by trying to spread uncertainty among readers, even though this is as clear as sun on a sunny day.
The effects of colours having different kinds of psychological effects are well documented. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4383146/
The neurological and psychological abuses employed on digital screens akin to slot machines is also documented, since social media apps and most audio visual content on computers employ same neurological hack techniques as that of slot machines.
https://neurosciencenews.com/visual-sound-slot-machines-15816/
https://www.fastcompany.com/3046149/applying-the-addictive-psychology-of-slot-machines-to-app-design
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0166432812006456?via%3Dihub
https://www.gatewayfoundation.org/addiction-blog/how-gambling-affects-brain/
Irresistible by Adam Alter is a great book on addiction.
I personally think that because of corrupt and malicious people like you defending such crimes perpetuated using neurology and psychology, this society deserves everything that is coming towards it.
