Policy vs design
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Tech addiction isn’t a hardware problem. It’s a policy and design problem. Read time: 6 mins Hi Reader, The debate around phone and social media use often blames the wrong actor. The upcoming EU Chat Control law highlights this further. The proposal would force apps to scan every message before encryption. This is a political decision, not a tech one. Knowing who really sets the rules helps you know when to adjust a setting and when to demand better policy. If you only have a minute, don’t miss the final myth. It’s the one that ties everything together. From the experts“Young people have basically given up all their attention to a few companies.” — Jonathan Haidt. “No self‑discipline can beat the addictive design we are all subject to today … If we do not act now, this will have an impact on the mental health and brain development of generations to come.” — MEP Kim Van Sparrentak “Regulation … this is what the tech companies fear most.” — Shoshana Zuboff, Harvard Business School “Creating is better than consuming.”Not always. What matters is where and how you share. A quick photo in a private chat is not the same as posting to a public feed. “We continue to have this illusion that things outside of us aren’t driving what we think and believe, when in fact so much of what we spend our attention on is driven by decisions of thousands of engineers and product designers.” — Tristan Harris, Center for Humane Technology Choose the audience first (private chat, small group, or public) before you hit upload. We all want a safe place online to share with people we trust. Many of us aren’t sure where that place is anymore. Social media harms often come from design choices: defaults, feeds, direct messages (DMs), and ads. Not from one random post. How would things change if accounts were private by default and location was off by default? You could still switch them on, but the starting point would protect you. "Phones are the problem. They are addictive."Phones are hardware. Addiction lives in platform design: feeds that never end, social scoring, and push notifications built to trigger reward loops. “No self‑discipline can beat the addictive design we are all subject to today … If we do not act now, this will have an impact on the mental health and brain development of generations to come.” — MEP Kim Van Sparrentak Do:
Instagram is already testing topic controls to help you reshape what the algorithm sees. One small policy-level shift that matters.More on that from the CEO of Instagram here. Platforms and devices share the same incentives.They don’t. Your phone/OS wants stability and retention. Do: "Quitting one platform solves it."Deleting TikTok often means bingeing Instagram Reels. The real fix is defining the job-to-be-done and setting your own policy.(news, staying in touch, learning, entertainment). Define a policy for yourself. "What I use, when, and why." That can be "no phones in the bedroom/toilet", "Social media only my iPad", or setting different bedtimes for different platforms, like Alex below. The tool is secondary; the personal rule is what breaks the loop. "Video editors are just tools."They’re not. Editors point you toward platforms. This one requires a bit of reading between the lines. CapCut is owned by ByteDance (TikTok’s parent), so it naturally fits TikTok formats and workflows. Edits is Instagram’s editor, so it’s built to feed Reels. Earlier this year CapCut updated terms with broad content rights and a persistence clause. Meaning content can stay in their system even after deletion. It also raised flags about things like biometrics. Updated rights include:
- The use in advertising or algorithmic recommendation mechanisms, without the need for a separate consent to be obtained.
- The so-called persistence clause. Even if an account is deleted, the rights of use previously granted remain in place. Users can therefore permanently lose control over their content without being able to restrict or revoke these rights subsequently.
In that climate, Meta launched Edits. It arrived quickly, with limited features, but one big advantage: it keeps creators inside Meta’s stack (templates, audio, effects, login) and away from a rival tool that could face policy shocks. That looks less like a pure “new app” and more like a strategic move shaped by politics and risk. So yes: CapCut → TikTok. Also, it’s not as simple as “trust the U.S. over China.” Remember Cambridge Analytica (2018): Facebook allowed a political consultancy to harvest data from millions of users for micro-targeted ads. Escape the algorithmBook: Offline Matters by Jess Henderson is a handbook for anybody experiencing digital overload in their lives and creative work. I bought this early in the summer, and it's something I keep coming back to in little pockets of time in the day. For anyone who feels like there’s just something not right about how we’ve allowed technology to control so much of our existence. An excerpt from the book here. Podcast: RPN (Roberto Nickson) is my most trusted voice on AI in the creator economy. In this very well-packaged podcast called Open Residency, he covers his blueprint for the AI era. Two hours of value, no gatekeeping. Some favourite bits: "Everybody's like, 'Oh, AI's gonna kill creatives!' How can AI kill creatives when creatives are the only ones who can get good results with AI?" "There's no way someone is going to pay $1.5 million for an ad spot that someone can make for $150 in his basement." "The barriers to creation are going to disappear. The only things that are going to remain are taste, creativity, understanding of culture, and distribution." If you got this far, you're part of 71% of subscribers, so thank you, Reader. If a section has particularly interested you, click the link of the corresponding section. It helps me prepare future newsletters. If this email was forwarded to you, please consider subscribing. See you in two weeks. Peace, Has
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