Right. Social media companies explicitly use the same addictive psychological reward mechanisms that are leveraged by companies that make slot machines.
As a non-smoker, I’ve never felt like I needed a cigarette more than when the credits rolled on Requiem. Certainly scared me off of harder drugs, though.
Not sure if this could have been more perfectly executed to discredit the idea of abolishing/defunding the police, which in my understanding has always been proposed as a structured, intentional shift away from heavily militarized policing toward a system of robust social services. I've seen others use the language of divest/invest to make clear that it's a shift in resources. Reading a little bit of abolitionist literature (because this stems out of a much larger, ongoing conversation about the prison industrial complex), it seems even full abolitionists see it as a process that involves building new systems and drastically shifting the American mindset around punitive retribution.
Instead, you have a situation where the police to abandon a precinct all at once and not long after, far-right groups start showing up at night to stoke violence. Hard not to read that as intentional.
https://ihpi.umich.edu/news/social-media-copies-gambling-met...