I really wish we could just pass "common sense" laws. Like, you just can't use addiction to make money, full stop. You can't use any kind of trickery in marketing, in particular anything trying to circumvent people's rational brain and preying on the weak animal brain underneath. Marketing and advertising would be gone overnight - good riddance -because anyone can write an honest advert.

The problem with us is we get stuck in local optima and we just can't get out. We're like ants in a death spiral. It takes some enormous external shock to get us out, like a world war. Even a financial crisis or global pandemic isn't enough any more, unfortunately. Individuals just can't accept less and no leaders appear to be able or willing to explain to the concepts of global optimisation or long term plans etc. So we get stuck with shit on top of more shit.

Until it all collapses.

You know, various historians have studied this. No society has ever avoided this collapse scenario. It's like the Great Filter. But in 2026 because of the internet we only have a handful of global-scale societies instead of a hundred thousand regional societies like we used to. The first one to collapse might just catch the whole world in its debris cloud.