Suppose you are right, what does that prove? You can be morbidly obese for decades before dying of the consequences. It's still not good to be morbidly obese.
That this is a social illness that has been with us since before the Internet does not excuse its continued existence. It's a waste of what Clay Shirky has dubbed "Cognitive Surplus":
> It represents the ability of the world's population to volunteer and to contribute and collaborate on large, sometimes global, projects. Cognitive surplus is made up of two things. [First,] the world's free time and talents. The world has over a trillion hours a year of free time to commit to shared projects. Now, that free time existed in the 20th century. [However, the media landscape in the 20th century was mainly very good] at helping people consume, and we got, as a result, very good at consuming.
> [That is the second part of cognitive surplus. Now that] we've been given media tools -- the Internet, mobile phones -- that let us do more than consume, what we're seeing is that people weren't couch potatoes because we liked to be. We were couch potatoes because that was the only opportunity given to us. We still like to consume, of course. But it turns out we also like to create, and we like to share. And it's those two things together -- ancient human motivation and the modern tools to allow that motivation to be joined up in large-scale efforts -- that are the new design resource. And using cognitive surplus, we're starting to see truly incredible experiments in scientific, literary, artistic, political efforts.
That people wasted their lives in front of TV does not mean that we should have to keep accepting business models based on "zombification", especially when the media of the 21st century has so much potential for individual empowerment compared to television before it.
But I do agree that Facebook should not receive all the blame. You know which product is not criticised nearly enough in this context? The iPhone. Because at its core, what differentiated the iPhone from the other smartphones when it was introduced, was that is was a portable, always-online computer optimised for consumption. And it definitely had a large role in the rise of the current form of social media, compared to the internet communities that existed before it.
The attention economy is the equivalent of bitcoin mining, except with human brain cycles: its economy is fundamentally based on wasting resources, revealing an utterly cynical view of the worth of human life.
On an individual level the attention economy is a waste of human life. On a societal level it is a waste of cognitive surplus. On a global level, whether or not we waste that cognitive surplus will mean the difference between collectively being able to get out of the mess we dug ourselves into in the last century, or racing ever harder towards collapse with then having to try to recover after that.
How is that for apocalyptic bombast?
[0] https://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_cognitive_surplus_...