100%. As others have pointed out, it's designed to be addictive, and is addictive. They know it, too; people at companies like Facebook don't let their kids use Facebook. And like any addiction, extreme forms of it cause harm.
The difficulty is going to be that -- although all of our brains have figuratively been irradiated by nuclear-hot Twitter takes -- this doesn't give you a literal, physical harm like cancer (one possible exception: suicide, but that opens up whole other causation questions). The harms it does cause (you do worse at school or work, your phone is a distraction from real people in your life, etc.) also fit neatly into the "they're just lazy/inattentive/immature/it's a parenting problem" box, so there are decades-old narratives in place to defend this shit.
this doesn’t give you a literal, physical harm
From a neuroscientific perspective, I think tech like this is too new to really know what kind of harm we might be causing ourselves by being online. Like it's known that there are behavioral correlates of improved outcomes in the graded severity of symptoms of alzheimers patients who broadly seem better off if they were someone who read often and enjoyed solving puzzles. Who knows how social media use in one's teens and twenties might bias their behavior in subtle ways that may add up later in life?
in my case I recognize most of my energy is spent being productive for my boss and I have to go out of my way to do something constructive for myself on my own time
at a certain point the flesh and mind give out. What we want to do after work is lay in bed an stare at a screen. Our will has been drained out by our labor
Staring at a screen has been America's past-time since the late 50's. If it makes you feel better, we are not the first generation to experience this.
Probably, they literally design this shit to be addictive. It's also a very cheap form of entertainment in dollar per hour terms.
how do we escape though. everything's online; we can't escape the monopoly platforms either
The amount of time I spend online is usually constructive somehow, or at least I try to make it constructive. I'm typically watching educational stuff, keeping up with the news, talking with you people (you're some of the most politically aware people I know), or researching how to do artsy stuff. I don't really keep up with internet parasocial personalities. I guess I just don't find it interesting.
Maybe I was raised wrong or something. My family never did anything except watch TV, so despite spending so much time online it feels like I'm doing something different. I grew up slightly before the internet became prevalent and even then I remember adults doing very little other than sitting in front of the TV or occasionally calling one another. Feels like I'm doing a lot more than they were.
