What am I doing while scrolling on social media?

I don't retain any of the information entering my brain. I can't help other
people. I don't lift my spirits, or calm myself; I just become more depressed,
more angry, and more hateful. The algorithm analyzes my thoughts through my
interactions, and blasts them back into my face, like an electronic lucid dream
powered by advertising. It's nothing I want, nothing I asked for. The only
value I create is value for Mark Zuckerberg.

I don't think we realize how truly evil this is. Social media creates negative
value in my life and postive value for the technology company. There's a
tendency to blame the user ("just put the phone down!"), but I don't think
that's productive or correct. The smartest people in the world are deploying
the most advanced technologies ever developed in a ploy to extract my attention.
They're taking advantage of quirks of psychology so deep that not even they
understand them. We are being controlled by organizations more powerful than
any empire in human history. That is, at the very least, immoral, but I'd argue
it is also criminal. Taking something from me without my permission is theft,
and this is attention theft.

Computers are such powerful tools for learning, understanding and communicating,
but tech companies have bent the rules so they can use them as mind parasites,
and they've injected those parasites into some of our most important spaces for
communication. We should all be horrified.

And as tech companies start to [manufacture content at scale with AI], they will
only become stronger.

This has always been a problem with social media. But I think short-form video
has made things bad enough that people, especially young people, are [realizing]
this is harmful. That energy shouldn't be directed at guilt tripping teenagers,
it should be directed at the companies creating the feeds. Your attention is
being stolen, and it isn't your fault. It never was.

We can't just make the internet illegal, but there are regulations we could
deploy. I think it should be illegal for a coorporation to store data about
people and use it to recommend content. That's where I'd draw the line. We
still need ways to find new stuff, but discovery algorithms should run locally
on devices we can fully control and monitor. Our algorithms should be
transparent-they should never, ever feel like "magic." Bring back visible
tags, and five star rating systems, and predictable, chronological feeds (RSS
or otherwise). We need to take back control of our attention and ensure that
control can never be taken again.