While I can appreciate the benefits of most social media in moderation, I’m increasingly convinced that on balance, they’ve become a net negative to progress. For a time, they were a net positive, but today, I struggle to believe that the collective energy of human beings spent scrolling endless feeds is producing isn’t better spent elsewhere.

Everyday people are being robbed of their time in pursuit of concentrating wealth among a handful of large companies. Don’t get me wrong, I’m pro-business and largely pro advertising. What I don’t support is systematically altering human behavior to maximize consumption of ads.

It comes down to basic business incentives. Social media is kind of a misnomer. Social (and video platforms like YouTube) companies have become more antisocial than social. Remember, these are businesses that seek to steadily increase their profits. It’s a simple equation: More time spent in, more money out. But when you optimize for time spent, it tends to inversely impact other metrics like content quality, or user productivity, or constructive debate. You start dialing up the things that increase time spent: stimulating content like porn, gambling, shock content, click-bait, and rage-bait. People spend more time glued to their phones and less time doing other productive things. Imagine all the hours spent by billions of humans every day over decades. It can’t possibly be benign.

Consider humans like batteries with a finite charge. Today, a big machine is draining billions of those batteries through attention. Tech platforms deliberately engineer addictive feedback loops that trap users in endless scrolling cycles. Attention is a commodity to be captured.

This to me, seems like a tragic misallocation of human capital. The collective hours lost to doomscrolling could fuel creation, scientific breakthroughs, artistic endeavors, community building, or the development of deeper, more meaningful relationships.

I hope we can find a way to get the world out of this doomscrolling loop.