Another terrific piece. You (Max) do this kind of thing better than anyone else I know of.

"In some sense they don't blame we, the users, enough, or assign us the kind of agency we know we have.": True. What I understand in the abstract but not intuitively is why so many people put up with this shit. Who would want to watch a TV channel that shows commercials over half the time? And most of them are crappy, too. But that's pretty much what Facebook was by the time I quit in 2021, after years of rising disgust. By that point, over half the stuff in my "feed" was stuff I'd never asked to see, and almost none of that was stuff I was happy to see. Some of it was so wildly misdirected that it was almost darkly funny (e.g., nobody who knows me even a little bit would imagine I'd want to see an ad from the Conservative Party of Canada). And I gather it's even worse now, thanks to "AI" and the mob of hucksters devoid of shame or taste who've embraced it.

The analogy with tobacco and the like definitely has limits. Nicotine is physically addictive; some people who quit smoking get the shakes and other physical symptoms. I haven't heard of anything like that happening to people who quit social media. Certainly, nothing like that happened to me. So a lot of people seem to be choosing to keep doing something that's bad for them (and their societies), even though they could easily stop. And again, the oddest thing to me is that it doesn't even seem like fun. It's like they crave distraction for its own sake. Are their lives really that bad or dull? I don't know, but it's a reasonable question.

Really, for me, my friends, and I suspect many other people, social media has been a long, tedious detour. Once upon a time, Facebook claimed to be "a social utility that connects you with the people around you" - not "brands", "celebrities", "influencers", and all that noise, but people: friends and maybe family, colleagues, fellow hobbyists, etc. And that's what my friends and I wanted: a way to stay in touch, even though we couldn't see each other every day or even every year if we lived far apart, that was easier to fit into our lives than a lot of phone calls, texting, or instant messaging. Facebook was never great for that, Twitter even less so, but for awhile, it was kinda-sorta usable for that. Not anymore. though. Even more than a TV channel that mostly shows commercials, it's like a phone connection with a lot of static. For me and many of my friends, it got to be more trouble than it's worth, even apart from all the putrid politics around it.