I love this statement, it's so true. We self-determine what the internet consists of. If we're unhappy with our addiction, we'll invent a better drug.

I see more of the rifts being a surfacing or metastasization of things that were smashed down and normalized before: Families that clamped down conversation to head-of-household preferences, people curating their public image at events, sexist and bigoted beliefs aired in limited forms and formats. A lot of genies coming out of bottles all at once.

A negative of empathy is that it's often encouraged through an environment of abuse. If it's going down, does that mean that we're becoming callous robots, or that people are increasingly liberated in their everyday lives?

Amen to that. Facebook and such becoming the vast majority of internet content, imho, are one of the biggest reasons it's getting boring.

There will always be juicier content to satisfy Internet addiction, made possible by new hardware and faster connections if necessary.