Isn't this just a generic graduation speech? I'm curious as to why anyone finds this noteworthy. It wouldn't surprise me if Cook didn't even write the speech himself.
I, for one, am thrilled with Tim Cook and others, helping to bring these issues to light. It is a huge problem. I know someone in the other room right now that is fishing for likes and depending on her success, will determine her mood for the rest of the day, maybe week.
It's psychological slavery that many have slipped into somewhat innocently.
On top of everything else, Facebook in particular is a monopoly and needs to be broken up. There's no good reason that they should own like 4 of the top 5 social media platforms unless we're fine with monopolies. I'd like to see a federal anti-trust lawsuit, but the government doesn't understand how impossible it is to do the social media thing and not be crushed by Facebook.
of course, to compete properly things have to go further. #p2p applications and decentralized authentication systems to compete with "Sign-up with Facebook" and creating an ecosystem for competitive applications that don't rely on centralized infrastructure. facebook can and will crush you if you need to spend your way to victory. they're huge and rich. this is p obvious imo. so, to compete you have to make cost to the rando dev ~$0 so they can face the behemoth forever.
that isn't to say you can't make money. totally possible to sell cloud services to boost performance or increase storage for users. the point is that it doesn't cost you anything to run in the first place and provides acceptable performance without the cloud speedups.
Once upon a time, there were paper mail and landline phones, with a directory where you could look up pretty well anyone's address and phone number. That was really useful; it was lost in the email years between letters and Facebook messenger.
Since no one got a distributed internet directory to work back then, it's hard to imagine that there will be one in the future. And so we're doomed to Facebook.
this is the doomed timeline, i suppose. no need to be so, uh, defeatist about it tho. building a facebook alternative/competitor isn't impossible, just hard. took forever, but #ostatus is finally making some headway against twitter. could happen again, right?