Surveillance capitalism saps the intellectual potential of humanity. Imagine what we could accomplish if our "best and brightest" were tasked with solving humanity's true problems instead of how to trick people into buying more crap they don't need.
Social life saps the intellectual potential of humanity. Imagine what we could accomplish if our "best and brightest" weren't weighed down by thousands of hours in churches, concerts, funerals, bars, and birthday parties.
etc, etc
The original comment lamented the fact that among the most lucrative positions within mathematics and computer science is ultimately tuning models for the purpose of spying on consumers. Be it an phd at Google trying to better categorize target demographics for advertisements or a high level engineer at Amazon trying to figure out what other products to recommend you.
It can be argued that sleep and social life are productivity drains. It can also be argued that it is part of a well-rounded life which is key to happiness. A happy individual is likely productive. Even so, it is besides the point. People sleep and socialize because they enjoy it. People don't waste decades of education and experience on gaming consumer behvaiour because its enjoyable however. They do it because it is lucrative.
My take on the original comment is that it encourages one to imagine a world where we instead incentivise the best and brightest of our generation to pursue nobler goals than consumer surveillance. It is also a natural response to the top level post. Why worry about video games as a productivity drain when there are far greater structural obstacles to building a better world.
I don't like surveillance capitalism either, but my argument was that this line of reasoning is silly because you can use it to conclude that literally anything is a waste of time or resources.
We shouldn't do surveillance capitalism because it sucks, not because everyone has some vague obligation to work on what you think is most important to society.
We're agreeing with each other, kind of.