>I'm not sure the author should be quite so proud of the results of his hard work

Well, that's a problem for every for-profit company, right?

If TikTok goes from attracting 5 minutes of attention a day from its users to 10 minutes, then that's great for TikTok. If it gets to 12 hours a day, then that's a civilization-ending disaster. If a coal mining company extracts and burns every cubic meter of coal in the Earth's crust then we all die. Etc etc.

Companies want to grow and compete, and that's good, since it's resulted in literally all human progress, and is why we're no longer living in dirt huts and dying at 30 from cholera. But taken to the extreme...