It takes 30 minutes of moderate effort to find this information, but really few people bother to do it. Our real problem is our inability to look at the landscape and synthesize a response, either individually or collectively.
We know social media is toxic to us, but we keep using it. We know our governments are corrupt, but we accept them anyway. We know AI will radically change society soon, but we keep acting like it won't.
We don't do anything because the walled gardens we're in don't tell us to, and we're currently quite comfortable, though increasingly concerned with that weird cloud coming towards us on the horizon. So we live in cognitive dissonance: constantly trying to "address the problem", then give up thinking maybe it's fine after all, and letting it happen for one more day.
The combination of addiction and visceral disbelief - we know the reality intellectually, but don't accept it - is ruining people's lives, and has neutered an entire generation (or multiple?).
We don't know how to act, how to coordinate, or even how to control ourselves. Instead, we find comfort in relying on dysfunctional systems that tell us "it's okay, don't worry about it". What would have spurred reform or revolution in a healthy population, instead falls flat. Eventually we'll each, individually, have to face the consequences of this dysfunction. Do you really want to risk your family's future on your present mental handicap?
Big Tech created the walled gardens, but we entrapped ourselves by willingly stepping into them. We happily gave our privacy away to Google, because we liked the convenience. Now we're cattle, and so we're being treated as such.
The only solution is to escape the reach of Big Tech and re-learn how to make sense of the world and be autonomous, then start working together to build new systems. See initiatives like:
- The authors of the memo: https://techoversight.org/
- The Consilience Project: https://consilienceproject.org/
- Metacrisis DAO: https://www.metacrisisdao.com/
- Center for Humane Technology: https://www.humanetech.com/
I'm not saying these initiatives are effective, but the fact that they exist is evidence that people are trying to address these problems.