They could be something else, but there is no business model that can compete with addiction.
I agree that kids need more real world experience. Mindlessly scrolling TikTok and playing repetitive games with compulsion loops designed by psychologists to maximize addiction isn’t real world experience.
I think a big problem with it is that people don’t realize how addictive this stuff can be or how manipulative and insidious it is. They’re not prepared for it and they get blindsided when it takes over their lives or their kids lives. Infinite scroll alone is incredibly addictive. Add other tactics and our stupid ape dopamine system is no match.
It might get better once we culturally assimilate this knowledge and realize that this stuff is more psychologically manipulative than we think it ought to be. We need to look at apps that use addiction patterns the way we look at drugs.
We think: It’s just a screen! It’s not like opioids or meth or something. How can a screen take over someone’s life?
The average TikTok user spends three hours on the app per day. Average. That means half spend more. That’s insane. Not to single out TikTok. It’s just one example.
Drugs are actually a great comparison. We keep pretending that we've "banned" drugs. Yet despite the endless fortunes spent, civil liberties curbed and countless lives ruined by incarceration, drugs remain universally available, increasingly potent and very, very cheap. At a certain point we have to accept that a failed approach has failed and dig deep for the courage to try something different.
We seem to romanticize the past as if before smartphones kids would spent their time reading Aristotle and doing calisthenics.
No one had a smartphone when I was a kid and instead I spent hours a day playing Nintendo or watching trash TV.
On the other hand, it wasn't that long ago that people could go to the grocery store and push a shopping cart without looking at their phone the whole time.
I think these are just the problems of a society of abundance.