Amidst more pressing concerns, the prospect of individuals being engrossed in their phones registers as a comparatively minor worry for me.

We live in the beginning of the end.

Us being on our phones is making connections, Forming relationships, and growing as people.

Watching friends reruns on TV is in no way better.

Yea, but a good percentage of them are consuming our particular brand of propaganda, so there's an upside.

I will say two things. 1 things aren't quite as bad as some people on this website think, this website seems to over select for terminally online and slightly antisocial people. 2 things are still bad though, and I think a lack of third places and walkable towns ultimately is a contributing cause

no one reads anymore, tiktok editing has killed attention spans. impossible to get my (also millenial) friends to read theory, i can't even get them to play fucking disco elysium or watch the original gundam series. if its not the hottest newest shit the entire internet is talking about they just don't give a shit. if its not superheroes or a cringe compilation reaction video no one cares. its all lowest-effort intellectually lazy slop, no one is even interested in the deeper themes let alone political implications.

all these criticism apply to myself as well in the past week i barely managed to force myself to read 'what is to be done' (on chapter V now), and i'm a committed communist in their 30s. when i was younger i read books all the time, even at home, for fun, instead of videogames sometimes, like almost every night. i haven't done that in like 15 years, almost exactly since phones came out. its just easier and lazier to get easier to digest content that doesn't require much mental effort to parse or interpret. we're exhausted from all of our personal psychodramas and from the financial and social strains of existing under capitalism and being responsible for ourselves. i don't even have a job and just the financial insecurity of that, the utter lack of control of my fate is mentally taxing enough that i just want to sit around and do absolutely nothing most of the time or subsume my conscious experience into the ready-made fictitious reality of a videogame.

you might say this is all personal anecdote and not applicable to 'outside', but i would argue that public life is already severely biased towards and dominated by extroverts.