I feel like the social media companies have opted for mindlessness over connection, simply because it pays more in the short term. No surprise that society is worse off as a result
No one believes me when I say this, but the decline in reading is already having dire consequences for art & culture. The media you loved in your youth—shows, albums, films—was made by artists who were widely read. You will not have that quality of art in a post-literate world.
The older I get, the more I understand people who move to the countryside, grow their own vegetables, get a dog, and only talk to about three people. That life gets more appealing every year
This cost them about $1 trillion.
The truth is, you cannot build systems like this exclusively on the logic of profit. You cannot expect to break even in 20 or 30 years. Projects of this scale are built because the government decides they must exist to serve the people.
And this is a problem with systems that are strictly, or overwhelmingly, capitalist. If you leave every problem in your society to the spontaneity of the market, some challenges are so large and so unprofitable that you will never have sufficient incentive to solve them.