Lol, TL;DR!!!

But seriously:

"The Death of the Alt-Weekly As Told By An Industry Lifer"

https://reason.com/2017/11/04/the-death-of-the-alt-weekly-as-told-by-a/

https://www.cjr.org/united_states_project/alt-alt-weeklies.php

I miss them. Now they're just what used to be called "the culture section" in newspapers. And the death of intellectual thought in the West accelerates.

Who reads long-form...anything...online? The pop-ups and temptation to just click some button and do something less intellectually demanding is distracting in itself. Hotlinks break concentration, even if you never click them. Etc.

"The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains" (Nicholas Carr) received huge backlash when it first came out. Now? People are blase about the fact that their frontal lobes, the part of the brain that makes them human, is shrinking from underuse.

All this just "dumbed down" America, then the rest of the West first!

As internet connectivity saturates the rest of the world....well, imagine for yourselves. Of course, there's pros and cons, but the negatives are pretty bad and affects far reaching. We are becoming less empathic, and more parrot-like.

Goldfish, really. A nation of goldfish. Edit: or maybe piranha.

Multiple studies have drawn a link between computer use or extensive screen time (eg, watching television, playing videogames) and symptoms of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). A 2014 meta-analysis indicated a correlation between media use and attention problems. A recent survey of adolescents without symptoms of ADHD at the start of the study indicated a significant association between more frequent use of digital media and symptoms of ADHD after 24 months of follow-up.6 Although most of the research linking technology use and ADHD symptoms has involved children and adolescents, this association has been identified in people at any age.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7366948/

The risk of being "avant garde": your advanced guard is the first to suffer if you go into a bad place, say over a waterfall or into some brambles. Rear guard can watch and avoid. The West led the way with internet technology and now all of us reading this are "addicted" ...esp after lockdowns. Plus, our society requires internet use now for common transactions.

A more conspiratorial minded person might wonder if there wasnt some devious plan, some overarching order behind the scenes to all of this...