The Pernicious Business Model of Social Media

Social media is almost entirely organized around a business model that deeply undermines its positive attributes. Instead of creating a useful and healthy experience for the end user, what we instead have are ecosystems very specifically designed to hijack and addict our attention. Highly sophisticated algorithms encourage outrage and conflict, down-regulating sanity, and instead up-voting provocation. The result is an extremely potent narcotic that quite reliably deepens our noxious and addictive relationship with social media. It activates something primal in our lizard brain that overrides rationality, renders us powerless to set it aside,. over time obscures our ability to evaluate situations objectively and denigrates the very quality of our lives.