People have sleepwalked into letting their brains be rewired by a harmful symbiotic relationship, and it’s happened in a very short period of time:
One of the differences I’ve observed is the quest for a constant dripfeed of feelgood news (which extends across all political/social viewpoints) and the eternal quest for “likes,” if there’s not been anything that gives a little dopamine spike in the last few hours people start feeling on edge.
The damage this is doing is phenomenal:
The relationship between addiction to smartphone usage and depression among adults: a cross sectional study - PMC
Conclusions
The positive correlation between smartphone addiction and depression is alarming. Reasonable usage of smart phones is advised, especially among younger adults and less educated users who could be at higher risk of depression.
Social media:
Social media apps are 'deliberately' addictive to users
Social media companies are deliberately addicting users to their products for financial gain, Silicon Valley insiders have told the BBC’s Panorama programme.
“It’s as if they’re taking behavioural cocaine and just sprinkling it all over your interface and that’s the thing that keeps you like coming back and back and back”, said former Mozilla and Jawbone employee Aza Raskin.
“Behind every screen on your phone, there are generally like literally a thousand engineers that have worked on this thing to try to make it maximally addicting” he added.
… “In order to get the next round of funding, in order to get your stock price up, the amount of time that people spend on your app has to go up,” he said.
“So, when you put that much pressure on that one number, you’re going to start trying to invent new ways of getting people to stay hooked.”
Lost time
A former Facebook employee made a related point.
“Social media is very similar to a slot machine,” said Sandy Parakilas, who tried to stop using the service after he left the company in 2012.
“It literally felt like I was quitting cigarettes.”
During his year and five months at Facebook, he said, others had also recognised this risk.
“There was definitely an awareness of the fact that the product was habit-forming and addictive,” he said.
“You have a business model designed to engage you and get you to basically suck as much time out of your life as possible and then selling that attention to advertisers.”
… Last year Facebook’s founding president, Sean Parker, said publicly that the company set out to consume as much user time as possible.
He claimed it was “exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology”.
“The inventors”, he said, “understood this consciously and we did it anyway.”
All part of progress though, something we need to adjust to? 
Adapt or die?
Well, the people peddling it sure don’t think so:
The tech elite in America are paying up to $40,000 a year to send their children to schools that enforce a back-to-basics approach. Danny Fortson reports on the screen-free education that has a new-age twist
Inside a concrete block at the top of a hill in San Francisco, 27 nine-year-olds are handed needles and ordered to sew. Across the hall, eight-year-olds churn butter by hand, while downstairs four-year-olds are busy carrying out their duties: sweeping up, washing dishes and dehydrating fruit.
This is not a child-labour camp in the heart of America’s richest city. It is a school, and among the tech crowd it has become much sought after. The San Francisco Waldorf School, you see, has a strict “no screens” policy. In fact, it is deliberately analogue.
Source: thetimes.co.uk (paywalled)
2021 update, more on this, here:
The Times UK: Tech-Free Schools for Children of Silicon Valley | ILAC
The tech moguls who invented social media have banned their children from it
Silicon Valley parents are pulling the plug, reports Olivia Rudgard from San Francisco
Apple co-founder Steve Jobs was the first tech giant to admit, in 2011, that his own children had not used the recently released iPad created by his company, conceding that “we limit how much technology our kids use at home”. And he wasn’t alone: Microsoft founder Bill Gates set time limits on screens, banned mobile phones at the table and didn’t let his children have them until they were 14, while Mark Zuckerberg implored his baby daughter to “stop and smell the flowers” in an open letter to her which he released last year - one that made no mention of Facebook or even the internet.
… Yet it is unlikely that this will lead to a crisis of conscience, says Adam Alter, a professor of marketing at New York University and author of a recent book about technology addiction, because it would be "completely inconsistent with the duty they have to their shareholders - to maximise profits.
“For all the advantages they and their kids enjoy - from wealth to education - they don’t trust themselves or their kids to be able to resist the charms of the very products they’re promoting.” It would be “silly” to expect them to change, he says. “The best we can do is to try to uncover these hypocrisies and air them publicly.”
Source: independent.ie
Bonus manipulation to drag you back in? yeah they do that too:
Your smartphone is making you stupid, antisocial and unhealthy. So why can’t you put it down?
The makers of smartphone apps rightly believe that part of the reason we’re so curious about those notifications is that people are desperately insecure and crave positive feedback with a kneejerk desperation. Matt Mayberry, who works at a California startup called Dopamine Labs, says it’s common knowledge in the industry that Instagram exploits this craving by strategically withholding “likes” from certain users. If the photo-sharing app decides you need to use the service more often, it’ll show only a fraction of the likes you’ve received on a given post at first, hoping you’ll be disappointed with your haul and check back again in a minute or two. “They’re tying in to your greatest insecurities,” Mr. Mayberry said.
Source: theglobeandmail.com, my emphasis
In addition to this, the idea that to find information, one simply asks a question and has it answered in full: accurately, authoritatively, and with your best interests at heart, without the need for further research (something that drives many of us crazy on here btw) is leading some people to be completely unable to learn - something covered in this excellent article by Josephine McCarthy:
Magic needs a curious mind – the learning dilemma for magical students | Josephine McCarthy
Obviously my own time contributing on this forum demonstrates I don’t think the internet is totally harmful, or a factory for making idiots, but anyone who is serious about progressing to real magick (instead of being a consumer who swallows whatever crap they’re fed by the first 3 search results) would do well to consider these trends, the staggering hypocrisy of the people running the tech giants, and the way in which human society can rapidly forget things that used to be common knowledge.
