It's also that this is not a function of their nature, but of the way that they've been designed to function. Things were not this bad 15 years ago, and the fact that social media existed and functioned the way that it functioned back then was incredibly important in allowing movements like MeToo and BLM and Dreamers and many others to build momentum.

When social media is a tool of regular people, it's an awesome, awesome tool. But when the companies and people that own the platforms start to see users as tools themselves, for their own sociopolitical ends, that's when they become destructive forces. And there was a clear enshittification line drawn about this time 10 years ago, when the transition from one state to the other got underway.

I fear that we're looking at an attempt to manufacture consent to destroy the tool and not just the malicious function.

I think a lot of it is the ease of access now that we carry computers with us everywhere. I was tweeting from my phone in 2009, but I had to send the tweets via text message, so there was no infinite scroll accessible all day everyday to suck my mind into the phone. We had to actually make a decision to sit at a computer and go to the website to fully be fully immersed.