I quit social media over 10 years ago, already having been a conscientious objector to Facebook and other platforms, much to the confusion of my classmates who

I quit social media over 10 years ago, already having been a conscientious objector to Facebook and other platforms, much to the confusion of my classmates who didn't understand my idiosyncratic positions on digital privacy, attention span, banality, and brainrot. It's gotten to the point where I view the narcissism of the modern 21st century social media user the same way I would view a crack addict smoking a pipe out in public, unable to pry their hands away from their glowing plastic rectangles, swiping incessantly in the hopes of getting just another dose of sweet dopamine with every refresh, or some artificial symbol of social validation in the form of more likes and upvotes. Somehow even in the wake of the Snowden revelations people are still ambling off of cliffs for fear of being left behind by the herd of lemmings. I feel vindicated as the years go on with every news story or opinion piece I read about (dissatisfaction with) the growing encroachment of surveillance capitalism, ad-tech and social media into our personal lives, and all for what? Some shitty memes and "influencers" peddling their garbage through thinly veiled advertisements? When I am exposed to mainstream social media content I can't believe people subject themselves to the digital equivalent of ass-to-mouth that is the brainrot of the algorithmically driven social media feed. If "you are what you eat" were analogized to an information diet, most social media users would be consuming informational shit and consequently producing the same 140-byte thoughts or reciting the same 5-second memes. If the attention economy is indeed a real concept, there is a premium for the ability to hold your concentration on something for more than half an hour and produce thoughts whose complexity is more than just a few bytes.