[comebhack]

I don't think I agree. From TFA:

> [...] Why walk into a store in Soho and see what’s on offer when you can stay home and scroll the entire inventory from the comfort of your couch? Why go to the library to find books about a topic that interests you when you can look it up on Wikipedia in two minutes and move on with your day?

> Instantaneous access to everything obviously comes at a cost. The cost being that we all behave like demented Roman emperors, at once bored and deranged, summoning whatever we want at any time.

Even without social media, we still would have the instant gratification that the author proposes as a problem.

[thinkingtoilet]

Correct, but social media takes the problem and turns it up to 11. It's odd how people seem defensive about it. If you use social media, you are being manipulated. Full stop. It's not only if you're uneducated, or not technical, or unaware of it's impact, or whatever. You are being manipulated. Full stop. Not only that, you are being manipulated by some of the best and brightest minds of a generation. To pretend this isn't problem is basically Stockholm syndrome at this point.

[VyseofArcadia]

Online shopping and Wikipedia were a thing years before smartphones though. In the post-cell but pre-smart era that the author is glamorizing, you could already scroll inventory and look things up on Wikipedia from the comfort of your own home.

[casey2]

The actual problem is that there are still physical stores and libraries. These should have all gone away decades ago to be replaced with something that you can't instantly find online.

Society is still run buy nostalgic boomers who don't know how to use a computer and this is yet another example of the friction it causes.

Despite the existence of phones, apps and websites this decade is, so far, the best for national park visitation. The same is probably true for local parks, Because as of today home VR isn't at that level. That's despite the lockdown dip.

Nobody wants to go the library to look for a book that probably isn't there only to have a chance encounter with their future wife. It's fantastical thinking and designing a society around that expected user behavior is a gross misallocation of resources at best and dangerous at worst.