It all comes back to growthism. When you're a MegaCorp, you can't make 20% more YoY revenue growth by making better products, charging more, or cutting costs. The only option is to get hundreds of millions or billions of new eyeballs with billions of hours of attention. You gotta keep them off other platforms. You gotta keep them unable to do anything but stare at the screen and consume.

Chromebooks in school seemed like a great idea before attention economy destroyed society. If your kid is spending their time playing with legos, drawing, etc, and for homework they use the chromebook, which develops rudimentary computer skills and vastly reduces teacher workload, then it's great. Different picture when their past time is tiktok, roblox, etc

Inb4 "I grew up gaming all day and I'm fine" millenials: the social fabric of your life didn't depend on the games, they were games. Social media is vastly different. (also you arguably could have done better with better activities)

Is it the tyranny of the majority? Is the majority really pushing for chromebooks or to get work emails at 9pm or the LLMs which -we breathlessly read every day for 4 years now- will make people jobless?

There are certainly conveniences - world changing improvements - but I dont think the majority ever defined or was asked what they were willing to trade. I dont think EULAs and buried opt-outs or binding arbitration across a product portfolio was what they had in mind.

That's what happens when lots of very smart people dedicate their working lives to devising schemes and systems that push people towards making bad decisions. There's a lot of money to be made influencing people to act against their own best interests.