Irresistible

I wanted to like it more, but it's telling how it already feels dated having been published in 2017. It misses the ascendency of Twitter wielded by the former president of the United States, the sheer algorithmic power of TikTok to deliver an infinite scroll of short, personalized dopamine hits, the introduction of Meta as Mark Zuckerberg wrestles with how to hook a new generation of users as its Facebook base ages out. And all of this in the midst of a pandemic where we find ourselves increasingly online. Where parents, finding no other recourse, increasingly submit to relying on screens to occupy their children. Where children see little difference between their parents working hours, staring at a screen, and their off hours staring at another screen. The Internet in the midst of a pandemic becomes a human right, an absolute necessity. Irresistible become irreplaceable.

Still, there are fun little digressions into the history of Tetris, Steve Jobs' luddite tendencies when it came to his kids and Freud's obsession with cocaine. I would however like a word with the monsters that purposely induced visual amblyopia in kittens, permanently pickling their visual cortex.