There is a strange moment when you realise something has shifted. You log in, you scroll, you click… and there’s this dull fatigue, as if every gesture demands a little more energy than it did yesterday. The services we once loved have grown heavy, chatty, saturated with demands. You catch yourself sighing at a feed that looks less and less like a conversation, and more like a supermarket hallway on stimulants.
This slide isn’t anecdotal. It’s a precise mechanism, patient, almost geometric. First the platforms charm us, then they tighten their grip, and eventually they squeeze. And we stay there, convinced it’s normal. Because “everyone is there”. Because leaving would cost too much, too many files, too many connections, too many habits.
What if this slow deterioration wasn’t a fate, but a system?
What if the tools designed to simplify our lives had turned into machines that erode our attention, our knowledge, and sometimes even our institutions?
We may have entered an era where technology doesn’t simply malfunction, it decays methodically, and takes us with it. The challenge now is not indignation, but understanding. Because once a mechanism is decoded, it stops being a trap.
