Is the web site sharing with them or does it make you share with them so that your CPU does most of the processing and uploading to each advertising lead leech?
This would explain why we need more and more powerful/expensive phones just to keep browsing.
It's also gobs of telemtey and AB testing constantly watching how you're interacting with what's on the page and changing what you see to figure out what makes you engage more & longer. All that processing requires a lot of resources compared to sites that respect your privacy.
Every geek I knew in the early 90's was naively evangelizing about the internet ushering in a new age of enlightenment.
I was too, I admit. Am now optimistic about the benefits of a UBI but, with the above humbling experience, guardedly so — the unintended consequences might be impossible to predict.
Turns out that (amongst OECD countries) GDP per capita is not correlated with indicators of happiness at all. What is correlated is the degree of income equality...
and here is the great part...
Even for rich people. They too have better lives where there is more equitable income distribution. One day they will hopefully realise.
That study is reinforcing the greed angle, isn't it? If those poor and unhappy people wouldn't all be trying to become rich, but would say "fuck it", let's just live and be happy, it would all be fine.
Nobody could force a few billion people to do slave work for questionable amenities. They just need to stop wanting to be part of the so-called rich and their vision of what progress is. They do it out of greed and wanting to have it all. Technology for everyone. A basic human right, internet and shoes with a name on them.
Nothing speaks against a collective endeavor for progress and science to better the whole. But making it a competition:
The OECD is part of the problem.
Economic Co-operation and Development. Developments for enabling rich people and them competing against each other for resources. Not for creating equal footing. But for creating a controlled slave-market disguised as a developed country.