I love how the entire tech worldview is so impoverished at this point that people engaging with things on some first-order level is automatically proof that there is no crisis or that people even enjoy it.

I guess by that logic the American midwest is really in love with opioids, and there's no crisis there. Throw in some reference to Girard and scapegoats probably because the author has watched some Peter Thiel video on youtube and you have yourself a new blog post.

Using a product doesn't mean you like it. If I had another platform for connecting with family and friends that wasn't Facebook, I'd use it.

phone? email? txt? Skype/slack/discord/ anything else?

A single text or email isn't a list of events and status updates I can scroll through.

I'm not convinced there is a problem specifically with FB either. Personally its great to keep up to date with friends and family globally. I only spend 20 minutes a week though. I spent a lot more time on Twitter and Reddit and those platforms seem much more toxic.

I read your post - it looks like you equal the expression "normal people" with "me".

He doesn't say so precisely but like many invocations of this phrase it probably means something closer to "people not part of the intelligentsia / chattering classes." Of which it appears he would not be one of these normal persons.

He also doesn't really make the argument they like facebook, just that they use facebook.

Normal people really love getting their TV and internet from big cable companies. We can see that in the subscriber numbers for Comcast, Time Warner, etc...

Media want to control the narrative , even if their advice is wrong (as was in this pandemic). So does facebook, even though it isn't willing to do any work (i.e. pay a penny) to create it. The media is also (rightfully) mad because FB stole their ad revenue. Regardless it's fascinating to watch the transformation of mass media and the discovery of individual voices over prepackaged narratives.