> The above is an edited extract from Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention by Johann Hari, published by Bloomsbury on 6 January.

That's not a good analogy. We actually could do this, in the same way that society has banned various other categories of harmful products.

The business model of slave plantation is another one that society got rid of.

Point ceded on the analogy. The point I was trying to make is that the only solution was a flippant suggestion that we just "ask social media companies to change their business model". Leaving aside how difficult of a proposition that is, it would have extremely negative knock-on effects. These companies are roughly 50% of the S&P 500 top 10.

> The business model of slave plantation is another one that society got rid of.

Ya I mean 655K people died fixing that issue[1]

I admit I am being unfair here, but the trend of "identifying" an obvious and well known problem and writing an article about it, really frustrates me. We KNOW climate change[2] is a problem, we KNOW social media is bad, we KNOW that housing/living costs in much of the world are unaffordable for generations of people. I would appreciate at least exploring the surface area of what a real solution could be.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualt...

[2] Those that do not accept climate change still recognize that our key fuel inputs are finite resources. Thus we still need to make changes to prevent foreign wars, increased pricing and maintaining global progress.