My take is that a lack of opportunity / class stratification / societal mobility plays into this. It's essentially the same reason people play the lottery. When you're stuck in a seemingly intractable situation, you need the world to suddenly change around you. Maybe you win Powerball, or maybe you decide to just burn everything down out of desperation. Social media just amplifies those thoughts.

Don't you mean zero-sum? Cynicism often defaults to transactionalism and implying that people are motivated by nothing else and deconstructing any evidence to the contrary as if dopamine is never mutually released. Transactionalism is frequently and illogically zero-sum play that takes place within infinite games.

It was literally a utopia before business came along. Every site was built from passion, with no expectation of getting anything in return. It was a global community centered around sharing knowledge.

I’d go one step further and ban the consolidation of platforms by billionaires. The open internet no longer exists or will ever exist again

Americans have, on the whole, decided that being murdered is an acceptable price to pay for the right to carry pew-pew sticks at all times.