EVERY second, thousands of people tap ‘I agree’ without reading a word. The law is satisfied. The platform is protected. The user is not. Consent, as it operates in the digital environment today, is not a legal safeguard. It is a legal loophole. To meet the legal condition, you are given a privacy notice, you agree, and business continues as usual. The post-consent digital harm follows quietly and legally.

People do not agree on much these days. But one thing that brings them together is the feeling that they have reached a point of digital exhaustion, scrolling through mindless content. Even when they want to stop, the system is designed to keep them manipulated and glued to screens. The most they can do is raise their protest on the same social media platforms before being swept away in a fleeting storm of reels.

People are lonelier and more hopeless than ever before. Technology is the predominant reason. Everyone is desperate to understand why today’s youngsters seem unhappier than the generations that came before. Marc Zao-Sanders’ study in the Harvard Business Review found that therapy and companionship had become the single most common use of generative AI in 2025, surpassing coding, research and content........

© Dawn