You make a good point, and I agree with you (you're talking to someone who doesn't use any social media). But we might be accused of the whole 'trains still run on time' argument.

The proofs that I'm referring to are not infrastructural or economic, they're cultural/ educational. To name just one issue, attention spans have been hijacked by vapid short-form content. If you've ever worked in a school, you wouldn't need to look thousands of miles away to see evidence of decline. Kids, admittedly, have never been good at focusing, but things are getting progressively worse.

The prescient Mark Fisher wrote this in 2009:

'Ask students to read for more than a couple of sentences and many - and these are A-level students mind you - will protest that they can't do it. The most frequent complaint teachers hear is that it's boring. It is not so much the content of the written material that is at issue here; it is the act of reading itself that is deemed to be 'boring'. What we are facing here is not just time-honored teenage torpor, but the mismatch between a post-literate 'New Flesh' that is 'too wired to concentrate' and the confining, concentrational logics of decaying disciplinary systems. To be bored simply means to be removed from the communicative sensation-stimulus matrix of texting, YouTube and fast food; to be denied, for a moment, the constant flow of sugary gratification on demand. Some students want Nietzsche in the same way that they want a hamburger; they fail to grasp - and the logic of the consumer system encourages this misapprehension - that the indigestibility, the difficulty is Nietzsche