Since the 1950s, with the rise of e.g. alcohol, cigarette, and junk food, society got exposed to a series of new consumer-facing products engineered to exploit physically addictive properties targeting the human body to sell more at all costs. Today, tech companies have spent two decades engineering digitally addictive products targeting the human mind to resell attention at all cost. In turn, society finds itself amid a widespread epidemic of constant partial attention, internet addiction, and unfulfilling junk connections. 
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A handful of tech multinationals monopolised the free and open web against its original promise of decentralisation. In order to become the trillion-dollar multinationals that they are today, these multinationals became not just advertisement companies but what Shoshana Zuboff terms surveillance capitalists. This new breed of capitalism made capturing human attention and reselling it a prevalent new economic imperative of the 21st Century, corrupting the development of most commonly used technologies. 
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Clocking in 2 hours and 19 minutes on average, social media will cost the next generation over 800 hours annually, and 6 years and 11 months in total throughout. Sadly enough, with this ever-increased exposure, the numbers indicate social media will be the defining activity of most people’s life while it sabotages their well-being, self-determination, and relationships. 

Telos is part of the rapidly growing field of responsible technology. A movement which seeks to move away from time spent, and move towards time well spent. As consumer awareness is rapidly increasing, sentiments around authenticity, self-development, and offline relationships are exploding as consumers favour services that are finally on their team — not someone else’s.