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 sabotgains individual well-being, relationships, and self-determination.
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A handful of tech companies monopolised the free and open web against its original promise of decentralisation. In order to become the trillion-dollar enterprises that they are today, these multinationals have become 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 rendering it free, yet adversarial to the user.. 
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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 countless research indicates we have never felt more alone.

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 tools that are finally again on their team — not someone else’s.