What you're seeing now is no different than when boomers were coming of age. Leaving children in front of a screen to babysit them while the parents slave away at work or do house chores is a long standing tradition. The main difference now is everyone has their own screen to stare at and gets their own feed of propaganda. Instead of broadcasts and the family watching propaganda together you now have everyone staring at their own screen and getting their own special mix of propaganda from their personal feed.

It's true that it's brain rot. It's also true that now people spend more time with the screen than in the past. It used to be that you spent time with the screen on weekends and after work/school. Now the screen goes with you everywhere and you can pull it out to be distracted even in public. It isn't like 20-30 years ago when you had times in the day when you didn't have access to the screen. So each generation becomes more and more retarded (and divided) as time goes on.

When I was a small child in first grade there was a group of older ladies that came around wanting us to sign contracts and agree not to watch TV for an entire week. No one signed up because we thought they were retarded because they said the Simpsons were the devil and video games were bad for us. We wanted to have fun playing NES and Genesis games after school then spend family time on the weekends watching Simpsons and shit like Rescue 911. But they were right and we should have listened. They weren't totally right. Since they were just trying to replace the TV propaganda with the church propaganda. But a stopped clock is right now and again.

The propaganda is worse than ever since now it's interactive. There was a time when it wasn't pure propaganda and you could actually find useful stuff through the screen in the early days of the internet. Compared to TV it was really good. But now the internet is as bad as the TV ever was.