Bingo. We built the modern world upon the principle that math was some “universal language” but what we found in practice is that it just keeps feeding upon as many quantifiable data points as possible without even consideration for the question of stopping, or doing anything else instead.

Nah. All these things have one thing in common. These companies are all selling a convenience. Doesn’t matter what kind, what the problems are, or what that leads to in the end. What matters is they can sell consumers the convenience of a task or product. It’s why plastic is so popular, why block chain and IoT, air travel, and AWS are so prevalent, and why large grocery chains took off and have kept on going.

Is it good for the environment? No. Is it good for the people who use the products or services? No, most of the time it’s not. But it’s convenient and coupled with the practice of keeping most regular humans so busy they don’t have time for just about anything, it’s a recipe that works. If it were about destroying the environment people would never have made any effort to clean it up anywhere in the world. It’s unfortunate but true. The internet is just the same. It rose in popularity due not to how beneficial it was to the world for spreading knowledge. But because it was convenient. And until it became convenient to get and use, it wasn’t popular nor was it particularly cost effective.

These companies will sell things at a loss repeatedly if they think they can hook people in the convenience of the thing and parlay that into better profits. And they’re really good at it.