This isn't theoretical, it's happening right now. The boom in digital detoxes, the dumbphone revival among young people, the shift from public feeds to private DMs, and the "Do Not Disturb" generation are all symptoms of the same thing. People are feeling the manipulation and are choosing to opt out, one notification at a time.
It's worth adding that "disengagement" does not mean "not giving a f*ck", and I worry that it isn't a good human response either.
So what's the difference between "not giving a f*ck" and "disengagement"? I think where the former works on the individual level, the latter is supposed to work on the collective level. I'm no scholar on any social sciences, mind you, but I worry that disengagement can only lead to positive change in conjunction with the Broken windows theory[0]. Here's the bummer: A lot of us are already in said stage of disengagement.
We somehow are in an atmosphere that makes it unpleasant for everyone and let the environment decay together, but the provoked collective change is just not happening. The dumbphone and digital detoxes are outliers. What happens instead is that the threshold for what's acceptable is systematically being lowered, and my biggest gripe is that it's done in the name of equality and inclusion while the imbalance between demographics is just growing. Tell me why?
There was a movement after Occupy Wall street and the Arabic Spring where it got fashionable to Not Giving a F*ck[1]. It contrasted a movement of self-optimization, growth-hacking, and some data-driven lifestyle usually reserved for corporate marketing. Morphemes such as hyper/super/über got resurrected from a nostalgic sentiment of the economic boom in the 80/90s, the neoliberal free-market Accelerationism and Bitcoin certainly fit in there. While "not giving a f*ck" was a critique of the established attention-grabbing system to promote the individuality of citizens, it also got misinterpreted by political representatives and corporate operators that started to put more focus on their own career than the responsibility of their current role. They all "didn't give a f*ck" anymore in a world that got more and more connected, year after year.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Subtle_Art_of_Not_Giving_a...