The obvious next question, of course, is how we got ourselves into this mess. In my experience, most people who struggle with the online part of their lives are not weak willed or stupid. They're instead successful professionals, striving students, loving parents; they are organized and used to pursuing hard goals. Yet somehow the apps and sites beckoning from behind the phone and tablet screen--unique among the many temptations they successfully resist daily--managed to succeed in metastasizing unhealthily far beyond their original roles.

很明显，下一个问题当然是我们怎么让自己陷入这样的泥潭里？以我的经验，大多数挣扎在上网这部分生活的人并不是意志薄弱或者愚蠢的。相反，他们是成功的专业人士，努力的学生，慈爱的父母；他们是安排有序的，并且习惯于追求有难度的目标。但是不知怎么的，那些应用和网站从手机和平板的屏幕背后招手，不同于他们平日里成功抵抗了的各种诱惑，成功地病态转移到远远偏离他们原始的角色上。

A large part of the answer about how this happened is that many of these new tools are not nearly as innocent as they might first seem. People don't succumb to screens because they're lazy, but instead because billions of dollars have been invested to make this outcome inevitable. Earlier I noted that we seem to have stumbled backward into a digital life we didn't sign up for. As I'll argue next, it's probably more accurate to say that we were pushed into it by the high-end device companies and attention economy conglomerates who discovered there are vast fortunes to be made in a culture dominated by gadgets and apps.

这种现象产生地绝大部分原因是，很多新工具并不是向他们第一眼看上去那么无辜。人们不是因为懒而屈从于屏幕，而是因为数十亿美元已经投资于促使这个结果不可避免。早些时候，我指出，我们似乎已经搬到在一个自己没有报名注册的数字生活中。就像我下面会强调的，可能这么说更准确：我们是被发现了在被产品和应用控制的社会群体中有巨额财富可图的高端设备公司和注意力经济集团强行推入这种生活里的。