From today’s New York Times:

Facebook reported dazzling first quarter results last week: Net income nearly tripled to $1.5 billion, and monthly active users hit a record 1.65 billion. But it’s a much smaller number that leapt out at me.

Fifty minutes.

That’s the average amount of time, the company said, that users spend each day on its Facebook, Instagram and Messenger platforms (and that’s not counting the popular messaging app WhatsApp).

Maybe that doesn’t sound like so much. But there are only 24 hours in a day, and the average person sleeps for 8.8 of them. That means more than one-sixteenth of the average user’s waking time is spent on Facebook.

The average time that users spend on Facebook is nearing an hour…

But it’s not enough, because surveillance capitalism requires an ever-expanding amount of data.