Had what felt like a minor lightbulb moment in response to this observation from Warren:

Imagine a story where the events in our lives that happen online are never depicted or mentioned. A day would seem twelve hours long and the protagonists would spend two thirds of that time asleep.

This may go some way to explaining a) why the contemporary literatures that try to capture and reflect the lives of the massively online don’t seem to get a great deal of traction: those twelve hours of screentime are effectively impossible to narrate. (Well, maybe not impossible, but arguably unreadable, if the “autofiction” I’ve tried to engage with is any measure.)

That in turn offers a possible reason for b) the contemporary success of genre literatures, in which screentime is simply not present in the fabula (as in e.g. fantasy, historical fiction) or can be handwaved away (as in sf) via either the introduction of a more evolved form of the same functionality (implants, ambient computation), or some implicit societal transformation that leaves the whole horrorshow in its fictional past, much like we left behind laudanum, leeches and lead-based make-up.

You might argue that this only applies to the narrow demographic that reads for pleasure, but I think that actually emphasises the point: whether consciously or not, that audience can feel the contradiction between the literate and post-literate modes of fiction and the infinite scroll, respectively, and they do not go to the former for an experience that the latter is inherently better at providing.