In the past few weeks, lawyers have argued that social media companies knowingly addicted people to their platforms to keep them compulsively engaged. On the other side of the country, I discussed with some friends their misgivings about heaven and hell. A few days later, I realized both of these were, at the root, the same conversation. The question is what sort of life we are being trained to imagine.
The cases against social media companies such as Meta are about the harms minors can face on these platforms, but they’re also about what plaintiffs argue are features engineered to keep developing brains addicted to digital feeds through autoplay, push notifications, and engagement-maximizing algorithms.
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