Social networks, Facebook’s first president, Sean Parker, now admits, were designed from the start to exploit “a vulnerability in human psychology.” He, his colleague Mark Zuckerberg, and other architects of the systems “understood this consciously, and we did it anyway.”20 “You don’t realize it,” another former Facebook executive, Chamath Palihapitiya, says, “but you are being programmed.”21 The goal of the programming is to maximize “time-on-device”—a term common to both Las Vegas and Silicon Valley. The Internet industry may have begun in idealism, but it’s now powered by a manipulative and
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