Let's try it like this -- a disproportionate and extremely high number of the most brilliant minds in the world work in Silicon Valley. Overwhelmingly, that wor

Let's try it like this -- a disproportionate and extremely high number of the most brilliant minds in the world work in Silicon Valley. Overwhelmingly, that work is essentially "harvesting the behavior and attention of human beings for profit, most often through advertising" That describes all of social media and all of FAANG to various extents. Those are facts. Up until now I haven't said anything about whether this is good or bad, and I'm still not saying "this means we should shut it down." But I've seen too much to suggest that it makes sense to hand-wave this phenomenon away and say "it's just life." No. It's worth studying and doing our best to determine how dangerous this is.