A growing number of refugees from Google and Facebook–including Sean Parker, Tristan Harris, Chamath Palihapitiya, Justin Rosenstein, Leah Pearlman, Loren Brichter, James Williams, and Roger McNamee–ranging in age from twentyish to sixtyish are coming out to mainstream media with this comment on social media: It’s a Bad Idea. They aren’t just explaining that clicking on Like, seeing that Red Alert new friend symbol, or reacting to an audible Notification gives you a jolt of dopamine, the chemical basis of behavioral addictions. They are claiming that the constant distraction of our devices has already eroded our ability to remember, reason, make decisions, and even control our own minds.

These well-heeled, highly educated insiders are by no means immune to the affliction. They employ various countermeasures, including turning off their phones for the night at 7 pm, programming their home Internets to shut down for a portion of each day, severely restricting access by their children, and hiring a social media assistant to maintain their accounts.

So much for that person’s ability to remember and reason.

Commanding our attention is the specific, scientifically-pursued goal of social media companies, a clearly stated and closely tracked mission. The target economy is the attention economy, an Internet shaped around the demands of advertisers. Google maintains an internal dashboard displaying how much of people’s attention it has commandeered for advertisers in real time. Smart phone owners today touch, swipe, or tap their phones an average of 2,617 times per day, each one delivering a valuable piece of monetizable information directly to marketeers.

Because it fundamentally changes the way we process the world, social media enabled by portable technology could lead to dystopia. Humanity’s experience with and perceptions of facts, news, groups, candidates, government, and human interactions are being fundamentally changed. Some fear the loss of democracy: what constitutes an informed decision today?

The Before in Life Before refers to the era without widely accessible social media–ie, most of human history. Few people under the age of twenty have direct experience of this, even those well outside of the First World. A UCSC college student who spent last summer in Central America told me she was astonished to encounter people living in flimsy shacks with outdoor plumbing and smart phones. She ascribed it to the human desire for interconnection.

I ascribe it to the human susceptibility to psychological manipulation by deep-pocketed corporations.

Facebook played a role in not only the election of Donald Trump, but also the genocide of the Rohingya. Rumors circulated on WhatsApp (owned by Google) led to seven people being lynched in India last May. Were these inadvertent results? The way online advertising is solicited and targeted, the device features designed to draw our attention, and the rapid spread of unvetted information are core aspects of the revenue model for social media companies.

All of them were working perfectly in those cases.