Thought I'm Wrestling With: Should Ingenuity Be Punished?
On attention engineering, Sucker’s Folly, and drawing a line between clever and cruel.
A friend of mine recently turned me onto the media outlet The Free Press. The platform positions itself as a home for heterodox journalism — stories and commentary that challenge mainstream narratives and aim to represent voices across political, cultural, and ideological divides. They focus on tackling topics that big outlets either avoid or frame through a biased lens.
Admittedly, I get more articles sent to my email than I care to read. I’ve been trying to employ Oliver Burkeman’s tip from a recent newsletter: read in the moment or delete the article. I have a tendency to see an enticing title and tell myself I’ll read it when I have time to “really” engage with it — but that’s just another form of avoidance. Or, as Steven Pressfield would put it, letting resistance win.
Anyway, the title that recently came through my Outlook inbox was:
“Social Media Shortens Your Life. Here’s How to Get Time Back.”
Immediately, I was drawn to the premise. Like anyone else, I struggle to find balance in my use of social media. I wasn’t looking for a silver bullet or some hack to forge unwavering discipline against temptation — I was just curious where the author was going to take the article.
The writer, Gurwinder Bhogal, outlined how apps like TikTok and Instagram warp our perception of time. Ironically, he touched on many of the same scientific principles about memory formation and the passage of time that I explored in Is Life Short or Long?
Bhogal says the sinister thing about social media is that it speeds up your sense of time — both in the moment and in retrospect — by simultaneously impairing your awareness of the present and your memory of the past.
Try to remember the last few posts you scrolled past.
You don’t.
I don’t either.
We got bamboozled.
Yet we keep going back for more.
The Lethe Effect
Theoretically, a social media feed should dilate time. It selects for content that’s exciting, outrageous, or scary — content that, by all logic, should heighten awareness and memory. But that’s not what happens.
Why?
Because when every post is alarming, your brain desensitizes. It starts to interpret outrage and novelty as routine. And routine — being passive and unmemorable — speeds up time.
Bhogal quoted Sean Parker, Facebook’s founding president, who once admitted:
“The thought process that went into building these applications was all about: ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?’”
Read that again.
In the digital economy, attention is the most valuable currency. I don’t care how convincing the bitcoiners are — the human nervous system trumps its value.
It struck me while reading this: maybe we’ve given too much freedom to tech companies — or, as some now call them, “attention engineers.”
When Clever Turns Predatory
This is a touchy subject. At face value, I’m advocating for regulation, which to some ears sounds like a slippery slope toward communism.
But here’s the real question:
What is the cost of letting ingenuity go too far?
Bhogal referenced the work of Bill Friedman, a casino manager who meticulously studied human behavior in order to design disorienting casino layouts. It’s called the Gruen effect — the moment a shopper forgets what they originally came for and starts aimlessly wandering and impulse-buying.
Grocery stores do this too. That’s why the essentials — milk, bread, eggs — are in the back. You’re forced to walk the full distance and pass distractions along the way.
The optimization of the Gruen effect happens when space is designed to disorient. Minimal sharp turns (which jolt awareness). No clear corners, no defined start or end.
Sound familiar?
Social media sites are designed in a very similar way.
Links are placed where your thumbs already go. Notifications pull you into a feed before you ever reach the message you opened the app to read. The goal is to alienate you from your own intentions — so you lose track of where you were, and when you were.
As Bhogal writes:
“What makes social media even more disorienting than a casino is that our feeds are not just mazes in space, but also in time.”
Social platforms exploit a dozen other tricks. They leverage our own behavior against us — and to their benefit. Our attention, time perception, and even our offline awareness are under siege.
And it’s not without consequence.
Sleep performance is trending down. Depression and anxiety are on the rise. Some researchers have even linked disrupted time-perception — potentially exacerbated by constant screen use — to earlier puberty onset in children.
Screen time also correlates with accelerated aging. Muscle loss. Bone density decline. Other metabolic issues.
Social Media Shortens Life — Literally
Which is the ultimate point of Bhogal’s piece:
Social media doesn’t just waste time — it compresses and degrades it.
So I return to my original question:
At what point do we admit the costs of these technologies outweigh the benefits?
In A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century, Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying introduce a term I think about often: Sucker’s Folly — the mistaken belief that just because something works immediately, it must be good overall.
But the “folly” is this:
The hidden costs show up later.
Sometimes in ways we couldn’t predict, and never imagined.
They use the automobile as an example. Cars solved transportation brilliantly. But decades later, we started seeing the real cost — greenhouse emissions, climate impacts, auto fatalities.
We’re evolutionarily wired to trust short-term payoffs because, in the ancestral world, long-term harms were rare. But modern technologies have long-tail risks — and we keep falling for them.
That’s why Bret and Heather argue that we need caution in our principles, and humility in our innovations.
The Folly of Social Media
Maybe now we’re finally seeing the folly.
Social media solved the problem of information flow. But it ruined authentic connection.
And now we’re seeing it degrade the very fabric of our lives.
Worse still — I’d argue that the “attention engineers” continue exploiting their capabilities, even with growing public awareness of the consequences.
So I ask, out of genuine curiosity:
Where is the line between clever behavioral design and outright manipulative harm?
Why do we continue giving innovators a pardon from the chaos they create?
A New Hippocratic Oath?
It’s not a one-to-one comparison, but I can’t help thinking of the Hippocratic Oath — the ancient physician’s pledge to prioritize patient care and do no harm.
Should we institute something similar across the tech sector?
This isn’t about punishing ingenuity — it’s about governing practices that systematically exploit cognitive vulnerabilities.
We already regulate nicotine, gambling, and alcohol — products that hijack human biology. Why should attention-harvesting design be exempt just because it’s clever?
As Uncle Ben told Peter Parker:
“With great power comes great responsibility.”
So should we hold “attention engineers” accountable for their abuse of power?
What constitutes abuse?
What’s fair?
What’s legal?
What’s ethical?
I don’t have a final answer.
But I do believe this:
We scroll, we age, we forget — and the architects keep building the maze.
Guardrails must be built before the system spins too far out of control.
Then again… who’s to say we aren’t already there?