Tech bros seem bent on controlling minds and politics

In Dave Eggers' 2021 novel The Every, a giant search engine company acquires an e-commerce behemoth.

- RAHUL JACOB

Delaney Wells, the lead character, plans a vigilante action against the company by getting a job with it.Her college thesis, written with a view to charm her way into the company, argued that it was immaterial that it was a monopoly if consumers were fine with it. Delaney describes the phenomenon as "Benevolent Market Mastery."

In the autumn of 2021, in a case of art foreshadowing real-life events, a whistleblower, Frances Haugen, gave the Wall Street Journal a stash of documents that showed that Facebook had been carrying out research for three years that revealed the damaging psychological effects on teens who used Instagram. Its findings revealed: “We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls,” said one slide from 2019, summarizing research about teen girls who experience the emotional issues, according to the WSJ report in 2021. "Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression,” said another slide. “This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.” The reports led to a Senate hearing.