Engineered Addictions

How silicon valley is putting a price tag on your attention - and relationships

Every few months, a new social platform promises to “fix” the problems with existing ones. BeReal would bring authenticity. Clubhouse would bring intimacy. Each follows the same trajectory: pure intentions, venture funding, growth pressure, algorithmic manipulation, inevitable corruption. I know because I tried to build one.

I spent a year building a social platform designed to bring people together in real life through social circles and communities. It failed spectacularly, like most attempts at "fixing" social media have. I realized that there is a problem with social media that can’t be solved with a new app.

We don’t all have ADHD. We have an addiction. Growing up, I barely knew a world without social media, and neither did my friends. We were the guinea pigs for Silicon Valley's great dopamine experiment, and now we’re waking up with the side effects.

Circliq was going to be different. Instead of endless feeds, we’d focus on the real-world. Instead of algorithmic manipulation, we’d connect people offline. Instead of addiction, we’d create genuine connections.

The platform was doomed from the start because I was still thinking within the same broken framework. But when investors asked how I'd scale, how I'd get as many events and eyeballs as possible, I found myself asking the same questions that created this mess in the first place.

That's when I realized the brutal truth: you can't fix these problems using their own tactics. I lost motivation with Circliq when I understood I wasn't solving the problem. I was just going to become part of it.

Inevitable Corruption

Every attempt to “fix” social media eventually becomes part of the problem because the economic structure creates inevitable corruption of the original mission. The pattern is always the same: start with connection, end with extraction.

Look at BeReal, which promised authentic sharing through simultaneous unfiltered photos. For a brief moment, it felt different. No algorithms, no endless scrolling, just genuine moments shared with friends. Then it raised venture capital, hit scale, and needed to hit growth numbers and meet quarterly metric goals. The focus shifted from “authenticity” to “daily active users.” It sold for $500M and the cycle began again.

Instagram started as a simple photo-sharing app among friends, celebrating the beautiful connections that smartphones made possible. Then Facebook acquired it for $1 billion, the largest sum known at that time for a mobile app. The chronological feed disappeared, replaced by an algorithm optimized for engagement. Even twitter began with the elegant simplicity of sharing 140 character status updates for friends, then became a platform for viral takes and algorithmic amplification of whatever generates the strongest emotional response.

This doesn’t mean these platforms haven’t done genuine good. They’ve connected families across continents, amplified marginalized voices, and organized social movements. But even their successes get weaponized once growth becomes the primary metric.

This is exactly what would’ve happened to Circliq if we raised capital like we tried to. The addiction we experience as users is the direct result of incentives that make good platforms impossible to sustain. The progression is predictable:

Pure Intentions: Founders, like myself, genuinely want to connect people, share authentic moments, and build community. The early versions feel magical because they follow this original mission.

Growth Imperative: To get funding, you need users. To get more funding, you need exponential growth. Growth becomes the primary metric, overwhelming the original mission. The flame grows out of the fireplace and starts burning down the house.

Engagement Optimization: Growth requires engagement. Engagement requires keeping people on the platform. Time-on-platform becomes the north star and KPI. This is where addiction starts being engineered rather than accidental.

Algorithm Manipulation: To maximize time-on-platform, you need to show people content that keeps them scrolling. Algorithms surface whatever provokes strong emotional responses - anger, envy, fear, outrage. The feed becomes a drug dealer and the drug is dopamine and emotional surges.

Complete Misalignment: The platforms at this point are raking in millions. Their original mission of bringing people together keeps them apart, scrolling alone and consuming content designed to manipulate emotions for profit.

This isn’t because founders are evil or users are weak. It’s because the incentive structures make this outcome nearly inevitable. Even well-intentioned people get trapped by these systems.

The house always wins

We keep trying to solve this problem at the individual level with digital detoxes, screen time limits, willpower, and apps to block other apps. But you can’t solve a systematic problem at the individual level. It's like solving pollution by buying an electric car.

Every major social platform employs a team of behavioral psychologists, runs thousands of A/B tests, and uses machine learning to find exact psychological vulnerabilities. They know that intermittent variable rewards are more addictive than consistent ones, just like slot machines. They know that social comparison triggers deeper engagement than sharing. They know outrage keeps you scrolling longer.

Your willpower, no matter how strong, is no match for that level of systematic manipulation. It's like betting against the house in the casino. The house always wins and you leave addicted.

Apps like TikTok, Instagram, and X aren't neutral tools. They're carefully crafted slot machines engineered to get you hooked. Pull to refresh. Tap to like. Scroll forever. Random rewards. Notifications timed to spike your cortisol. The same behavioral loops that addict gamblers now hook children and adults alike.

The data shows the impact clearly. Depression and anxiety among Gen Z has skyrocketed ever since smartphones and social apps exploded around 2012. We weren't built to consume every disaster in real-time, compare ourselves to hundreds of curated avatars, or stay plugged in 24/7. And yet, here we are.

What might actually work

We need a fundamental re-evaluation of what our phones should be for, what role technology should play in human connection, and whether these platforms can ever return to their original purpose of actually bringing us together instead of keeping us scrolling… apart. Individual solutions won’t work against systematic problems, so we need systematic solutions:

Different Funding Methods: What if social platforms were funded like utilities or public goods instead of venture-backed and advertisement driven growth machines? Subscription models, cooperatives, or public funding could prioritize user wellbeing over engagement metrics. Wikipedia thrives as a donation-funded cooperative. These models exist - they just don’t scale at venture-required rates.

Regulated Algorithms: We regulate tobacco companies because their products are addictive and harmful. Algorithmic transparency or giving users control could preserve the benefits while reducing the addictive design patterns. The EU’s Digital Services Act already requires algorithmic transparency from large platforms.

Structural Separation : Maybe platforms that make money from advertising shouldn’t be the same ones designing our social interactions. Separating both economic incentives from the social functions could preserve both.

Alternative Metrics: Instead of measuring daily active users and time-on-platform, what if platforms were evaluated on user wellbeing, relationship quality, or real-world connections facilitated? What if we measured social platforms like we measure hospitals?

The deeper issue is that we’ve outsourced our human connection to systems designed for profit. Real connection happens in the margins that can’t be monetized. The conversations that don’t generate data, the relationships that don’t scale, and the moments that can’t be optimized for engagement.

Perhaps the goal isn’t to build better social media. Perhaps it's to build systems that make social media less necessary. Improve third spaces where people connect directly, authentically, without intermediation by systems designed to extract value from their attention.

This isn't about being anti-tech. I'm a founder and engineer myself. It's about being pro-human. These platforms have genuinely connected people across continents, organized movements, and amplified voices that needed to be heard. The core ideas were beautiful and necessary.

But we took a catastrophic wrong turn when we optimized for engagement over connection, for time-on-platform over user wellbeing, for extraction over authentic relationship. Now we’re fighting a battle against the architecture of distraction, against companies that profit from fractured attention and frayed mental health.

The fight isn’t against the people using the tools, or even the people building them. It’s against the systems that make addiction profitable and authentic connection impossible.

We built these platforms. We can build better ones. But only if we're willing to abandon the economic models that made the current ones inevitable. Until we change those incentives, every attempt to fix social media will become part of the problem it’s trying to solve. We’ll keep wondering why we can’t just put our phones down, not realizing that billion-dollar companies have spent a decade making sure we can’t.

The solution isn't another app. It's changing the rules of the game entirely.

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