I don’t. People were clearly already vain, reactionary, signaling-obsessed, shallow and gossipy, and the ad system isn’t (by itself) the part that makes Facebook an existential threat.

The misaligned A.I. which drives engagement — or whatever the precise metric is — with no regard for anything else, and optimises that metric ruthlessly with continuous variations to tease out the most effective way to maximise eyeball-seconds, that’s the problem.

The paperclip factory doesn’t hate you, it’s just that you’re made of stuff that can be used to make more paperclips.