The following section is pieced together from Tim Wu's The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to get Inside our Heads:

Every instant of every day we are bombarded with information. In fact, all complex organisms, especially those with brains, suffer from information overload. Our eyes and ears receive lights and sounds (respectively) across the spectrums of visible and audible wavelengths; our skin and the rest of our innervated parts send their own messages of sore muscles or cold feet. All told, every second, our senses transmit an estimated 11 million bits of information to our poor brains, as if a giant fiber-optic cable were plugged directly into them, firing information at full bore. In light of this, it is rather incredible that we are even capable of boredom.

Theodore MacManus, who had so famously branded Cadillac, Dodge, and Chrysler, decided he’d had it. Writing in The Atlantic, he denounced both his own industry and the whole of modern civilization: “Advertising has gone amuck,” he wrote, “in that it has mistaken the surface silliness for the sane solid substance of an averagely decent human nature.” A serious Catholic, he blamed the American brand of Protestantism for creating a “Nadir of Nothingness” in which people worshipped consumer goods as “brightly packaged gifts of the gods.”

Helen Woodward, a copywriter of prominence, wrote a popular book lamenting the emptiness of what she’d done with her life. She offered a professional confession: “In the advertising business we thought ourselves important. We thought we knew what we were doing; we had our plans for next week or next year. The realization came to me with a slow shock that I was nothing, we were nothing. We were feathers all of us, blown about by winds which we neither understood nor controlled.”

The darkest was the work of James Rorty, another former copywriter, who wrote Our Master’s Voice: Advertising (1934), in which he described the job’s effect on the soul. The adman, he wrote, “inevitably empties himself of human qualities. His daily traffic in half-truths and outright deceptions is subtly and cumulatively degrading. No man can give his days to barbarous frivolity and live. And ad-men don’t live. They become dull, resigned, hopeless. Or they become daemonic fantasts and sadists.” In one poetical passage reminiscent of “The Hollow Men,” T. S. Eliot’s 1925 cry of despair for Western civilization following the Great War, Rorty memorializes his former colleagues thus: “they are dead men. Their bones are bakelite. Their blood is water, their flesh is pallid—yes, prick them and they do not bleed. Their eyes are veiled and sad or staring and a little mad. From them comes an acrid odor—they do not notice it, it may be only the ozone discharge of the machine itself.”

The consumer movement, meanwhile, kept up a relentless onslaught over the early 1930s, with the publication of still more books, including 100,000,000 Guinea Pigs (on food and drug advertising) and Skin Deep (an attack on the cosmetic industry), as well as Eat, Drink and Be Wary, Guinea Pigs No More, and The Popular Practice of Fraud, all of them encouraging a growing sense that neither advertisements nor manufacturers were to be trusted. The combined effect raised an interesting question—just what use, if any, was advertising to the economy?

The following section is pieced together from Jaron Lanier's Ten Arguments for Deleting your Social Media Accounts Right Now:

Here’s Sean Parker, the first president of Facebook: We need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever.… It’s a social-validation feedback loop … exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.… The inventors, creators—it’s me, it’s Mark [Zuckerberg], it’s Kevin Systrom on Instagram, it’s all of these people—understood this consciously. And we did it anyway … it literally changes your relationship with society, with each other.… It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.

Here’s Chamath Palihapitiya, former vice president of user growth at Facebook: The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works.… No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth. And it’s not an American problem—this is not about Russian ads. This is a global problem.… I feel tremendous guilt. I think we all knew in the back of our minds—even though we feigned this whole line of, like, there probably aren’t any bad unintended consequences. I think in the back, deep, deep recesses of, we kind of knew something bad could happen.… So we are in a really bad state of affairs right now, in my opinion. It is eroding the core foundation of how people behave by and between each other. And I don’t have a good solution. My solution is I just don’t use these tools anymore. I haven’t for years.

One of the first behaviorists, Ivan Pavlov, famously demonstrated that he didn’t need to use real food. He would ring a bell when a dog was fed, and eventually the dog would salivate upon hearing the bell alone.

Social media algorithms are usually “adaptive,” which means they constantly make small changes to themselves in order to try to get better results; “better” in this case meaning more engaging and therefore more profitable. A little randomness is always present in this type of algorithm.

Let’s suppose an algorithm is showing you an opportunity to buy socks or stocks about five seconds after you see a cat video that makes you happy. An adaptive algorithm will occasionally perform an automatic test to find out what happens if the interval is changed to, say, four and a half seconds. Did that make you more likely to buy? If so, that timing adjustment might be applied not only to your future feed, but to the feeds of thousands of other people who seem correlated with you because of anything from color preferences to driving patterns.

Social networks bring in another dimension of stimuli: social pressure. People are keenly sensitive to social status, judgment, and competition. Unlike most animals, people are not only born absolutely helpless, but also remain so for years. We only survive by getting along with family members and others. Social concerns are not optional features of the human brain. They are primal. The power of what other people think has proven to be intense enough to modify the behavior of subjects participating in famous studies like the Milgram Experiment and the Stanford Prison Experiment. Normal, noncriminal people were coerced into doing horrible things, such as torturing others, through no mechanism other than social pressure. On social networks, the manipulation of social emotions has been the easiest way to generate rewards and punishments. [...]

Originally, many of us who worked on scaling the internet hoped that the thing that would bring people together—that would gain network effect and lock-in—would be the internet itself. But there was a libertarian wind blowing, so we left out many key functions. The internet in itself didn’t include a mechanism for personal identity, for instance. Each computer has its own code number, but people aren’t represented at all. Similarly, the internet in itself doesn’t give you any place to store even a small amount of persistent information, any way to make or receive payments, or any way to find other people you might have something in common with.

Consider the billions of dollars taken in by Facebook, Google, and the rest of the so-called digital advertising industry every month. The vast majority of that money comes from parties who are seeking to change your behavior, and who believe they are getting results. Many of these behavior changes are similar to the ones that television ads try to provoke, like getting you to buy a car or go to a café.

I can highly recommend Richard Seymour's The Twittering Machine. I've quoted a section of it here.

The most current and on-point report that I've seen about our current climate, which the books above don't apply to—only due to being older than, well, having been released within that past few weeks—is this panel discussion with Shoshana Zuboff, Naomi Klein, and Simone Brown: ‘Surveillance in an era of pandemic and protest’. I highly recommend watching it.

A little more than a year ago, as western media were spreading fear about an app called FaceApp, I compared it with Facebook. Things are even worse now.