People Who Don’t Like People Are Making All of Our Decisions.

For two decades, I have watched us blindly fall for one sales pitch after another. Every app and advancement comes shrouded in promises of “progress” and “connectivity” and “convenience.” And in many early cases—such as the invention of ride-sharing apps—Silicon Valley truly did deliver a better mousetrap. But we’re getting diminishing returns. We are living in Silicon Valley’s future now, and we are lonelier, more anxious, and more polarized than ever before. Are the mousetraps better? Safer? Who knows. But the mice inside are miserable.