17 billion dollars is what Meta has agreed to pay this week to nearly fifty US states for designing Instagram and Facebook to hook minors, thus closing, without a verdict, the trial that began eight days ago in Oakland. Behind the number is something that does have substance, an entire generation that has surrendered its childhood to a design intended not to let it fully escape. One more symptom of the United States that eats away at our soul without leaving anything of what was good about it.
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There was no conviction. There was a price. And that difference, technical for a jurist, is almost moral for an economist and a humanist. Meta has decided that it is cheaper to pay over ten years —and remodel its platforms for minors with daily limits of two hours, breaks at 15, 60, and 90 minutes, night blocks, age verification, end of “like” counters— than to risk a jury saying it knew exactly what it was doing.
And it knew. And here I allow myself a very personal heresy. I’m starting to think that this model —the one that creates hunger and then sells us the cure, the one that turns even adolescent grief into a metric— has become a reference without culture, a way of extracting our soul to devour it calmly, of manufacturing living demons who no longer even know how to live. Very American. I’m not talking about a country or its people, who are not to blame, but it is the instrument. I’m talking about a civilizational model that confuses appetite with meaning and exports it to the entire planet like an assembly line. Today it’s social networks, another day it’s drug money laundering.
That architecture was designed to capture the attention of an adolescent brain just as a cigarette was designed to capture the body. There is already talk of the “tobacco moment” of networks. But the nuance that the agreement does not resolve, and which is more concerning than the figure, is that this is not a problem for minors, it is a problem of the era. The sociology of suicidal behavior has known for half a century about the Werther effect —the contagion by imitation that Goethe unintentionally unleashed and that a mass medium can multiply—. An algorithm that pushes self-harm content does not distinguish between thirteen and forty years old.
It’s 15 years of a business model with a colossal negative externality —the mental health of entire populations— without a price on any balance sheet. 17 billion is an anecdote compared to the 201 billion that Meta invoiced last year. What matters is that, for the first time, the market admits that this attention had an owner. Enough of treating digital mental health as a separate chapter of the economy. It is a GDP item that bills lives.
If one wants to be a humanist, what burns is not the balance sheet, it’s the trap. Borges dreamed of an infinite library where one could get lost without finding meaning; infinite scroll is that library made an algorithm, without a last page. Addictive design turns that gift into a condemnation. The journey is exhausting, and the promise —to close the application, to be bored without guilt— never arrives because the system was built so that it wouldn’t.
That’s why this agreement, while historic, is just the beginning of something, and it is necessary to propose, to try other things. Such as design limits ceasing to be a condition for child litigation and becoming a market norm for all ages, like a seatbelt, enforceable on anyone who sells human attention. May the next ruling not distinguish between thirteen and forty years, because the algorithm doesn’t distinguish either.
Seventeen billion will not bring back the sunsets lost staring at a screen instead of looking at the world. But if we learn to read this agreement well, perhaps we will begin to build something more valuable than any compensation: the right, so ancient and forgotten, to be bored in peace, at any age, far from the appetite of others.