They Own Us Now

My dad and I are not Facebook friends.

Not long after the president’s first term began a decade ago, my dad and I stopped speaking over a racist Facebook post about the Super Bowl. We did not speak — not a word, not a text message, nothing — for three years. 

We gave up each other, but we did not give up Facebook, which is something I failed to recognize and feels increasingly significant. 

There is an early scene early in Jane Smiley’s 1991 Pulitzer Prize winning novel, A Thousand Acres, in which Larry Cook says to his daughter Ginny, the narrator, about the bank, “Owns us now.” Larry has over-leveraged his thousand acres to keep the family farm running and believes that his longterm, friendly relationship with banker Marv Carson will insulate him from negative consequences.

“Owns us now” is not a throwaway line. 

“Owns us now” will be the farm and the family’s undoing.

I recently rewatched The Insider movie about big tobacco whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand. In testimony, Wigand says, “We are in the nicotine delivery business…” and that cigarette smoking “produces a physiological response, which meets the definition of a drug. Nicotine is associated with impacts on satisfaction, and it has a pharmacological affect that crosses the blood-brain barrier intact.”

Here’s the 60 Minutes interview that’s the basis for the movie.

You can’t look at those big tobacco revelations today without noting the glaring parallels with social media: addiction, physiological response, a dopamine triggering system. 

As Sarah Wynn-Williams writes near the end of her 2025 book Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism — her insider account of working for Facebook — “Facebook was long aware that its research, models, and programs sought to optimize use engagement at all costs. Facebook employed a series of ‘addictive by design’ features specifically targeted and tailored to exploiting the vulnerabilities of young users, while hiding the risky and harmful nature of such features. Forcing every lever to drive engagement and drive that addiction.”

If big tobacco was in the nicotine delivery business, the screens we carry in our hands are in the dopamine delivery business. But that’s not all. Even the big media companies are in on the game. In The Insider, we also watch CBS cave to the power of big money and big tobacco exactly the same way they’re caving today to the president and his golden coterie of social media oligarchs. 

Technology has upped the ante, but the game is the same.

Over the last month or so, I’ve been asking people about social media use. I recognize this is purely anecdotal, but the over-50 set I talked to get most of their news and/or news links from Facebook while younger folks get theirs from Instagram, Reddit, Tiktok. Very few get news directly from news outlets.

No surprises there, but it does increasingly feel like the apps on our phones, from maps to weather to banking to social media to google, are the tools we can no longer live without. I am reminded of the 2017 book Churchill and Orwell. “Orwell saw that people might become slaves of the state,” author Thomas E. Ricks writes, “but he did not foresee that they might also become something else that would horrify him — products of corporations, data resources to be endlessly mined and peddled elsewhere. He would no doubt have been a powerful critic of such things.”

With social media being free of charge and scrolling effectively endless, we can easily justify not paying for vetted, fact-checked news while considering ourselves duly informed and connected and simultaneously wondering why we feel so uninformed, isolated and anxious.

Meanwhile, no one is taking more advantage of this era than the president (who bleats out lies and hateful rhetoric from his own social media platform all day, every day) and the billionaire tech bros who cuddle up to him at his elite, exclusive Florida country club for personal favors to continue their personal enrichment. If we were characters in Orwell’s 1984, those guys would be the ruling class, the thought police, and those of us on their platforms: the proles.

I don’t want to be a prole, but here I am on the apps, volunteering for duty.

“Liberal democracy requires patience, tolerance, and perspective, but torrents of sensory experiences — it is too much to call it all ‘information’ — assault those virtues, wrote Tom Nichols in Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault from Within on Modern Democracy. “The constant ability to see into the lives of our neighbors, to compare ourselves to strangers, to be in constant contact with the entire planet day and night, is unnatural and pushes the human mind far beyond its capacity for reason and reflection.”

Like the liars who sold us big tobacco, men like Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg are sucking the life out of us in a competition to be trillionaires while helping Trump and his allies feed us targeted propaganda in what we call — you can’t make this up — our feeds.

They feed us. And when we scroll, we hungrily watch our screens and gobble up every morsel, from the time we wake up until we go to bed. 

Proles.

Like with my dad back in 2017, it feels increasingly like we are sacrificing our real life connections for digital ones, and since no one is forcing us to download an app or hit the like button or share a post, it is easy to convince ourselves that we are simply employing free will, using our voices, communing with “friends” (Facebook did not choose that word by accident), exercising our First Amendment rights to protect democracy.

We think we are in control.

But like the tobacco companies and the banker in A Thousand Acres, the president and his tech bro buddies are laughing all the way to Mar a Lago. 

They own us now.

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