Idealistic engineers built artificial intelligence & algorithms that are dismantling democracy
They came to Silicon Valley to connect the world, but many left the technology industry wondering if they had broken it.
The story of how a generation of engineers and product designers — many of them genuine idealists — built the algorithmic infrastructure that has been linked to political polarization, misinformation, and democratic erosion is not a tale of villains.
It is a story about what happens when good intentions meet a business model that rewards engagement over truth, and when “move fast and break things” becomes not a slogan but a moral framework.
The idealists
Justin Rosenstein helped design the Facebook “like” button. He believed he was spreading positivity.
“Our entire motivation was ‘Can we spread positivity and love in the world?’” Rosenstein says in the 2020 documentary The Social Dilemma. “The possibility that teens would be getting depressed when they don’t have enough likes, or it could be leading to political polarization, was nowhere on our radar”.
Tristan Harris, a former Google design ethicist, wrote a 144-page internal manifesto in 2013 titled A Call to Minimize Distraction & Respect Users’ Attention. He warned that a handful of designers — “mostly men, white, living in SF, aged 25–35” working at Google, Apple and Facebook — were having unprecedented impact on how millions of people spend their attention.
His concerns were heard. They were not acted upon.
“Technology is not inevitable,” said Jeff Orlowski, director of The Social Dilemma. “People are making it based on, in part, the market and market forces, and in part their values, ethics, and choices. Google and Facebook chose to go down a path that really optimized financial profitability”.
The business model that shaped the tools
The algorithms that now dominate global discourse were not designed to polarize. They were designed to maximize engagement — time spent, clicks generated, ads viewed.
But engagement optimization, applied at scale, has predictable outcomes. Algorithms prioritize content that reinforces existing beliefs. They amplify divisive material because division generates more interaction than nuance.
The documentary The Social Dilemma — which features interviews with former tech executives and engineers — depicts this dynamic through a dramatized algorithm, but the underlying mechanism is well-documented.
Tim Kendall, former head of monetization at Facebook, recalled that after spending all day trying to boost his firm’s profits, he could not stay off his own phone at home.
“Knowing what was going on behind the curtain, I still wasn’t able to control my usage,” Kendall said.
The result, critics argue, is a system that fragments attention and rewires behavior by design — not through malice, but through the relentless logic of a business model that treats human experience as raw material to be extracted and monetized.
Shoshana Zuboff, author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, describes this as “a new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales”.
The apparatus that governs this system — what she calls “Big Other” — “renders, monitors, computes, and modifies human behavior”.
The moral vacuum
The tech dissidents who now warn about the tools they built are often criticized for their late conversion. As one academic analysis of The Social Dilemma notes, the film portrays former executives as “the saviours of our current perils, while they are also the source of that peril to begin with”.
But the more troubling question is not whether these individuals are sincere in their regret. It is whether the culture that produced them — and the incentives that shaped their decisions — made the outcomes inevitable.
The phrase “move fast and break things,” famously attributed to Mark Zuckerberg, captured a philosophy in which disruption was a virtue and caution was a liability. But what was being broken was not always abstract.
It was, in some cases, the shared factual basis that democratic societies require.
“This is a climate change-scale problem,” Harris has said, describing the challenge of reforming the attention economy.
The recurring pattern
What the story of these engineers reveals is a pattern that predates them. In The Irresponsibles, former Facebook policy adviser Sarah Wynn-Williams describes the company’s internal culture as a “red book” of corporate commandments — a moral framework that demanded total loyalty to the project of growth and connectivity, while leaving little room for ethical self-examination.
The comparison is not to a totalitarian ideology, but to something subtler: a belief system in which progress is self-justifying, in which technical innovation is inherently good, and in which the question “should we build this?” is drowned out by the question “can we?”
One researcher who spent time embedded in police training sessions described feeling the pull of the warrior mentality despite his own critical perspective. If a researcher could feel that pull in a single session, what happens to engineers immersed in a culture for years?
The answer, according to the growing body of evidence, is that they build what the incentive structure rewards. And the incentive structure rewarded engagement, growth and profit — not democratic resilience.
What comes next
The tech dissidents agree on one point: regulation is necessary, and the companies cannot be trusted to regulate themselves.
“It will take massive public pressure to make the companies change their policies,” Harris has said.
The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation and the Digital Services Act represent attempts to impose external accountability. But enforcement across jurisdictions remains difficult, and tech companies have lobbied aggressively against such measures.
Meanwhile, the tools remain. The algorithms continue to optimize for engagement. And the question that the idealist engineers never asked — what happens when the thing you build to connect people becomes the thing that divides them — has become the defining question of the digital age.
The moral vacuum at the heart of “move fast and break things” was not that its architects were evil. It was that they were earnest, and the system rewarded earnestness that served growth, and disregarded earnestness that questioned it.