I am writing an op-ed on the ethics of social media when my phone buzzes. I pick it up. I open TikTok. Two minutes later, I am watching a stranger interviewing people on the street, and I have forgotten what sentence I was working on. Score one for the philosophers.

In the Ethics of the Attention Economy: The Problem of Social Media Addiction, Vikram Bhargava and Manuel Velasquez argue that social media companies are committing a distinctive kind of wrongdoing by designing their platforms to be addictive. 

They make four claims that are hard to argue with. 

• Social media pits our urges against the lives we say we want to lead. 

• The harm and the compulsion can't be cleanly separated, the way nicotine could in principle be separated from a cigarette's carcinogens. 

• The platforms exploit us in a demeaning way by feeding our own data back at us in an ever-more-effective form. 

• And the attention-economy business model gives companies a structural incentive to keep doing all of it.

I agree with all four. My TikTok detour just confirmed it.

Where I part company with Bhargava and Velasquez is one word: distinctive. They argue that something morally novel is happening here, that what social media does to us deserves its own ethical category, separate from cigarettes, slot machines, billboards, infomercials, supermarket layouts, and Saturday-morning cartoons selling sugar cereal. I don't think it does. Manipulating attention for profit is one of the oldest businesses there is. We have always known we were inside it. And by and large, we have decided we'd rather be inside it than not.

Consider the company that ran the first commercial ad on the radio: a real estate firm that paid for 10 minutes of airtime on WCBS-FM (101.1). Within a decade, the entire medium had reorganized itself around the principle that programming exists to deliver an audience to advertisers. Television followed. Newspapers had been built on the same logic for a century before that. Bhargava and Velasquez acknowledge this; they note that radio and TV ran on attention-economy business models, too. But then they argue that adaptive algorithms make today's version different in kind, because they target each of us individually and improve in real time.

Different in degree, sure. But "different in kind" is doing a lot of work. The supermarket has been adjusting its layout to your habits for fifty years. Casinos have been refining slot-machine reward schedules since the 1980s. Direct-mail companies bought your zip-code-level demographic data in the 1990s. The granularity has gotten finer, and the loop has gotten faster. That is not the discovery of a new ethical wrong. It is the same wrong, on a faster computer.

The deeper problem with the "distinctive wrongdoing" framing is that it casts users as inert victims of a process they cannot see. We can see it. We have been told, exhaustively, what happens when we open these apps. There has been a major newspaper exposé approximately every six months for the last ten years. There is a Netflix documentary. There are congressional hearings. By 2026, an adult who claims not to know that TikTok's algorithm is studying her has not been paying attention to the thing she has been doing for the last decade.

We use it anyway. Not because we have been outwitted, but because we judge the trade worthwhile. Bhargava and Velasquez concede, to their credit, that the platforms have produced enormous benefits, they have helped organize the Arab Spring and the Black Lives Matter movement, they let people sustain relationships across continents, and they let me watch an interview on the street about new restaurants in NYC, and learn something I genuinely did not know how to do. Then they argue that these benefits do not require the addictive mechanisms. Perhaps, in some abstract sense, they don't. But strip the algorithmic feeds from the platforms, and you don't get healthier social media. You get social media nobody uses, and the benefits evaporate with the engagement.

There is also something self-undermining about the "demeaning exploitation" argument. The complaint is that the platform uses our data against us. But that data is us, what we paused on, what we lingered over, what we watched twice. The personalization that Bhargava and Velasquez treat as the core of the violation is also what makes my feed mine and yours yours. We are not being shown a manipulated reflection; we are being shown the reflection. If we do not like what we see, that is information about us, not just about the platform.

I'll grant one important concession. The argument lands much harder when it comes to children, and to people with the pre-existing vulnerabilities the paper catalogs. Vapes were sold as a way to help adult smokers quit; they ended up hooking a generation of teenagers who had never smoked at all. The tool wasn't the wrong. The access was. The strongest version of Bhargava and Velasquez's case is about minors and the genuinely vulnerable, where consent is thin, and the harms fall hardest. Regulate that aggressively. Set ages, set defaults, set the deactivation friction Bhargava rightly criticizes back down to one click. There is real reform to do.

But this is not the discovery of a new species of moral wrong. It is the same problem markets have always had with attention: someone is selling it, and they are getting better at it. The honest question is not whether we are being manipulated; we are, we know it, and we always have been. The honest question is whether the trade is worth it. For most of us, most of the time, the answer is yes. That is not a failure of moral seriousness. It is what choosing actually looks like.

I shut my phone off, put it in the other room, and I still finished my paper. See? We still get things done.