Definitely. It's the kind of manipulative dystopia that might have been designed by timeshare salesmen and propagandists. But the weird part to me is that conscious design seems basically unnecessary. It's dystopia metastasized.

I've interviewed the occasional person looking to leave Facebook, and one of the surprising things to me is how small everybody's job is. They're all optimizing micro-metrics for micro-gains, with very little thought as to the systemic impact. Those micro-metrics in turn roll up to plausible-sounding things like revenue, DAU, time on site, and engagement. Yay engagement! How could that be bad?

But I've never heard anybody from Facebook, employee or exec, say, "Gosh, could we be acting like tobacco company execs or slot machine designers?" They don't even seem to understand addiction as a topic, let alone a concern. It's very much as Upton Sinclair said: "“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”