Social media apps are one of the biggest reasons we pick up our phones. A host of tricks then make it hard for us to put them down. Quitting facebook produces the same physiological reactions as quitting smoking, in part because social media companies hire Attention Engineers who borrow principals from the Las Vegas casino gambling world to make their products as addictive as possible. We rarely if ever hear the term “Habit Forming Technology”. Social media users are experimented on constantly to maximize continued platform scrolling. Modern algorithms driven by AI make sure you don’t decide what gets in and never see what got edited out. We tend to think of the internet as superior to societies of yesteryear where gatekeepers controlled the flow of information. But most of today’s information flows through a handful of big companies that act as contemporary gatekeepers. Who will control the emerging smart surveillance infrastructure, and what will be the rights of the controlled?