Key points
- Meta’s new AI ad says it believes in people. We should consider what that really means.
- Big Tech’s playbook: Manufacture the problem, then sell the solution.
- “Supernormal stimuli” explains what tech ads never will.
Meta released a commercial this summer telling us it believes in people. “Some people will have you believe AI will make us less connected,” the narrator says. “We couldn’t disagree more.” Twenty-two years and 3.5 billion users after Facebook launched, the ad tells us, the company’s technology has changed, but its intentions never have. “Call us optimists. Call us dreamers. Call us whatever the hell you want. We’re betting on people, and we like those odds.”
I agree that Meta is betting on people, but not in the way this commercial implies. And it’s not just Meta. Anthropic ran a campaign this summer built around the question “can AI be trusted,” arcing toward hope by the end. OpenAI has its own version of this pitch. The entire industry has converged on the same message at the same moment: Don’t worry, we believe in you. I think these companies genuinely do believe in people, the way a con artist believes in his mark
The ads want you to hear “we believe in people” as a statement about your resilience and your capacity for connection. What it actually means, if you look at what these companies have built over two decades, is closer to this: We believe you are predictable. We believe you are exploitable. We believe that when we build something compelling enough, you will choose it over the healthier, harder thing, almost every time. And we like those odds, because we’ve tested them for years and they’ve made us some of the most profitable companies ever to exist on Earth.
Meta recently lost a social media addiction trial in California and a child safety case in Mexico, both built on the argument that its platforms were designed to hook young users before they had the cognitive equipment to resist them. You don’t get sued for that by accident. You get sued for it because engagement systems worked exactly as intended, and they worked best on brains that hadn’t finished developing the machinery to see it coming
The part of you these companies are selling to
As a clinical psychologist, I’ve spent nearly 30 years listening to people describe similar experiences in a hundred forms. They know the thing isn’t good for them. They do it anyway. They watch porn for hours past the point of pleasure. They check the app again after swearing they were done. None of this is a character flaw. It’s what happens when a nervous system built for scarcity and small tribes meets a stimulus engineered by people with unlimited data on exactly what your brain finds irresistible. Evolutionary psychologists call this a supernormal stimulus, something that hijacks an instinct so effectively that we can prefer the engineered thing to the real one. We are running very old software in a very new environment, and the companies building that environment know it better than we know ourselves.
That’s what the commercials leave out. Meta’s shows rooftop dancing, kids in a lake, friends embracing after time apart, and never mentions that its fortune was built on the version of you that can’t stop scrolling at midnight, that compares its life to strangers’ highlight reels until something in your chest goes hollow. These companies didn’t create our vulnerabilities. Evolution did. But they found them, mapped them, and built a business on them, and now they want credit for allegedly believing in the very people they’ve spent two decades studying like a lab.
The fire and the extinguisher
Here’s what infuriates me. Two decades of social platforms have coincided with rising loneliness and isolation, especially among the generation that grew up inside them. Now the same industry says AI will finally deliver the connection its earlier products promised and didn’t. This isn’t a new chapter; it’s the oldest trick available. Sell the fire, then sell the extinguisher
What worries me, perhaps even more than the manipulation, is the tool being offered as the fix. The thing making us lonelier is now the proposed solution—more advanced tech. The capability you’d need to see through an ad like this, to sit with discomfort, question a compelling narrative, and notice your own patterns and interrupt them, is precisely what gets weaker the more we hand our thinking to something else. These companies aren’t just betting we’ll stay distracted. They’re betting the next tools make it even harder to notice that we are.
The answer is not more willpower. Telling an exhausted person to simply try harder against a system built by people with more data on their habits than they have on themselves isn’t helpful; it’s just another burden on someone already running on empty. But there’s something that isn’t willpower and still works, and it’s what I watch happen in a therapy room: Understanding the mechanism changes your relationship to it, even before your behavior catches up. A person who believes their midnight scrolling is a personal failing spends most of their energy managing shame. A person who understands the product was engineered, deliberately, to exploit exactly what they’re feeling right now, spends that energy differently. Naming the trap accurately isn’t a failure. For a depleted person, it’s often the first move available.
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I don’t believe AI will make us more connected because an ad says so over footage of rainbows and reunions. I believe these companies know precisely what they’re betting on, because they built the algorithms themselves. The future isn’t a mystery. It’s a pattern we’ve already lived through
I’ve been writing this blog for years because I care about the future of intimacy. Technology is already reshaping it. What I hope is for people to keep choosing each other anyway, not because the human version is nobler, but because it’s the one we’re actually built for. A supernormal stimulus can hijack the craving, but it’s unlikely to satisfy it. That gap is where the loneliness lives, and no amount of AI is going to close it, because it isn’t designed to. It’s designed to keep you coming back.
