The Algorithm Has Custody

My oldest is 24, and he falls asleep with his phone in his hand. Physically in his hand. I’ve stood in his doorway like some kind of parental ghost and watched the screen go dark against his palm. In the morning, before his eyes are fully open, the thumb starts moving. Whatever the algorithm queued up overnight is already rolling. Gambling content. Women presented like products. The reduced version of what a man is supposed to want.

I should note here that I don’t handle this gracefully. I am not the calm, measured mother who sits down and says, “Let’s have a conversation about media literacy.” I’m the mom who has said out loud, “That phone is rotting your brain,” which, as you might guess, has never resulted in meaningful behavioral change.

But if you scrolled his feed, you could not sort this kid into a box. He posts pictures of birds everywhere he goes, like a six-foot-four Audubon Society of one. He posts his chiseled jaw, effortless, unbothered. And right next to it, a video of him singing Ella Fitzgerald with his nana. He’s run operations for a traveling farm-to-table dinner company across ranches and rural pockets of the country most people never see. He got his love of jazz from his grandparents, and when he lived in Austin, he sat in with jazz musicians on weeknights because that’s how he wanted to spend his time. If there’s no band, he’ll find the closest karaoke bar. Singing is what brings him joy.

Full disclosure: I am a former CMO. I built marketing campaigns using the same algorithmic targeting, the same priming, the same emotional triggers I’m now watching shape my own children. I was good at it. Nobody felt guilty, because we’d all decided this is just how you market now. You tell yourself you’re helping people. Maybe you even have a great product. But underneath, it’s manipulation, and when everyone is doing it, it stops looking like a choice.

I am almost 50 years old, standing in my bathroom in a red light mask, in front of a shelf of peptides, skincare, and supplements the algorithm fed me one after another until they became a routine I don’t remember choosing. The machine I once used professionally now uses me. I don’t get to stand outside this.

Last year I opened Instagram and saw a man running on a treadmill with a wooden cross on his shoulder. I stared at it, trying to figure out what I was supposed to do. Pray? Subscribe? Be impressed? Then I scrolled past three more things almost as absurd, and I realized I’d already started normalizing it. The bar moves so fast you stop noticing how strange it’s gotten.

I gave my oldest a phone when he was twelve so I could reach him. I put a portable DVD player in front of him on road trips when he was two. I didn’t know what I was doing. It’s hard to watch your kids struggle with something like this. It is so much harder to know you handed it to them yourself.

My 11-year-old will not get a phone.

My middle son taught me how the loop works. The more disconnected he felt, the more he escaped to his room and went online, and the more time he spent online, the more alone he got. The machine sold him connection and delivered the opposite.

It didn’t stop at lonely. The feed found a boy who already wondered if he was enough and worked to prove he wasn’t. He was bullied. He was told he was worthless. And both my older sons were being fed the same messages at the same time, in different words on different apps. Women hate you. You’re not man enough. You’re falling behind every other guy your age, and here’s what to buy to catch up. Blame pointed outward, shame pointed inward, and a race you can’t win sold as the way out. It teaches boys to reduce girls to a number, then teaches them to hate themselves and hands them somewhere to aim it. It took every opening to tell my son he wasn’t enough, until he believed it, and it brought him to the point of not wanting to be alive.

He was not rare. Suicide among young men climbed through the 2010s. Men die by suicide at close to four times the rate of women. And ask young men his age, and two out of three will tell you no one really knows them.

Lonely is the word that scares me, because loneliness isn’t just sad. It’s dangerous. When people are isolated long enough, depression climbs, addiction climbs, self-harm climbs. We are social creatures. We are built to need each other, down to our biology, and when that need goes unmet, our bodies and minds start to break down. So a machine that keeps a boy alone in his room, feeling like nobody knows him, is not wasting his time. It is threatening his life.

Then, three years ago, he walked the Camino de Santiago with his stepfather. The Camino is an old pilgrimage route that ends in northwestern Spain. These days it belongs to anyone: seekers, people in transition, people trying to find their way back to themselves. He walked the Portuguese route. Two weeks, no phone, completely unplugged.

He came back different. The anxiety was gone. The tics I’d noticed and never named were gone. He was genuinely happy in a way I hadn’t seen in a long time. Two weeks of his feet on the ground, talking to pilgrims from everywhere, with no algorithm in his pocket telling him who to be. He came back and said something I think about all the time: “The more connected we get to technology, the more disconnected we get from ourselves.”

Every choice he’s made since is downstream of those two weeks. He’s studying in Spain now, probably eating better than I am. He watches his friends and worries. They have expectations of girls they never consciously chose. They’re not traveling. They’re not reading. He’s lived the alternative, and he can’t drag them across.

When I dropped him off for school, we spent a week together, and every dinner was a chance to connect. We have a family rule: no phones at the table, and at home that rule buys us about thirty minutes. Everyone eats, everyone clears, everyone scatters. In Europe, nobody brings you the check. Dinner started at nine, and nobody was in a hurry to be anywhere else. Three hours. Sometimes four. And somewhere in hour two, with nothing to scroll and nowhere to be, my son started talking. Really talking. Things he’d been carrying that I didn’t know he was carrying. I didn’t pull them out of him. I didn’t ask the right question. I just sat at a table with him long enough for the person to come all the way out.

The algorithm compresses everything. Attention into seconds. A person into a caption. My son didn’t need compressing. He needed a long enough table, and it turns out he was in there the whole time.

My husband is an engineer who sees the world in systems, which is either deeply useful or deeply annoying depending on whether you’re trying to have a feeling at the time. One night I was going off about how every conversation has collapsed into labels. Narcissist. Karen. NPC. Snowflake. Toxic. And the kids get it worse. Boys get sorted into alpha, beta, sigma, simp, Chad, or incel before they’re old enough to drive. Girls get pick-me, basic, high-value, low-value, or a number. Everyone is either a red flag or giving someone the ick. Your mom is a boomer. Anyone who disagrees with you is gaslighting. Narcissist used to be a clinical diagnosis. Now it’s what we call an ex who didn’t text back. We’ve built a vocabulary that sorts people into boxes before they open their mouths.

“Toxic masculinity” started as a real observation. Now it’s a weapon. “Virtue signaling” was a legitimate critique. Now it’s a way to shut down anyone who cares enough to speak up. Both sides do it. And I look at some of the guys in my older sons’ lives, and my first instinct is to call them douchey. The hypocrisy is not lost on me. I almost sorted a group of young men I barely know into a box because it was faster than actually looking at them.

He listened and said, “It’s reductionist behavior.” Two words for what I’d been circling for twenty minutes. Then he went further. “Their whole reality is shifting toward being based on an algorithm. They’re fed things that a massive amount of computing power has decided will engage them. And it doesn’t always align with who they want to be.”

He paused. Then we both said it at the same time.

“But it becomes who they are.”

Whoever spends the most time with a child raises that child. For a lot of kids right now, that isn’t a parent, a teacher, or a coach. It’s whatever is in their hand when they fall asleep and when they wake up.

There’s a framework for how that happens. Beliefs move in three stages. They start as an idea, something you’re exposed to. Then they become an ideology, a lens you see everything through. Eventually they become your identity. Once a belief becomes your identity, anyone who challenges it feels like they’re attacking you.

Robert Jay Lifton and Edgar Schein mapped the mechanism in the 1950s, studying Korean War prisoners and Chinese thought reform. The plain word for what they documented is brainwashing. The CIA was chasing the same thing on its own track, in the program that became MKUltra. They found that none of us are immune.

And now we use the same mechanism to sell skincare.

We call it priming: planting a feeling in you before you know it’s there. We call it brand awareness: living rent-free in your head. We call it audience targeting: finding you at the moment you’re softest. It is brainwashing with better marketing. We took what horrified us when our enemies did it to prisoners, renamed it, and built an economy on it. Now it’s so ordinary nobody notices.

The machine isn’t broken. It’s working exactly as designed. A calm person can put the phone down. A person who feels enough doesn’t need the next video, the next product, the next fix. So the machine can’t let you feel enough. Your peace is bad for business. The anxiety isn’t a side effect. It’s the fuel. The 2023 Surgeon General’s advisory, the American Psychological Association’s health advisory, Jonathan Haidt’s “The Anxious Generation,” all point the same direction. People who put the phone down start feeling better within weeks, and most of us go back anyway, looking for relief from the very thing making us feel bad. The dealer is also the cure. That’s what makes it brilliant and monstrous.

I know, because I was one of them until I wasn’t. I left social media in the spring of 2025. All of it. Not as a wellness challenge, not a cleanse with a hashtag. I left because I could feel it working on me. More anxious. More depressed. More certain every single morning that the world was ending. The woman who built the campaigns could not out-discipline the machine, so I did the only thing that works. I got off the field. What came back was quiet, and my own attention, which I hadn’t even noticed was gone.

I’m back on now because of the podcast. Social media is a requirement of the work, so I’m on for a few minutes at a time, strictly business. And even now, knowing everything I know about how the machine is built, I feel the pull. Two minutes into posting an episode, something in me wants to keep scrolling. I built these traps for a living, and I can still feel my foot reaching for one. If it works on me, it is not a fair fight for a fourteen-year-old.

A few weeks ago my oldest called me in a panic. He’d seen something on his feed about the U.S. dropping a nuclear bomb on Iran. Then another post. Then a third. By the time he called, his hands were shaking. I talked him down. And where did that fear come from? A feed. Content engineered to make him feel the world was ending so he wouldn’t look away. He woke up afraid because afraid is profitable. After we hung up, I knew he’d pick the phone right back up. They start the fire, sell you the only extinguisher, and fill the extinguisher with gasoline.

The other night I watched a debate clip about body count, the number of people a woman has slept with. A relationship expert on one side, a panel of men on the other. The men had a rule: fine for a man, disqualifying for a woman.

The expert kept trying to bring her back into the room as a person. Maybe she was in a serious relationship that didn’t work out. Maybe she’s honest about her life instead of strategic about it. Maybe she’s kind. Every time, the men went right back to the number, like he hadn’t said a word.

Watching it, I kept thinking about those three stages. Idea, ideology, identity. These men weren’t defending an opinion anymore. The double standard had become who they were, and you can’t argue someone out of who they are. Rational was never in the room.

People are allowed to have values about sex and relationships. You get to care what your partner believes. But we grow. We change our minds. We are not one moment in time, and we are not a number. The double standard gives the whole game away. It was never about the number. The number was just the fastest way to stop seeing her.

My middle son worries that his friends have expectations of girls they never consciously chose. I used to wonder where those came from. Now I watch them get manufactured. One debate clip at a time, served to millions of boys before breakfast, a woman reduced to a stat while she’s still sitting right there on the screen, being a person.

A while back I was in a hot tub with two girlfriends when a couple in their twenties climbed in. She started posing. He took pictures. She looked at each one and said, “Do it again.” Five times. They weren’t in a hot tub. They were producing content, curating an image for an audience that wasn’t there.

Later I walked past. Same two people, sitting side by side, not speaking. Not laughing. Not playing. Shoulders curled, faces slack. Two young people in warm water on a beautiful day, another human being right next to them, and neither one could find their way to a conversation.

That’s what we’re losing. The ability to be with each other. To sit in a moment without performing it. To be comfortable in our own skin without a curated version standing in for the real one. Everyone is a character now, and the person underneath is disappearing.

But I’ve seen the person come back. I watched it happen at a dinner table in Spain, in hour two, when there was nothing to perform for and nowhere else to be. Whatever the machine reduces, a long dinner or a long walk can restore. Nobody’s feed will ever tell them that. The cure doesn’t scroll.

I look at my boys, still inside the machine, still reaching for what’s real while being pulled in every direction. They haven’t figured it out. Neither have I. But they’re reaching. I hope they find their way out. I hope we all do.