Last week I watched what may be the Big Tobacco moment for social media unfold in real time.

The trial against Meta in Los Angeles is the first of an estimated 1,600 cases making a specific argument: that Section 230 doesn't protect a platform that deliberately engineered addictive behavior. Internal company documents — showing what these companies knew about harm and when — are entering the court record. And then Mark Zuckerberg got served with legal papers walking into court. We don't know what lawsuit yet. But the image says everything.

On Friday I got into a public debate with Taylor Lorenz about whether the social media threat to young people is a moral panic or something genuinely new. We disagree. I think the internal documents coming out of these companies make the moral panic framing harder to sustain — when a company's own researchers document harm and management keeps optimizing for engagement, that's not cultural overreaction, that's a paper trail.

Then this morning the Anthropic story broke. The Pentagon summoned CEO Dario Amodei and told him to drop his internal ethics restrictions on autonomous weapons and mass surveillance, or lose the contract. Amodei published an 80-page AI constitution last month and a 20,000-word warning essay this year. He named the trap he was worried about. Now he's in it.

The full analysis is at The Rip Current. Paid subscribers get early access + full transcripts: https://theripcurrent.com