They Said Cigarettes Weren’t Addictive, Too

If you want to understand the tech industry, look at Big Tobacco.

For decades, cigarette companies insisted smoking wasn’t harmful. They hid internal studies. They blamed consumers. They framed addiction as a “lack of willpower.”

The truth eventually came out:
Their products were engineered for addiction – and intentionally marketed to children.

Sound familiar?

Today, Big Tech uses the same tactics:

• Deny harm
• Hide internal data
• Blame users
• Target children
• Optimize for dependency

The parallels are uncomfortable because they’re true.

In the 1950s, tobacco companies discovered nicotine hijacked the brain’s reward pathways, so they increased nicotine levels and added ingredients to make cigarettes hit harder and faster.

Tech companies do this with:

• Infinite scroll
• Autoplay
• Red dot notifications
• Randomized rewards
• Personalized psychological triggers

The goal is identical: Maximize consumption.

But the stakes are higher today.

Instead of damaging lungs, tech reshapes:

• Attention
• Emotion regulation
• Impulse control
• Identity formation
• Social attachment
• Childhood brain development

And they have something Big Tobacco never had: real-time behavioral surveillance.

They don’t have to guess what hooks you.
They watch what hooks you – and then optimize it.

Just like cigarettes were placed at kids’ eye level in gas stations, tech platforms are designed to reach children early, before their judgment and impulse control are strong enough to resist.

The result?
We now have 8-year-olds experiencing dopamine dysregulation, 12-year-olds struggling with pornography addiction, and 15-year-olds reporting anxiety, sleep disruption, and constant comparison spirals.

Even worse:
Tech companies knew all of this years ago.

• Internal Meta documents showed Instagram worsened body image problems.
• Internal TikTok data showed their algorithm learns vulnerabilities in under 40 minutes.
• Internal YouTube memos acknowledged radicalization through recommendation loops.

But like Big Tobacco, they protected the business model instead of the public.

The good news?
History has shown we can change course.

Seat belts, car seats, warning labels, bans on advertising to kids – none of that happened because the companies suddenly grew a conscience. It happened because people demanded accountability.

We don’t need to ban phones. We need to understand their design – and build seat belts ourselves.

Start with some simple shifts:

• Screen-free mornings
• Screen-free dinners
• Do Not Disturb rituals
• Phone out of the bedroom
• Parental modeling of healthy tech behavior

This isn’t an anti-tech movement. It’s an anti-addiction movement.

To learn more about how Big Tech copied Big Tobacco's playbook and what you can do to take back control, join me for Break the Chain.