Power and institutions set the rules; markets are made, not natural; people are social and fallible; inequality is produced, not earned; media manufacture the thinkable; harm is contested, not measured; regulation can and does work when it is not captured; change comes from organized pressure.
Ask each participant to write one sentence naming a specific social-media or AI harm, the lesson that best explains it, and one realistic response. Go around the room; collect the sentences.
Close on the future: Berlin’s “crooked timber of humanity” warns that monism (one supreme value) is the root of tyranny—the trap the longtermist frame triggers—and “don’t foreclose options” is the most defensible version of what we owe the future.
Point to the reading list below and, if running this with colleagues, to a follow-up session or reading group.