IT’S nearly 20 years since Sean Parker was a cocky tech punk sticking it to The Man. Back at the end of the 90s, Parker co-founded Napster, a revolutionary if controversial site that allowed people to share music for free and that drove record companies and bands crazy. Today, of course, in the era of Spotify, the idea of paying for music is seen by many as an anachronism.

Parker’s still only 38, but in Silicon Valley terms is akin to Gandalf the Grey, a whiskery owl of the scene. It’s not a bad CV: as well as Napster, he joined Facebook as chairman when it was five months old and currently sits on the Spotify board. The punk has become The Man.

So when he speaks uninhibitedly about social media and its impact on us, it’s probably worth listening. At an event last month, Parker lifted the lid on some of the early thinking. “The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them… was all about: ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?’ And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. And that’s going to get you to contribute more content, and that’s going to get you… more likes and comments.”

He went on: “It’s a social-validation feedback loop… you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology. The inventors… understood this consciously. And we did it anyway. When Facebook was getting going, I had these people who would come up to me and they would say, ‘I’m not on social media.’ And I would say, ‘OK. You know, you will be.’ And then they would say, ‘No, no, no. I value my real-life interactions. I value the moment. I value presence. I value intimacy.’ And I would say… ‘We’ll get you eventually.’ I don’t know if I really understood the consequences of what I was saying, because the unintended consequences of a network when it grows to a billion or 2 billion people… it literally changes your relationship with society, with each other. It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.’ If you’re a parent who has successfully found a way to regulate and monitor their child’s online activities, do let me know – for my own part, I can report almost total failure.

Glued to screens of various shapes and sizes, exchanging WhatsApp and Snapchat and Instagram posts with friends till late into the night, obsessed with YouTube “celebrities” of variable quality, our kids inhabit a virtual and often secret world. Any attempt to remove the phone or tablet or laptop is met with a fury and outrage that no explanation about interrupted sleep patterns, rewired neural circuitry or the value of reading a good book can assuage. What’s it doing to our children? Well, speaking from personal and wider anecdotal experience, it’s turning them into little s***s.

It’s not just the young, either. Facebook and especially Twitter seem at times to have been overrun by their adult equivalent – frenzied hordes of cyberthugs searching out victims on whom to vent their jabbering rage. The naïve, the holders of opinions deemed to be “wrong” and therefore morally indefensible, those not slick enough to play by social media’s arbitrary, ever-changing rules: all can find themselves tumbling through the hate vortex.

The impact this is all having on us, psychologically and otherwise, is clearly profound. The statistics around tech are so outsize as to be rendered almost incomprehensible. According to No Ordinary Disruption: The Four Global Forces Breaking All The Trends, a book by researchers at the McKinsey Global Institute, it took 50 years from the invention of the telephone for half of American homes to acquire one, while radio needed 38 years to attract 50 million listeners; Facebook had six million users in its first year, a number that grew 100-fold over the next five years. China’s messaging service WeChat has 300 million users, more than the entire adult population of the United States. In 2009, two years after the iPhone’s launch, developers had created around 150,000 apps. By 2014, there were 1.2 million, and users had downloaded more than 75 billion, more than 10 for every person on the planet.

I would argue that the good in all this far outweighs the bad – the convenience, the connectedness, the instant access to information have all been transformative. But the revolution has been dogged by a lack of accountability, by the absence of any kind of overarching regulatory gatekeeper. It’s not difficult to see why: technology has expanded at such speed and in such volumes that it long ago bust through any existing legal or moral constraints. It is something new, a global Wild West of constant innovation and creative destruction. The traditional authorities haven’t yet caught up.

Individual governments have largely abrogated responsibility due to the transnational scale of the tech giants. The giants themselves are in no hurry to slip into the harness, due to their staggering success – the five most valuable listed companies in the world are Alphabet (Google’s parent company), Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft, which collectively racked up more than $25bn in net profit in the first quarter of 2017.

But as this vast sector calcifies in such a way that a handful of titans control most of it, we have the chance to draw breath and look again at accountability. The storage and use of our individual data requires greater transparency and regulation – Google and Facebook accounted for nearly all the revenue growth in digital advertising in the US last year, driven by their ability to provide those advertisers with precise information about the habits of their users. In 2012 Max Schrems, an Austrian law student, asked Facebook for all his data and in return received a file of more than 1,000 pages.

We also need to think harder about whether the current model is sustainable – whether what are, in effect, private monopolies can be allowed to provide what is, in effect, a utility service. “Exploiting vulnerability,” to paraphrase Parker, does not make for a comfortable motto.