New Delhi, Feb. 25 -- In Dave Eggers' 2021 novel The Every, a giant search engine company acquires an e-commerce behemoth. Delaney Wells, the lead character, plans a vigilante action against the company by getting a job with it. Her college thesis, written with a view to charm her way into the company, argued that it was immaterial that it was a monopoly if consumers were fine with it. Delaney describes the phenomenon as "Benevolent Market Mastery."

In the autumn of 2021, in a case of art foreshadowing real-life events, a whistleblower, Frances Haugen, gave the Wall Street Journal a stash of documents that showed that Facebook had been carrying out research for three years that revealed the damaging psychological effects on teens who use...