Engineers learn to reason about direct, traceable failures: a faulty valve leads to a boiler explosion or a bug crashes a program. This model frames harm as rare, dramatic, and attributable, but the most serious damage caused by industry hasn’t actually worked this way. Instead, it has been diffuse, cumulative, slow to emerge, and difficult to attribute to any single decision or actor. When leaded gasoline lowered the IQs of an entire generation of children, no single tank of fuel caused a measurable injury. Similarly, no particular cigarette is responsible for any particular cancer death. The harm is real and massive, but it was distributed across millions of exposures, tens of millions of people, and decades, so those responsible didn’t meet the legal requirement of direct and proximate cause. This pattern is no longer confined to physical toxins. Social media platforms optimized for engagement produce radicalization and depression as a byproduct. The harm is diffuse: no single…
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