Silicon Valley is finally facing its problems. Can it stomach the cure?

A strange virus is spreading through Silicon Valley: regret. After years of making money from addiction, distraction and outrage in a technological Wild West, an Augustine moment has arrived.

Previously, tech companies seemed comfortable with addiction. They borrowed techniques from video games and the gambling industry to keep their users plugged in. Sean Parker, Facebook’s first president, proudly described its method as “exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology” to monopolise our time and attention. The result: 71 per cent of British schoolchildren have taken “digital detoxes” to escape.

But not everyone was on board. In early 2013 a document at Google went internally viral: it called on employees to make the Android operating system, which runs on two billion smartphones, less distracting. It sparked debate, but little action, and its author, Tristan Harris, left Google to campaign against the “digital attention crisis”.

Only now are these ideas gaining traction. In January Facebook, bruised by a year of controversy, adopted Harris’s key phrase and promised to shift its focus from merely capturing your time to ensuring “time well spent”. Then Apple promised new parental control features after shareholder pressure.

This week, Google promised to go further. Its new software, Android P, will promote “digital well-being” by letting you track and put limits on the time you spend on each app. You can set “wind down” time, after which your phone will turn quiet and grey, screen out notifications, and switch instantly to Do Not Disturb mode when the phone is flipped over.

Will such moves be enough? There will always be strong business incentives to maximise time spent scrolling and swiping. Just last weekend, Google also updated its Chrome internet browser to stop websites automatically playing videos, breaking hundreds of online games and multimedia artworks overnight – but leaving Google’s own Youtube, which keeps children occupied with endless cascades of auto-playing video, carefully unscathed.

Campaigners have designed prototypes for truly non-addictive media, and they are much more radical than this. Facebook could ask you to stop and think before posting abusive messages, or offer users the option of an “outrage-free news feed”. Twitter and Instagram could hide follower counts to stop us feeling competitive and jealous. You can download Twitter and Facebook “demetricators”, which abolish all numbers (likes, retweets, friends) – a peaceful experience, but also a less compelling one.

It’s not clear what such big changes would do to these companies’ bottom lines, nor even that users would want them. Still, tech companies are right to worry. It is not in their long-term interest for society to decide they are the new tobacco and treat them accordingly.