Have you seen Netflix’s The Social Dilemma yet? If not—and I don’t say this often—add it to your must-watch list. It’s not a perfect film, to be sure. Prone to doomsday hyperbole and blame-shifting, the documentary definitely does a better job raising alarms than it does offering solutions. But the alarms need to be raised, and loudly. Social media algorithms—as part of a broader media ecosystem increasingly adept at serving individuals, but fragmenting communities—really do pose an unprecedented threat. But the threat is as much in us, and how we use social media, as it is in the technology itself.

“We are not powerless pawns, and our behavior online is not a foregone conclusion—however sneaky the algorithms become,” Jason Thacker writes in his review of the film for TGC. “Nor are we merely innocent victims in AI-driven societal disintegration. Humans chose to create these tools, and we can choose how to use them—or not.”

So should we delete social media apps? Can we trust ourselves to use such dangerous technologies in generative, rather than destructive, ways? I think about these questions a lot, and in my new book The Wisdom Pyramid (releasing in February) I suggest that while social media can have a place in our information diet, it should be used sparingly rather than as a staple. I’ve seen what life looks like when social media is the staple of one’s media diet. I’ve seen it, and so have you. It’s not pretty.