Twitter, as everyone knows, is Hell. Its most hellish aspect is a twofold, self-reinforcing contradiction: you know that you could leave at any time and you know that you will not. (Its pleasures, in this sense, are largely masochistic.) My relationship with the Web site, which has, for years now, been the platform most deeply embedded in my daily—hourly, minutely—routine, has come to feel increasingly perverse. It mostly seems to offer a relentless confirmation that everything is both as awful as possible and somehow getting worse. And everyone else on Twitter appears to feel the same way. (You can check this claim right now by doing a Twitter search for phrases including “extremely normal website” and “I’m losing my mind.”) Last month, the writer Julius Sharpe posted the following exquisitely relatable sentiment: “Whenever someone stops tweeting, I feel like Ben Affleck going to Matt Damon’s house at the end of ‘Good Will Hunting.’ So happy for them.”

So why hasn’t Sharpe done a runner, like Matt Damon lighting out for the territory? And why, more to the point, haven’t I? The obvious answer is that social media is an addiction. The first argument in Jaron Lanier’s recent book, “Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now,” is that the nexus of consumer technologies and submerged algorithms, which forms so large a part of contemporary reality, is deliberately engineered to get us hooked. “We’re being hypnotized little by little by technicians we can’t see, for purposes we don’t know,” he writes. “We’re all lab animals now.”

The problem, for Lanier, is not technology, per se. The problem is the business model based on the manipulation of individual behavior. Social-media platforms know what you’re seeing, and they know how you acted in the immediate aftermath of seeing it, and they can decide what you will see next in order to further determine how you act—a feedback loop that gets progressively tighter until it becomes a binding force on an individual’s free will. One of the more insidious aspects of this model is the extent to which we, as social-media users, replicate its logic at the level of our own activity: we perform market analysis of our own utterances, calculating the reaction a particular post will generate and adjusting our output accordingly. Negative emotions like outrage and contempt and anxiety tend to drive significantly more engagement than positive ones. This toxic miasma of bad vibes—of masochistic pleasures—is not, in Lanier’s view, an epiphenomenon of social media, but rather the fuel on which it has been engineered to run.

Lanier has coined a term for this process: he calls it BUMMER, which stands for “Behaviours of Users Modified, and Made into an Empire for Rent.” (Sample BUMMER-based sentence: “Your identity is packified by BUMMER.” Sample marginalia, scrawled by this reviewer with sufficient desperate emphasis to literally tear the page: “Please stop saying BUMMER!”) In Lanier’s view, BUMMER is responsible, in whole or in part, for a disproportionate number of our contemporary ailments, from the election of Donald Trump to the late-career resurgence of measles due to online anti-vaccine paranoia.

Before he emerged as a prominent diagnostician of our technological malaise, in 2010, with his book “You Are Not a Gadget,” Lanier was mostly known as one of the chief architects of virtual reality and a tutelary spirit of the Internet’s freewheeling early days. (He is nowadays an employee of Microsoft, a fact that he acknowledges in the book.) His major selling point as a public figure is the notion that he’s critiquing from the inside. But that insider status can be a disadvantage. One way of framing the problem would be to say that he thinks like an engineer, in that his argument is an explanation of how a particular system, social media, operates, and how it might be improved by tinkering with certain aspects of it. Which is to say that “Ten Arguments” is relentlessly focussed on the few BUMMER apples, without giving much serious consideration to the barrel. His peers in Silicon Valley, he repeatedly reassures us, are fundamentally well-meaning—which even if it were true wouldn’t be especially relevant—and capitalism, he maintains, is a basically just and rational social arrangement, albeit one that is open to corruption by bad actors and bad systems. He goes so far as to suggest that even Trump would be a “nicer, better person” if Twitter suddenly ceased to exist. “As a lefty,” he writes, “I don’t think a BUMMER-style lefty leader would be any better than Trump. Debasement is debasement, whatever direction it comes from.” I would, I suppose, prefer a lefty leader who didn’t tweet from a West Wing en suite at 5 A.M. to a lefty leader who did, but I would take either over a right-wing President who pursues tax cuts for the super-rich, dismantles environmental regulations, and implements border-protection policies specifically designed to victimize immigrants and their children. Stephen Miller does not appear to tweet much; it’s hard to imagine him being a worse person if he did.

There is a tendency toward overgeneralizing of this sort throughout the book. Social-media posts, Lanier argues, are peculiarly vulnerable to deliberate or incidental misinterpretation, because context can be applied to what you say after the fact. “You have to become crazy extreme if you want to say something that will survive even briefly in an unpredictable context,” he writes. “Only asshole communication can achieve that.” But this is straightforwardly untrue, and it’s untrue in a way that reveals a fault line in Lanier’s whole argument. Any regular Twitter user will immediately tell you that the communications that survive in the unpredictable context of the platform are not extreme statements but extremely funny statements. What Lanier seems not to appreciate is that we keep firing up our timelines, scrolling downward through the linear abyss of utterances, in large part because of the ever-present possibility that we might read something that makes us howl with laughter. It is, granted, not a vision of a flourishing utopia, but it’s not nothing.

Lanier is, to the very marrow of his bones, a Silicon Valley sage: his prose, despite its politely resistant stance, is a medley of TED talks and keynotes and takeaways. Reading his book, I kept wanting him to go deeper. And then I read James Bridle’s “New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future,” which wades in so deep that I began to fear I might never come back. “New Dark Age” is among the most unsettling and illuminating books I’ve read about the Internet, which is to say that it is among the most unsettling and illuminating books I’ve read about contemporary life. Bridle doesn’t want to convince you to delete your social-media accounts, although you might be more likely to do so as a result of having read his book than Lanier’s. Instead, he wants you to see more clearly what it’s like to live in a world where you can never really go offline anyway, where there is no workable possibility of evading the network.

Bridle, like Lanier, has a background in computer programming: he is an artist whose work examines the hidden operations of technology in the public realm. Among his better known pieces are “Drone Shadow,” for which he painted life-size outlines of military drones in urban spaces, and “Autonomous Trap 001,” a high-concept prank involving “trapping” self-driving cars by surrounding them with ritualistic circles of salt, whose resemblance to road markings confused the cars’ A.I. navigation systems into helpless stasis. He also gained prominence last year for his viral essay “Something Is Wrong on the Internet,” a harrowing exposition of creepy, algorithmically generated kids’ videos on YouTube, an expanded version of which forms a chapter of “New Dark Age.”