Facebook’s vertiginous rise from “Hot or Not” knockoff to extra-governmental digital nation-state has alarmed a growing number of its original architects. “They look at the role Facebook now plays in society, and how Russia used it during the election to elect Trump, and they have this sort of ‘Oh my God, what have I done’ moment,” one early employee told my colleague Nick Bilton last month. Former Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya recently echoed this sentiment. “Do I feel guilty? Absolutely I feel guilt,” he told CNN. “Nobody ever thought that you could have such a massive manipulation of the system. You can see the reaction of the people who run these companies. They never thought it was possible.”

But the disillusionment surrounding Facebook is bigger, and more complicated, than Russia. As Sean Parker, one of Facebook’s earliest investors and the company’s first president, warned Wednesday in an interview with Axios’s Mike Allen, the social network has also affected human psychology in ways that he didn’t anticipate. “When Facebook was getting going, I had these people who would come up to me and they would say, ‘I’m not on social media,’” Parker said. “And I would say, ‘O.K. You know, you will be.’ And then they would say, ‘No, no, no. I value my real-life interactions. I value the moment. I value presence. I value intimacy.’ And I would say . . . ‘We'll get you eventually.’” In retrospect, Parker said, he doesn’t know if he understood the ramifications of growing Facebook to a network of more than 2 billion users. “It literally changes your relationship with society, with each other,” he said. “It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”

That’s hardly a problem from the perspective of Wall Street, which has rewarded Facebook’s staggering profit margins with a half-trillion-dollar valuation. While Facebook’s net favorability is about 30 to 40 points worse than Google, its net positive popularity has barely budged over the last year, suggesting that recent congressional scrutiny hasn’t had much of an impact. Still, Parker’s comments reflect growing concern among Silicon Valley leaders about the products they created. “The companies that used to be fun and interesting and benevolent are now disrupting our election,” Bill Maris, who founded Alphabet’s venture-capital arm, said last month. Multiple sources I’ve spoken to say the tech industry has a trust problem that isn’t going away. “It feels like the storm has already been bearing down on Silicon Valley as we speak,” said one venture capitalist. In Facebook’s case, he added, “either you buy the product or you are the product.”

Experts say that dynamic is by design. As Parker explained, social media like Facebook was designed to “consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible,” by “[giving] you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. And that’s going to get you to contribute more content, and that’s going to get you . . . more likes and comments.” Parker blamed people like himself, Mark Zuckerberg, and Instagram C.E.O. Kevin Systrom, who “understood this consciously” and did it anyway. “It’s a social-validation feedback loop . . . exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.”

Zuckerberg, the ultimate true believer, doesn’t necessarily see that as a bad thing. “Studies have actually proven that the more connected we are, the happier we are, and the healthier we are,” he said this summer at Facebook’s first ever communities summit in Chicago, where he announced a new, idealistic mission statement: “To give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.” From the outside, it seemed like a conscious effort to put a positive spin on Facebook’s unique capacity to facilitate national dialogue—a dialogue, in recent years, that has turned increasingly partisan, and toxic.