You are the product.

You've heard this before, but have you really understood what it means?

Every free app, every social platform, every content feed—none of them are selling you anything. They're selling you to advertisers. And what advertisers are buying is your attention.

This changes everything about how these products are designed.

The Business Model of Distraction

When you pay for a product, the company makes money by satisfying you. A good product means you'll buy again.

When you're the product, the company makes money by capturing you. The longer you scroll, the more ads you see, the more money they make. Your satisfaction is irrelevant—only your engagement matters.

This is why social media doesn't optimize for your wellbeing. It's not a bug; it's the business model. Making you feel good is only valuable if it keeps you scrolling. Making you feel outraged works just as well. Often better.

The Arms Race for Your Brain

Tech companies are spending billions competing for the same limited resource: your attention. This creates an arms race.

Any technique that captures attention gets copied and amplified. Variable rewards, infinite scroll, autoplay, notifications, streaks—each one is a weapon in the battle for your eyeballs.

And it's escalating. The techniques that worked five years ago are now baseline. The new techniques are more sophisticated, more targeted, more effective. They're using AI to personalize the manipulation to your specific psychology.

You Are the Mine

Think of attention extraction like resource extraction. Your attention is the raw material. The platforms are mining operations.

Like all mining, it's extractive. They're taking something valuable from you—your time, your focus, your mental energy—and converting it into their profit. The mine doesn't care if the land is left depleted.

At the end of a scroll session, you're depleted. Your attention has been extracted. What did you get in return? Some content you won't remember. A few moments of stimulation. The company got money. You got empty.

The Asymmetry of the Fight

On one side: a person with a phone, trying to live a meaningful life, with finite willpower and limited understanding of psychology.

On the other side: trillion-dollar companies with teams of behavioral scientists, real-time A/B testing, and algorithms that learn exactly how to manipulate each individual user.

This isn't a fair contest. The platforms know more about what makes you tick than you do. They have data on millions of users, refined through billions of interactions. They know exactly which thumbnail makes you click, which notification makes you open, which content makes you stay.

Awareness Is the First Step

You can't opt out of the attention economy. These platforms are too integrated into modern life. But you can stop being an easy target.

Understanding that you're being manipulated doesn't make you immune, but it helps. It makes the manipulation visible. It lets you see the strings.

Every time you catch yourself mindlessly scrolling, remember: this is by design. A room full of engineers worked specifically to create this moment. You're doing exactly what they optimized for.

Is that who you want to be?

In the attention economy, if you're not paying for the product, you're not the customer. You're the resource being extracted.