Look, I've done this dance before. Downloaded the app, tapped 'I Agree' on 47 pages of legal fiction, and told myself I was in control. Then I spent three years checking my notifications 58 times a day like a trained seal waiting for fish. The difference between me and an actual addict? The addict knows they've got a problem. I had a productivity tool.

The Business Model You're Not Supposed to Talk About

Here's the thing nobody wants to say out loud at a tech conference: you're not the customer. You're the product being auctioned off 15 billion times a day. Meta pulled in $160.6 billion in advertising revenue in 2024. That's not money for making your life better. That's money for keeping your eyeballs glued to a screen while algorithms work out exactly which emotional buttons to press next.

The maths is brutally simple. Meta's average revenue per user hit $49.63 last year. Every time you scroll past your ex's holiday photos and feel that little twist in your gut, someone's getting paid. Every time you rage-click on a political post you disagree with, the engagement machine purrs with satisfaction. Frances Haugen, Facebook's most famous whistleblower, put it plainly: the platform knows engagement-based ranking is dangerous, but they haven't rolled out safety systems in most languages because, well, engagement means money.​

We Designed This, and We Can't Pretend Otherwise

The attention economy wasn't an accident. It was engineered by people who knew exactly what they were doing. Tristan Harris, the former Google design ethicist who co-founded the Center for Humane Technology, has been banging this drum for years: social media platforms are designed like slot machines. Variable reward schedules, infinite scroll, notifications timed to pull you back in just as you're about to do something useful. A Stanford addiction researcher calls your smartphone "the modern-day hypodermic needle, delivering digital dopamine for a wired generation".

And the numbers are damning. Seventy-six percent of 18-29 year olds self-report smartphone dependency. Gen Z clocks over six hours of daily screen time, with 56% admitting they feel addicted. We've created an entire generation of people who spend more time staring at glass rectangles than they do sleeping.​

The Wellness Features That Don't Actually Work

Apple's Screen Time launched with much fanfare about digital wellness. Google followed with Digital Wellbeing. Both companies essentially said: "Here's the data on your addiction. Good luck with that." Research shows these features can affect usage patterns when people actively pay attention to them. The problem? They're asking you to use willpower against billion-pound behavioural engineering teams. It's like handing someone a paper shield and telling them they're ready for battle.

The EU, bless them, has started cracking down on dark patterns. The Digital Services Act now bans interfaces designed to "deceive or manipulate" users. Fake urgency, guilt-tripping cancellation flows, pre-ticked consent boxes. All technically illegal now. A Princeton study found over 90% of popular shopping sites used at least one dark pattern. The regulation is playing catch-up with an industry that moves at the speed of quarterly earnings calls.​

The Uncomfortable Truth About Public Services

Now here's where it gets properly awkward. The UK government just launched the GOV.UK App, promising to put "public services in your pocket". Digital-first is the strategy. Paper forms are out. Apps are in. Technology Secretary Peter Kyle wants government services to feel like banking or shopping from your phone.​

But wait. We've just established that the entire mobile ecosystem is built on attention capture and addictive design. And now we're making citizenship require participation in that same ecosystem? The very platforms designed to exploit cognitive vulnerabilities are becoming the mandatory gateway to accessing benefits, driving licences, and tax services.

This isn't neutral. When 40% of smartphone users say they want to reduce usage but 27% don't believe they'll succeed, we're not talking about consumer choice. We're talking about compulsion. And when government services increasingly require that same compulsive interface, we've quietly mandated participation in an attention extraction economy.

The Way Forward Isn't Backwards

I'm not suggesting we return to queue-based bureaucracy and paper forms in triplicate. That's not realistic, and frankly, it wasn't great either. But here's what I am suggesting: we need to stop pretending digital design is value-neutral.

The UK government is considering two-hour screen time caps per platform for children. Finland just passed legislation restricting phone use during school hours. These are band-aids on a structural problem. The real question is: who gets to design the choice architecture of our lives?​

Because right now, it's a handful of companies whose revenue depends on keeping you scrolling, and a government that's outsourcing its interface to the same addictive framework. Performance-based regulation that requires companies to prove their designs support autonomous decision-making, rather than just banning specific dark patterns, would be a start. Designing public digital services with explicit attention-protection standards, not just accessibility standards, would be another.​

The attention economy is projected to hit $1 trillion in global advertising revenue in 2025. That's the scale of the economic pressure pushing against your ability to focus, choose, and think clearly. The market doesn't want you autonomous. It wants you engaged.​

Maybe it's time we stopped confusing the two.