Your Alienation Is Engineered
The numbness, disconnection, and self-censoring you feel is all part of their business model.
We all tell ourselves the same lie: I’m just going to check something real quick.
You sit down with friends for dinner, meaning to stay present. Or you’re at the table with your kids, vowing not to reach for your phone. Or maybe you’re on the couch, intending to actually watch something instead of scrolling through previews for an hour.
Then a question comes up — something someone said that doesn’t sound quite right. You’re sure you saw a stat about it recently. So you grab your phone to look it up.
Or your kid asks what the weekend plans are, and you vaguely remember seeing an event. You can’t recall the details. You check the weather. Then you check the listing. Then…
Or you’ve surfed past the first six shows on Netflix and still can’t decide. Before you hit play on something you’ll regret, you decide to look up the reviews.
Each time, the intention is quick. Just a second. But when you look up, you’ve lost track of the time. Dinner’s over. The kids are talking about something else or on their own phones. The moment has moved on. It’s bedtime and you’ve watched nothing.
An irretrievable part of your life just passed by, and you spent it staring at a phone.
You’re not the only one it happens to. It’s not a personal failing, and you’re not broken. It’s the result of a system that’s working exactly as designed.
Last week, I wrote about how platforms convert your leisure time into unpaid labor, turning your time into their profit on the Attention Farm. This week, we’re going deeper: into the emotional, relational, and civic costs of living inside their system.
They Know. That’s Why Their Kids Stay Offline.
Let’s be clear: the people who built this system never meant for their own families to live inside it.
Steve Jobs didn’t let his kids use the iPad or tech in general. Jony Ive — the man who designed the iPhone — strictly limited his sons’ access to the Internet. Bill Gates, Instagram’s Kevin Systrom, and even Mark Zuckerberg all reported setting strict boundaries around screen time in their homes. Many tech elites send their children to low-tech or screen-free schools.
Across Silicon Valley, the advice is consistent: delay the age when kids start using the internet. Well, not your kids, just theirs.
The message couldn’t be clearer. They know what this technology does to attention, development, and mental health.
They built the system to hook your family. They designed it to keep your kids engaged, addicted, optimized for profit. But their own? Their own get wooden toys, human teachers, and real conversations.
Oh, they like their privacy but want to profit from yours.
You’re Not Using Tech — It’s Using You
We’re told that tech is neutral, that it’s just a tool: here to help us connect, learn, be entertained, stay organized. But what we’re actually using isn’t a tool. It’s a system that’s built to hook you, track you, and train you, all for someone else’s gain.
The platforms you rely on are not passive. They’re actively modeling your behavior, shaping what you see, nudging how you feel, and monetizing every click, pause, hesitation, and choice.
And every interaction you have with them, no matter how small, feeds the machine.
Let’s Start With Google
You open a search tab to look up something, but what you’re entering isn’t a search field: it’s an ad funnel disguised as a service.
The first thing you see? Sponsored results. Shopping carousels. “AI Overviews” filled with regurgitated content that’s often wrong, sometimes nonsensical. Google says these features exist because the internet is flooded with spam. But they forget to explain that their own systems helped flood it in the first place.
Google doesn’t want you to click through to websites for the answers. That takes you out of their monetizable loop. The longer it takes you to find a satisfying answer, the more data they gather. This lets them tell investors that search queries are up and use that same reasoning to raise ad rates.
The goal isn’t to reflect who you are. It’s not to make you happy or create a better version of yourself. It’s to keep you online and evolving into a person who is easier to profit from.
Using Chrome? Even better…for them. Now they can track how far you scroll, where your cursor hovers, what you click, and what you bounce from. Even when you’re unhappy, their algorithms are learning. Especially when you’re unhappy, they’re optimizing how to sell more info about you.
Meta Doesn’t Even Pretend Anymore
Instagram and Facebook give you the illusion of control, but it’s performative and illusory. You click “hide this ad.” You select “see fewer posts like this.” You adjust your privacy settings.
Spoiler alert: None of those things actually keep you from seeing those advertisers or that content again. It’ll just pop up under a different name as the advertiser selects another profile to use instead.
It feels like you’re steering the ship, but you’re not. Meta is.
Just this week, news broke that Meta was secretly tracking Android users across the web, without consent. They’ve done it before. Facebook was caught using tracking pixels without permission and only recently began paying out class action settlements as a result.
But for Meta, fines are just the cost of doing business. Because even when you’re not on their platforms, they’re still watching you. Their trackers are embedded across millions of websites. They map your behavior through invisible pixels, hidden scripts, and off-platform data brokers.
Instagram logs not just what you like, but what you stop scrolling on. Yep, even if you’re hate-watching.
The more you pause, the more they know how to serve you more of the same.
“Engagement” doesn’t mean joy. It means emotional reaction. Rage, desire, jealousy, shame. It’s all as sticky as the fingers that profit from it.
So no matter where you go, no matter if you’ve told them not to, they’re tracking your behavior and learning how to make more money from it.
We Know It’s Bad…And Still Can’t Quit
On paper, it looks like we’re getting everything we want. Constant entertainment. Endless information. Instant connection.
But in practice? Most of us feel worse for it.
The average adult now spends over six and a half hours a day online, with about a third of that on social media. And most of us — across ages, income levels, and political lines — say it’s making our lives harder.
Nearly half of teens say they wish the internet had never been invented.
One in four married adults say the internet causes tension in their relationship, either because they’re online too much, or because their partner is.
Two-thirds of adults say they wish they spent less time online.
And 74% of women, who often bear the brunt of emotional labor and digital multitasking, say they want out of the loop.
We know it’s bad. We feel it in our disrupted sleep, our inability to focus, our irritable moods, our strained relationships.
And yet…we keep coming back. Because everything about the internet these days is designed to addict us and keep us there. Our jobs are online. Our schools are online. Our social lives, our calendars, our directions, our music, our memories.
Trying to cut back isn’t just inconvenient, it makes you feel like a freak. That’s by design. It feels isolating, like you’re opting out of the world itself. After all, everyone else is online.
We didn’t agree to live this way. But we’ve been nudged here, one dopamine hit at a time.
Your Data Is Their Product
By now, the phrase feels cliché: “If you're not paying for the product, YOU are the product.”
But it’s so much worse.
You see, you’re not the product, you’re the raw material. Every search you run, every time you pause your scroll, every reaction emoji, and every half-written comment or deleted draft (what, you thought those really disappeared?) — it’s all behavioral data.
And that data is gold.
Companies like Google, Meta, and Amazon don’t offer “free” services out of generosity. They offer them because every interaction gives them more insight into how you think, what you want, and how you can be nudged to buy, to click, to conform to the profile they’re building of you.
Grant a DotDash Meredith site like The Spruce, AllRecipes, or People the right to set a cookie and they’ll share your data with over 1,600 advertising partners.
This is the behavioral surplus we talked about last week: the data they gather about your behavior that’s not needed to run the service. That’s why it’s called surplus. And what does a money-hungry system do with anything surplus? They sell it.
That Gmail account? It reads your receipts, maps your contacts, and timestamps your habits.
That calendar app? It’s a behavioral clock that tracks your appointments, travel times, and even who you’re meeting with then feeds it to algorithms.
That scroll through Instagram? It tells them more about your emotional triggers than a therapy session ever could.
The video you’re watching? YouTube optimizes for what’ll keep you watching, not what’ll make you happy.
The music you’ve got in the background? Spotify’s auto-generated playlists keep serving up things you have a history of sticking around to hear, even if you’re trying to discover new tunes.
The system doesn’t just observe. It learns and then it shapes you. How? By feeding you content and experiences the algorithm has determined will keep you engaged, emotionally activated, and predictable.
The goal isn’t to reflect who you are. It’s not to make you happy or create a better version of yourself. It’s to keep you online and evolving into a person who is easier to profit from.
That’s why the tech elite don’t post their dinners or share their favorite movies and memes. They know what’s being harvested. They’ve read the dashboards. They don’t want to become predictable, because they know predictable people are the easiest to manipulate.
And that’s exactly what the system needs from you: predictability.
So What Can You Do?
When it comes to privacy, Big Tech has one foundational assumption: that you’ll stay predictable.
That’s what powers the nudges, the frustration loops, the frictionless tracking. It’s what makes your behavior profitable… and what makes it usable to train the very systems that will replace your labor. If your choices are predictable, they’re programmable by ads, by AI, by algorithms that don’t serve you.
Because algorithms don’t thrive on innovation, they thrive on patterns. But here’s the good news: predictability doesn’t have to be your default. If you want to mess with the system, become harder to model.
How to Become Big Tech’s Problem
Take back your attention
Turn off notifications. They’re recall beacons that are timed to reel you back in when you've drifted away. (Or haven’t you noticed they seem to pop up after you’ve put down your phone for a bit?) Shut down your devices completely when you're not using them. Knowing you’ve got to wait for boot up to dash off a rant might be enough to break the reflex.
Use a landline
Yes, seriously. If you’re worried about emergencies when your phone is off, give your people a landline number. There are all sorts of laws protecting the privacy of your landline phone conversations that don’t apply to tracking your smartphone.
Worried about stretching your budget to pay another bill? The less you use your phone, the less you’re primed for impulse purchases and programmed to shop. You might wind up with more money, not less.
Kill the subscriptions and pay cash
Your purchases tell stories. Recurring payments create predictable data patterns tied to your identity. Credit card transactions get logged, analyzed, sold, and used to build behavioral profiles. Cancel what you can. Pay cash for the rest. You’ll break the data trail and reduce the targeted ads.
Add friction
Use a VPN based in a country that actually values privacy (like Iceland or Switzerland). Access sites through a browser, not the app. Switch to privacy-respecting tools like ProtonMail, LibreWolf, or DuckDuckGo. Use burner emails. Use aliases. Give them nothing they can reliably track.
Get out of the Googlesphere
Every Google surface exists for surveillance. Switch your homepage. Ditch Chrome. Try Kagi, Brave, or Orion. Get off Google Calendar. Delete Gmail. You don’t have to go cold turkey overnight, just start pulling threads.
(Warning: If you’re a creator, expect to see some push back for this. Many of us have seen immediate impression and traffic drops after speaking out online against Google even without changing our content.)
And Most of All, Resist the Trap of Convenience
That popup asking you to accept cookies? Decline.
That site telling you its app is better than access through the browser? Decline.
That place saying it’ll give you a bigger discount for letting them text you on that phone that goes everywhere you do? DECLINE.
They’re counting on your fatigue, on your haste to just get your mission over with and get on with your life. They want you to be in a hurry, too busy to care. Passive.
But resistance doesn’t have to be dramatic. It just has to be consistent.
Say no when they’re asking you to trade your privacy for less friction. It’s a trap.
Choose unpredictability not because you’re chaotic, but because you’re human.
That’s How You Stop Being Engineered.
You don’t have to be perfect. You just have to start breaking the pattern to start freeing yourself from it.
Eff the algorithm.