CODEXCard 5 of 8 · Hidden Architectures of Daily Life
Attention economy
You are the product being sold.
The attention economy is the business structure behind most free media and apps. If you are not paying, someone else is, and what they are buying is your time on screen. Broadcast television worked this way, and so do social feeds, free games and many search and email services.
Seeing the structure changes how you read a product. Its design goals follow the needs of the paying customer. More minutes and more sessions mean more ads shown, so features tend to reward compulsive checking, endless feeds and notifications. A familiar saying sums it up: when a product is free, its users are what is being sold. It is a description of incentives rather than an accusation against any person who works there.
The limit is assuming that anything free must be exploiting you. Public libraries, many open source projects and nonprofit sites like Wikipedia are free for other reasons, funded by donations, taxes or volunteers. The useful question is who pays, and what they get for their money. When the answer is advertisers paying for your attention, treat the design with healthy caution.
The attention economy is the older cousin of surveillance capitalism, where the product is not just your attention now but predictions about what you will do later.
Example
A free puzzle game sends you a notification every evening saying your daily reward is waiting. The reward is small, but opening the app shows you three ads before you can claim it. The game is not really built around puzzles, it is built around getting you back in front of those ads.
Try it this week
Pick one free app you use daily and write down who pays for it and what that buyer gets from your time.
From Hidden Architectures of Daily Life (Design & Economics).
