Addiction by Design

We check our phones 100 times a day. Not because we want to but because we’ve been programmed to. The internet stopped being a tool to help us and instead became an addiction, one we need to escape.

It’s not about sheer force of will. It’s not about screen time or digital detoxes. Big tech spent two decades engineering addiction at scale, and society is helpless against it.

The internet was built on a simple idea: open access to information. Anyone could publish. Anyone could read. The early web was raw and free. Not free as in no cost — free as in no one controlled what you saw or used.

Ads change that when it became the business model of the web. Someone realised they could sell your attention and every incentive shifted. The goal was no longer to serve you but for you to serve it. Your attention has been auctioned in real time to the highest bidder.

Three billion people carry devices designed to interrupt them all day every day. Children grow up on platforms built to be as addictive as cigarettes. Anxiety and depression amongst teenagers is at its highest level ever. The people who built these systems said, on record, they don’t even let their own children use them…wtf.

The big tech business model needs addiction. You can’t generate billions in advertising revenue from a product people use for a few minutes per day. You need hours. Hours of addiction. Hours of people reaching for their phones.

Platforms respond to criticism with tools — screen time reports, app timers, wellbeing dashboards, settings menus. It’s like handing a gambler a stopwatch and telling him to stop when it goes off. It doesn’t work.

Now look what’s happening. Sponsored Ads in AI. Injected right into chat responses. AI agents that recommend products — not because the tool identifies that, but because these leeches want more from you. The companies that turned the web into an addiction are doing it again and this time others are at the table too.

Can you see it?

Social media. At least you can identify the ads. You know they are there. You had some insight, not anymore.

In an AI response, the sponsored answer is the answer. No boundaries. No distinction. No separation between what’s genuine and what’s paid for. Ask the AI a question and you’ll get back what they decide they want you to see. Maybe you get a real answer, maybe it’s an ad. They don’t care.

Trust is the value proposition. You trust them because you think they know better. They don’t. The moment trust is eroded the technology becomes useless. Worse than useless. You still trust it, because you have nothing else. You’re an addict.

This is a pattern of usury. Technology promised liberation and got captured by the business model. Email became spam. Search became ads. Social became manipulation.

AI is next. The playbook doesn’t change. When the product is free, you are the product. When advertisers pay, the system optimises for ads. Lose lose for us.

We need to break the cycle.

Pay for tools. Buy things that are genuinely useful, not addictive. There’s no reason to manipulate people when they’re your customers. You provide a service, they buy it.

It’s not complicated. It’s the old ways. You pay the carpenter, the carpenter builds what you need. The moment a third party pays the carpenter to make the chair uncomfortable you’ll buy a pillow and stop trusting the carpenter to do his job.

We stopped trusting carpenters twenty years ago. We just kept sitting in the chairs because its free to do so.

The internet doesn’t have to be addictive. Software doesn’t have to be adversarial. AI doesn’t have to sell your attention. These are choices made by people for sole purpose of making money. We can do better.

Pay for the tools. Buy software that serves you. When someone offers you something for free, ask, who’s actually paying for that and what are they buying?

If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product. You always will be. Fight the machine. Fight the addiction. Make better choices so the next generation doesn’t have to live with the consequences of our decisions. We can change the outcomes. We can win.