Advertising forecaster WARC projects that companies will spend $1,395 on every person in the United States in 2026. That’s about $3.82 a day for every resident of the country, infants included.

Advertising and marketing are the business of extracting capital from you through behavior modification. Your attention is finite, attention influences behavior, and your financial decisions follow it, Silicon Valley is built on this model and the companies extracting both from you have calculated and observed the harm, then chosen to keep the designs of that revenue generating psychological pollution. Advertisers spend that $1,395 because the change in your behavior pays them back more than it costs. What I wanted to know when researching this article was what the money buys and who pays for the damage.

The first thing I checked was whether economists treat attention as a resource at all. They’ve treated it that way since at least 1971, when Herbert Simon, who went on to win the Nobel Prize in economics, wrote that information consumes the attention of the people who receive it, so “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” Matthew Crawford, the author of the bestseller “Shop Class as Soulcraft,” put it more plainly in The New York Times in 2015: “Attention is a resource; a person has only so much of it.”

If advertising has been around for centuries, what’s different now? Tim Wu, a Columbia Law School professor who later served as President Joe Biden’s special assistant for technology and competition policy, calls the modern version the “attention harvest”: companies draw you in with free content and resell your attention to advertisers. Shoshana Zuboff, a professor emerita at Harvard Business School and the author of “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,” describes the step that came next. The companies record what you do so they can predict what you’ll do next, and Zuboff argues their most accurate predictions come from intervening in your life to “nudge, coax, tune, and herd human activity at scale.”

In July 2026, Meta reported what that business earns. In the second quarter of the year, ads brought in $59.36 billion of Meta’s $60.8 billion in revenue. The company now processes every public Instagram post with a large language model to predict what each user will watch next, and Meta told investors that time spent on Instagram grew at a double-digit rate after those recommendation changes.

Meta also quantifies and precisely calculates their effectiveness in mass behavior modification. Improvements to how Meta ranks ads produced a 15.7% increase in conversions on Facebook, meaning more people bought something or signed up after seeing an ad. Each of those conversions is a person whose attention became someone else’s revenue. Each of those conversions is a person whose behavior was controlled effectively by a pathologically money motivated and wholly sociopathic mega-corporation.

Alphabet and Meta take the largest shares of the world’s ad money, and with Amazon they’re forecast to take 59.7% of global ad spending outside China in 2026.

Next I wanted to know how much of that attention people give up willingly. In a randomized experiment published in 2022 in the American Economic Review, the American Economic Association’s flagship journal, economists led by Hunt Allcott paid some smartphone users to cut back on social media and gave others tools to limit their own future use. People who’d been paid to cut back kept using less after the payments ended, which the authors read as evidence the apps are habit-forming, and they concluded that “self-control problems cause 31 percent of social media use.” Close to a third of the time these companies sell is time you’d cut if you could.

Allcott and Matthew Gentzkow then tested what quitting does to mood, in a study Meta’s own researchers helped conduct. Their team paid tens of thousands of Facebook and Instagram users to deactivate their accounts in the weeks before the 2020 election. Mood improved in both groups, and in an exploratory analysis, the Instagram effect was concentrated among women under 25. A few weeks off produced about one-fifth the benefit of an average therapy program. A June 2026 pooled analysis of 35 randomized experiments with 7,160 participants, still a preprint awaiting peer review, found that depression and well-being improved when people cut back.

Attention recovered when people blocked the internet on their phones. In a randomized trial published in February 2025 in PNAS Nexus, a peer-reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences, a team led by Noah Castelo of the University of Alberta asked 467 adults to block mobile internet on their phones for two weeks, with calls and texts still working. Their sustained attention, measured with a computer task, improved by an amount the authors compare to “as much as being 10 years younger.” Their reported mental health improved too, and volunteers who switched the block off early still improved, by smaller amounts.

For kids, the danger is more sharply outlined as compulsive use. Researchers who followed 4,285 children for four years for a 2025 study in JAMA, the journal of the American Medical Association, found that compulsive use of social media and phones came with more than twice the risk of suicidal behavior, while total screen time showed no association with those outcomes.

Meta asked the same question in 2020, in a deactivation study of their own, and never published the answer.

The company’s scientists worked with the survey firm Nielsen to measure what happens when people stop using Facebook for a week, and the people who stopped reported less depression, anxiety, loneliness and social comparison. School districts suing Meta quoted the internal documents in a court filing made public in November 2025, and they told the court Meta called off further work. One staff researcher wrote, “The Nielsen study does show causal impact on social comparison.” Another asked whether keeping quiet would make Meta look like the tobacco companies that hid what they knew about cigarettes. Meta spokesman Andy Stone said the company stopped the study because of flaws in its methodology.

TikTok measured the habituated patterns of users in their own research. In unredacted portions of a 2024 lawsuit by Kentucky’s attorney general, reviewed by NPR, TikTok calculated that a habit forms after 260 videos, and the same research linked compulsive use to weaker analytical skills, memory, contextual thinking and empathy, along with more anxiety. The time-limit tool TikTok built cut daily use by about a minute and a half, and the company measured the tool’s success by “improving public trust in the TikTok platform via media coverage.”

Meta’s own survey of 1,000 teens and their parents, called Project MYST and done with the University of Chicago, concluded that parental and household factors had “little association with teens’ reported levels of attentiveness” to their own social media use. Instagram head Adam Mosseri testified at a Los Angeles trial in February 2026 that Meta never published the findings.

The jury at that trial also saw a 2016 Meta email naming “total teen time spent” as the company’s goal.

So why do people keep using these apps? Four economists led by Leonardo Bursztyn of the University of Chicago answered that in a study titled “When Product Markets Become Collective Traps,” published as the lead article in the American Economic Review in December 2025. TikTok users would pay an average of $55 for four weeks of access while their classmates stayed on the app, and the same users would pay an average of $24 to shut TikTok off for everyone on campus, themselves included.

The authors put their finding plainly: “active users of a platform prefer it not to exist.” The most common reason students gave for staying was fear of missing out, and the authors point out that a company in that position can raise demand by making life worse for anyone who stays off the app.

The only damages the companies have paid so far were for harm done to children. In March 2026, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and YouTube negligent and awarded $6 million to a 20-year-old woman who testified she became addicted to social media as a child; both companies say they disagree with the verdict. Meta settled in August 2026 with 51 attorneys general for up to $17.1 billion, paid over a decade. At the pace Meta earned money in the second quarter of 2026, the entire settlement equals about 26 days of revenue.

Every design change in that settlement applies to minors. Teen accounts get a daily limit of 120 minutes and an overnight block from midnight to 6 a.m., along with hidden like counts and prompts to turn off the personalized feed, which the Massachusetts attorney general’s office describes as delivering content “based on a prediction of what will keep the user on the platform.”

The House voted 267-117 in June 2026 for a package of children’s online safety bills that includes their own version of the Kids Online Safety Act, and the Senate bill’s sponsors, Sens. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said they won’t accept “hollow reforms that allow Big Tech’s predatory business model to remain intact.” Their version still awaits a floor vote.

Every remedy won or proposed so far was written for people under 18. Adults get the feed as Meta designs it, for unlimited hours a day. Still, it’s a start.

The damage these studies measure is modest for any one person on any one day. Meta reports that 3.6 billion people a day use at least one of their apps. Still, the companies measured and observed the harm being caused and chose to keep the mechanisms causing that harm because they are allowed to and their job is to make money, not to act in the public interest.

The economists who measured the trap classify the cost as a negative externality, the category economists use for pollution: a cost paid by people who never agreed to the transaction. Crawford proposed treating attention like air and water, as an “attentional commons” that belongs to the public.

A harm too small to notice in one person, repeated across that many people every day, is damage on the scale of a public health concern, and the resource being damaged is the one we’d need to notice the damage and respond effectively. What could in fact be more important than our experiential consciousness? If we allow the mass destruction and exploitation of human thought, especially among the most vulnerable populations, are we not securing our inability to effectively and collectively determine our future? Think of that in terms of democracy and ask yourself what could be more valuable if captured and destroyed than our attention.

The commodification of attention and well-being at that scale is an existential risk. We protect air and water with laws that apply to every company because the public pays for the pollution while the polluter keeps the profit, and our attention needs the same protection.

What $1,395 a year buys is a measurable change in what you do, and you’re the one who pays for the damage to your attention and mental health.

CALL TO ACTION

Who you’re contacting and how: Reach out to one of your state legislators. You can do that by email, phone, FaxZero or even a printed letter. You could even go to their office during business hours, bring donuts, and tell the staff you’re going to talk to them about an issue you care about if the representative isn’t there.

Find your legislators by clicking on this sentence.

What you’re asking for: to publicly endorse a bill that gives every user in your state, adults included, the protections the 2026 Meta settlement gave teenagers. You can read the settlement, even print it out and share it if you like, by clicking on this sentence.

Let them know who you are, what you want, and why you care. Offices count identical messages once, so write it in your own words.

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