Your Anxiety Is Someone Else's Quarterly Earnings

leonardmorton.substack.com · 685 words · saved by 2 readers

Your anxiety is someone else’s data. Every time you experience constructed urgency, compulsive checking, emotional activation in response to digital stimuli, you’re generating behavioral surplus. That surplus gets processed into predictions about future behavior, sold to advertisers who want to influence your future choices. The more dysregulated your nervous system, the more valuable your data becomes. Dysregulated people are more predictable. More manipulable. Wall Street figured out how to make money from your inability to focus. Every compulsive phone check generates revenue for someone. Investment in “engagement optimization” doesn’t just make products appealing. It maximizes extraction of cognitive resources from users who don’t understand their mental bandwidth has become a commodity. The math is brutally simple. Calm, centered people don’t generate profit for attention merchants. A person in a regulated nervous system state makes thoughtful purchase decisions, consumes informat

artwork by Chema Mendez Your anxiety is someone else’s data. Every time you experience constructed urgency, compulsive checking, emotional activation in response to digital stimuli, you’re generating behavioral surplus. That surplus gets processed into predictions about future behavior, sold to advertisers who want to influence your future choices. The more dysregulated your nervous system, the more valuable your data becomes. Dysregulated people are more predictable. More manipulable. Wall Street figured out how to make money from your inability to focus. Every compulsive phone check…

Your Anxiety Is Someone Else's Quarterly Earnings

saved by

related reading