I don't think the world was built to make us lonely.
I think loneliness became such a profitable side effect that it's now built into the system itself.
It wasn't a secret plan. It was an accident that got turned into a business model.
When Facebook launched, it didn't want to destroy social life. Google didn't want to become a manipulative oracle. Twitter didn't want to polarize public discourse.
They were tools — born with ideals of connection, knowledge, voice. But along the way, they found something far more powerful than any vision: data.
They realized our attention, our time, our emotions could be converted into money with an efficiency no other industry had ever known.
And from that moment on, the goal wasn't to connect people anymore. It was to keep them there.
The attention economy
The attention economy isn't an abstract theory. It's the modern form of capitalism.
It doesn't produce goods, it produces addiction.
It doesn't sell products, it sells habits.
Every scroll, every notification, every ad is a carefully calculated attempt to capture one more second of your life.
And there's no conspiracy behind it: just the inertia of profit.
Companies discovered that isolation makes people docile, anxiety makes them consume, boredom makes them click.
And so, bit by bit, we traded freedom for frenzy.
Relationships for connections.
Community for engagement.
Units of emotional consumption
We went from “social beings” to units of emotional consumption.
More lonely, more fragile, more impulsive.
Sadness today gets fixed with a trip to Amazon. Boredom gets managed with a reel. Anger with a comment.
Every emotion gets monetized, and every interaction feeds a machine that never rests. And the machine, ironically, is built by humans who are victims of it too.
The system's consistency
Big tech companies aren't evil. They're just consistent.
They follow the rules we've all accepted: infinite growth, better quarters than the last, metrics going up.
Doesn't matter if it drains collective attention or burns out a generation's mental health.
Doesn't matter if it destroys trust between colleagues, between friends, between citizens.
All that matters is the curve goes up. 📈
Meanwhile, we — the ants — look around and can't figure out who the enemy is anymore.
There's no “evil boss” or “ruling class”: there's a system that pits us against each other, competition everywhere, empathy dropping.
We work, we consume, we scroll. And at the end of the day we feel empty, but also guilty for feeling that way.
The rebellion of connection
Yet in the midst of all this, one truth remains: humans are social by nature.
Isolation isn't sustainable.
No matter how much the system tries to sell us loneliness as freedom, real freedom is in reconnecting.
Talking, listening, sharing. Saying hi to someone who doesn't say hi back. Being kind to someone trapped in their own bubble.
Not out of niceness, but out of rebellion!
Because in a world that monetizes distance, every act of connection is a political act.
Conclusion
We can't stop the system.
But we can defuse it, one human contact at a time.
And maybe, in the end, that'll be the real “update” to consumerism: remembering to be human.
Books to read
Tim Wu — The Attention Merchants
- A history of how industries—from newspapers to Big Tech—turned human attention into the product, explaining why “engagement” eclipsed connection.
Shoshana Zuboff — The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
- How platforms converted our behaviors and emotions into data for profit, hardwiring addiction, prediction, and control into the business model.
Zeynep Tufekci — Twitter and Tear Gas
- How social platforms both empower and destabilize collective action, revealing the mechanics that polarize discourse and monetize emotion.
James Bridle — New Dark Age
- A portrait of life inside opaque, metric-driven systems, showing how optimization erodes trust and why re-centering human context is an act of resistance.
Riccardo Luna — Qualcosa è andato storto
- A sharp, Italy-focused critique of how digital innovation veered off course—diagnosing platform incentives, public-policy gaps, and how to steer tech back toward social value.