But the more reliant we become on a given app or platform, the more opportunities its makers have to observe our behavior—and the better they understand our behavior, the better they become at manipulating it to their own ends, whether their business model is serving ads or selling to us directly. It’s a virtuous cycle for the producers, and a vicious one for the consumers. Often, we barely recognize that we’re participating in it, because the barriers to participation are so low. Many of the most addictive platforms lure us in with the promise of a free service. But Snapchat, TikTok, and Twitch can be considered free only if we decide that our time, and the personal information we’re providing, have no value.

Digital life, we must remember, is still in its infancy, and the powers of the corporations that govern that life are still growing. Companies are studying what we search for, what nudges we respond to, and what times of day we engage in certain online behaviors. Soon, cameras and sensors will likely be tracking what frightens, amuses, and arouses us, allowing data collectors to know more about us than we perhaps even know about ourselves. (The Wall Street Journal has reported that popular iPhone apps that track users’ heart rate and menstrual cycle were passing that information to Facebook, though the social network denied using the information to its advantage.)

From January/February 2020: Inside tech’s fever dream

The suggestion that we need to be protected from such tactics might seem paternalistic, and if consumers were the rational actors who populate econ textbooks, it might be: A person could decide for herself whether to exchange some amount of privacy for the joy of viewing friends’ photos or the convenience of tracking her heart rate. But the addiction economy relies on an asymmetrical exchange of information. Users are expected to blithely surrender their private information for access to services. The data collectors, meanwhile, fiercely guard their own privacy, typically refusing to disclose what information they have, whom they sell it to, and how they use it to manipulate our behavior.

And they do, in fact, manipulate our behavior. As Harvard Business School’s Shoshana Zuboff has noted, the ultimate goal of what she calls “surveillance capitalism” is to turn people into marionettes. In a recent New York Times essay, Zuboff pointed to the wild success of Pokémon Go. Ostensibly a harmless game in which players use smartphones to stalk their neighborhoods for the eponymous cartoon creatures, the app relies on a system of rewards and punishments to herd players to McDonald’s, Starbucks, and other stores that pay its developers for foot traffic. In the addiction economy, sellers can induce us to show up at their doorstep, whether they sell their wares from a website or a brick-and-mortar store. And if we’re not quite in the mood to make a purchase? Well, they can manipulate that, too. As Zuboff noted in her essay, Facebook has boasted of its ability to subliminally alter our moods.