When big tech and corporate interests talk about “saving you time” or “removing friction,” the immediate question we have to ask is: Who owns the time that was saved?
It turns out, they didn’t free up your time so you could sit in quiet contemplation, paint a masterpiece, or read a deep book. They cleared away the friction of daily life—the cooking, the shopping, the banking, the navigating—solely to clear a direct, unblocked path straight to your attention span.
“Free Time”
In the old economic model, corporations made money by extracting physical resources from the earth or physical labor from your 9-to-5 workday. Today, the new frontier is the extraction of your cognitive surplus—your free time, your down moments, your late nights.
The Frictionless Trap: If it takes you fewer steps to order groceries or hail a ride, that is fewer minutes your brain is engaged with the physical world. That is “saved time” that can immediately be filled by looking at a screen.
From Leisure to Labor: True leisure used to belong entirely to you. Now, “free time” has been thoroughly financialized. The moment you open an app to relax, your leisure time becomes their working time to track your data, map your desires, and serve you targeted
“Better living through science” became “Better targeting through surveillance.” Every efficiency handed to us is actually a trade:
They remove the friction of the world so you can slide effortlessly into their ecosystem. Once you are in, you are no longer just a consumer buying a product. You are the product itself, being packaged and sold to advertisers “more and more and more.” Your boredom has been outlawed because a bored mind might wander outside the digital fence, but a distracted mind can be infinitely monetized.
They optimized the world not to liberate us, but to domesticate us. The “easy life” was just the bait.
Tom Wright Artist mrtomwright.com
