If you’ve ever opened TikTok while waiting for your coffee to cool, then locked your phone without watching anything, you probably thought you were wasting time. You weren’t. You were working, and that’s exactly what Big Tech wants—your engagement, even if it’s fleeting.
Not in any way you’d recognize. You didn’t create content, engage with ads, or click a single link. You just drifted. But that drift (the hovering thumb, the mid-scroll hesitation, the exact second you gave up and closed the app) was logged, analyzed, and fed into a system designed by Big Tech to predict what will hold you next time.
For years, we heard that attention is the new oil. Platforms wanted your likes, shares, and comments. But the economy has matured past that. Now the real value isn’t in what you choose. It’s what you almost chose. What bores you? What makes you quit?
Modern apps don’t just track action. They study inaction with the intensity of a lab experiment. How long before you scroll away? Whether you replay the first three seconds of a video. The moment you dim your screen. These aren’t bugs in the data. They’re the most honest signals you produce. That’s how Big Tech understands your inaction.
Unlike a carefully chosen like or a performative comment, your boredom can’t lie. It shows what genuinely fails to hold you, what you instinctively avoid, what exhausts you past the point of pretending to care. That’s why it’s more valuable than anything you’d willingly share.
Scholar Shoshana Zuboff calls this “behavioral surplus”: data created simply by existing in digital space. You don’t need to post, react, or even tap. Your presence is enough. Your mental fog is enough. And because this passive data gets classified as “analytics” or “user experience optimization” in terms of service, it often evades the privacy protections that cover location or purchase history. Big Tech collects it continuously, invisibly, legally.
AI systems interpret these patterns with specificity that would unsettle most users if they saw it plainly. Internal research at major platforms has correlated scroll speed with stress levels, tap hesitation with decision fatigue, and screen-lock timing with emotional withdrawal. These aren’t guesses. They’re engineered inferences, tested and refined across millions of people who never consented to the experiment.
The effects ripple outward. Content creators now structure videos around “retention curves,” inserting a surprise or visual jolt every few seconds not because it serves the story, but because it reduces drop-off rates. Artists optimize for algorithmic attention spans rather than creative vision. Even authenticity gets A/B tested. The “raw” confession, the messy aesthetic, all calibrated to keep you from scrolling past.
The broader cost is cultural. When success is measured by what people fail to skip, slowness becomes a liability. Nuance and ambiguity are lost to constant stimulation. Homogeneity wins because deviation risks losing attention, and losing attention means losing revenue for Big Tech.
The system also has a built-in class bias. It rewards people who can always be “on,” always ready with content, always available to respond the instant a notification arrives. People with caregiving responsibilities, demanding jobs, or just less flexible lives don’t fit that mold. Their real, full lives get tagged by the algorithm as uninteresting, and the platform responds accordingly.
So what changes this?
Awareness helps, but individual resistance isn’t enough when the infrastructure runs on autopilot. Real change means rethinking what we accept as normal in the first place.
Start small. Turn off non-essential notifications. Delete apps that thrive on passive scrolling. Use grayscale mode to reduce visual compulsion. These aren’t productivity hacks. They’re refusals to participate in a system that treats your mental drift as a resource to extract.
But personal boundaries only go so far. Platforms should be required to disclose not just what they collect, but how they interpret your behavior. If BeReal can show you how many retakes you took, why can’t Instagram show you how your scroll patterns shape your feed? Transparency about construction is better than the illusion of spontaneity. Big Tech owes us this clarity.
Most fundamentally, we need to stop treating boredom as waste. It’s not a gap to be filled or optimized. It’s space for rest, imagination, and the kind of formless thinking that doesn’t lead anywhere profitable. Your idle moments should belong to you, not to systems designed to keep you just bored enough to stay.
Because here’s the reality: this isn’t laziness. It’s labor. Unpaid, unacknowledged, and absolutely central to how the digital economy functions. The least we can do is see it clearly.
