The Unpaid Shift

The attention machine is not new. In July of 1934, my grandfather watched it run at full steam: "Every few hours the newspapers issued blazing extras announcing: BIG STRIKE BROKEN!"¹² The strike was not broken. But panic sold papers, and the wires, he wrote, "burned like an inflamed nervous system."¹² Hearst was harvesting San Francisco's attention by the hour and selling it back as fear.

And then my grandfather recorded the part that matters most: "But the people, in general, were unimpressed by headlines that screamed of communist violence. They knew better. They could look around and see for themselves."¹²

They knew better. Their attention was being farmed, and they took it back, and the strike held. Ninety years later the harvest never stops — the extras arrive every few seconds now, in your pocket, engineered by the smartest people alive — and the crop is worth more than oil. This essay is about that crop: what it earns, who keeps it, and how we collect.

Every other deal in this series had two sides: worker and employer, town and company. The platform deal has one. You are the consumer of the feed and you are the product sold through it — your attention packaged and auctioned by the hour, your words and photos and searches the raw material training the machines. The terms arrived as a button labeled "accept," and there was no other button.

Run it through the scorecard from essay No. 03. The split: you're paid nothing. The hours: taken — engineered to take more. The voice: a contract you can't negotiate. It is the most lopsided arrangement in American economic life, and it's working a shift in your house right now.

Start with the platforms' own books, because they keep meticulous accounts of you. Meta reports its take per user, by region, every quarter: by the end of 2023 it was earning $68.44 per U.S./Canada user per quarter — against $4.50 in the poorest parts of the world.² One analysis of Meta's roughly $20 billion in quarterly North American ad revenue works out to about $26 a month per daily user — call it more than $300 a year, roughly ten times what Reddit, Pinterest, or Snap squeeze from the same pair of eyes.³

And Meta is one stall in the market. The whole U.S. digital advertising industry — the entire apparatus for converting American attention into money — took in a record $258.6 billion in 2024, up 14.9 percent in a single year. Social media alone: $88.7 billion. Search: $102.9 billion.¹ That entire number has one input. Us.

Now the hours, because a wage is a rate, and you're working more than you think. American teenagers average 4.8 hours a day on social media — 33.6 hours a week, which is to say a full-time job, worked for free, before homework.⁴ Teen girls average 5.3 hours; seventeen-year-olds, 5.8.⁴ Adults run shorter shifts, but almost nobody runs none.

And before anyone says "that's a choice" — the economists checked. A study published in the American Economic Review found that roughly 31 percent of time spent on social media stems from what researchers politely call "self-control problems"⁴ — which is the academic way of saying the machine is engineered to take more of your shift than you'd freely give. In any other industry we'd call that wage theft. Here we call it engagement.

So here is the question this essay exists to answer: if the attention economy paid its suppliers — by the hour, like any shift — what would the check be?

Be careful with the easy version of this math. Dividing the take by every American overpays the people who never log on and stiffs the ones working the longest shifts. Not everyone supplies this economy: about 254 million Americans use social media — 74 percent of the country¹³ — and a fair split follows the hours, not the headcount. So price it the way every other shift gets priced: by the hour.

The social platforms took in $88.7 billion in 2024.¹ Their American workforce: those 254 million users, averaging 2 hours and 16 minutes a day.¹⁴ Divide it out and the rate is about 42 cents per hour of attention.⁶ Now punch your own timecard. The average user's year — roughly 830 hours — comes to about $350. A teenager's 4.8-hour daily shift: about $740 a year. A teen girl, at 5.3 hours a day: roughly $815 — earned by a kid, kept by a corporation.

And that's only the social slice. The same eyes power the rest of the $258.6 billion digital take — search alone is another $102.9 billion.¹ Spread the full pie across the people who actually supply the audience and it lands around $850 to $1,000 per supplier, per year — growing about 15 percent annually, compounding while you sleep and scroll.⁶

If those numbers sound abstract, here is what makes them concrete: a check exactly that size already exists in America. Alaska decided in 1982 that the oil under public land belongs to everyone who lives there — so every year, every eligible Alaskan gets a dividend from the Permanent Fund. In 2025 the check was $1,000 — to the dollar, the attention economy's full annual take per supplier. In 2024 it was $1,702, mailed to more than 600,000 people.⁷ Nobody calls it welfare. They call it what it is: their cut of a common resource. The only difference between an Alaskan and you is that Alaska's drillers pay royalties.

Two notes on that chart, both of which make the case stronger. First, $258.6 billion counts only the advertising. It does not count the value of the same words, photos, and clicks as training data for the AI models — the asset this whole series is about. The real number is larger; nobody outside the companies knows how much. Second, the take grows about 15 percent a year.¹ The unpaid dividend isn't just unpaid. It's compounding.

Now the paragraph this series always includes, because the case has to survive honesty. The platforms are not worthless to you. They connect scattered families, run small businesses' storefronts, carry the group chat that holds a crew together — and they hand you the whole apparatus without a bill. Economists who pay people to quit these apps find many demand real money to stay off, which means the feed delivers something users value. And a data dividend has serious critics with a serious question — an economist who studied Alaska's fund put her finger on it: in Alaska everyone gets the same amount because the oil belongs equally to all, but with data, "the question becomes: is my data more valuable than your data?"⁸ There's a harder critique behind that one: a badly built dividend could end up legitimizing the surveillance it's taxing — a royalty check for being watched.

All true. And none of it changes the core fact: this is a commercial exchange in which one side's contribution is priced at $258.6 billion and the other side's is priced at zero. "You get the app for free" is what the company store said too. The answer to a lopsided deal has never been gratitude. It's negotiation.

So here is the guide — the same architecture as essay No. 03, aimed at the feed. Seven moves, from your pocket to the statehouse.

01Price the asset.

Nothing changes while the asset is priced at sentimental zero. The first act of any negotiation is naming the figure, and now you have it — sourced from the industry's own benchmark report. A thing with a price can be bargained over. A thing called "just my data" cannot.

02You own your double, part two.

The striking performers already won this for themselves: consent and pay for digital replicas.⁹ The principle doesn't care whether you're famous. Your search history is a portrait too — more intimate than any headshot — and the precedent that a person's digital likeness is property they control is now sitting in a signed contract, waiting to be generalized by law.

03The data union.

One user deleting an app is a rounding error; the network barely blinks. But organized users are a different species of counterparty — the same transformation that turns one worker's complaint into a contract. Labor has already built the template with the largest tech company in the world: a federation of sixty unions won neutrality, information-sharing, and a voice in how the technology develops.¹⁰ A data union is that same logic, with membership open to anyone who has ever scrolled.

04The data dividend.

This is not a thought experiment; it's a forty-year-old American institution plus one substitution. Alaska wrote into its constitution that a common resource pays a common dividend, and it has mailed the check every year since 1982.⁷ California's governor proposed the data version outright in 2019.⁸ The per-adult value of American attention — about $990 a year and compounding — is already Alaska-sized. The fund solves the economist's valuation problem too: don't price each person's data, tax the aggregate take and split it evenly, exactly as Alaska does with oil no one owns a particular barrel of. And the dividend does something no lawsuit and no parental-controls app ever could: it puts a price on the harvest itself — which, as move 06 shows, is where the public finally gets recourse.

05Tax the take, fund the commons.

A levy on $258.6 billion doesn't have to arrive as a check to count as a share. The industries and institutions hollowed out by the attention machine — the local paper that once did what my grandfather did, the classroom competing with a 5.3-hour shift — are the natural payees. This is essay No. 02's logic moved upstream: the extraction funds the repair.

06Protect the hours — by repricing them.

This is the most socially redeeming feature of the whole plan, so read it twice. Today the platform's incentives run in exactly one direction: a teenager's 4.8-hour shift is pure revenue — the engineered third of it included⁴ — and the public's only recourse is worry. Every design meeting starts from the same question: how do we get more of the kid's evening? But the moment attention must be paid for, the ledger flips. Each additional hour of a minor's scroll stops being free money and becomes money out the door — and suddenly the most profitable design is the one that gets the kid off the app sooner. We didn't end child labor in the mills by asking the owners to feel something; we made a child's hour cost more than it earned. Same move here. Companies will never grow a conscience, but they will always read a balance sheet — so write the conscience into the balance sheet. The eight-hour-day fight, fought against the algorithm, and won the way that fight is always won: by putting a price on the hours.

07Spend your attention like money.

In 1934 the people of San Francisco read the screaming extras and were "unimpressed" — they "knew better" and looked around and saw for themselves.¹² That was an attention strike, and it beat William Randolph Hearst. Its modern form: hours moved from the feed to the union meeting, the local paper, the worker-owned publication, each other. An organized attention strike — millions of users dark for a day, on a date, with demands — is a picket line no platform can cross, because its product is the picket.

Now brace for the sound that follows every proposal in this essay, because it is as reliable as the tide: the most profitable companies in the history of money, crying poor. Pay for attention? Premium rates on kids' hours? It would devastate innovation. Margins are thinner than you think. We'd have to start charging you.

So let's open the books — their books, filed with the SEC under penalty of law. Meta, 2024: $164.5 billion in revenue against $95.1 billion in total costs, leaving $69.4 billion in operating profit — a 42 percent operating margin, up from 35 the year before. Net income: $62.4 billion. Free cash flow: $52 billion, with $78 billion in cash already sitting on hand.¹⁵ For scale: the average American industry nets about 7.7 cents on the dollar. The S&P 500 giants average about 12. The grocery store that feeds your family survives on one or two.¹⁶ Meta nets 38 — and if you enjoy your irony exact, its operating margin is 42 percent: a point of margin for every cent of your hourly rate.

And here is the detail that turns the poverty plea into comedy: Meta already pays a dividend. In 2024 it returned $34.8 billion to shareholders — $29.7 billion in stock buybacks plus $5.1 billion in dividend checks.¹⁵ Now run that against this essay's arithmetic. A $100 check to every one of America's 254 million social media users costs $25.4 billion. One company's single-year payout to its shareholders could fund a national attention dividend with nine billion dollars to spare. The checkbook exists. The checks are being written every quarter, on the value of your hours. They are simply addressed to someone else. And notice what that proves: shareholders are the one constituency these companies never plead poverty to — that payment has never once been missed. So hear the demand of this entire series in its plainest form. We are not asking to smash the machine that writes those checks. We are asking to be written into it. Turn the public into shareholders — in our communities, in our society, in the capitalism our hours quietly fund.

Run the royalty honestly — the Alaska way. Suppose the levy were aggressive: 20 percent of Meta's entire global revenue, every dollar of it, about $33 billion. Operating profit falls from $69 billion to $36 billion, and the margin from 42 percent to roughly 22 — still nearly double the S&P 500 average, still more than ten times the grocer who sells your family dinner.^15,16 The oil majors have paid Alaska's royalty for half a century, and not one of them ever packed up the rigs out of grief. Profitable companies pay royalties on the commons they drill. That is not punishment. That is the rent.

So when the plea comes — and it will come wearing a very good suit — answer it in the only language the filing speaks. "Unprofitable" is not what these books say. What these books say is: never once had to share.

Straight talk, as always. No individual can opt out of this one — the network owns the group chat, the job board, the family photos, and lone abstinence just makes you harder to reach, not better paid. The dividend won't arrive because it's fair; Alaska's didn't either. It arrived because organized people built a fund the politicians couldn't claw back. And a check, even a fair one, is not the finish line — power is. The dividend is what power looks like when it's been won and written down.

But notice what this essay's arithmetic did: it turned a vague unease — "they're profiting off us somehow" — into an invoice with a rate on it. Forty-two cents an hour. $350 for the average scroller, $740 for a teenager's shift, around a thousand dollars a head once the whole take is counted. Compounding fifteen percent a year. The unease was dismissible. The invoice is not. And the moment the invoice exists, the incentives flip with it: the hour they engineer out of your kid stops being their revenue and starts being their bill.

My grandfather's neighbors couldn't stop Hearst's presses. They did something better — they withdrew their belief, and with it the power of the headline, and the strike held until the boys won. The platforms are betting we'll never do the modern version: never price the asset, never organize the users, never connect the scroll in our hand to the share we're owed.

They knew better in 1934. So do we. The shift is over — and it's payday.