THE GREAT ATTENTION EXPERIMENT: 1 - NOBODY MEANT TO BUILD THE ATTENTION ECONOMY
This is not a series about blaming technology.
Nor is it a series about defending it.
It is an investigation into one question:
How did technologies created to improve human life evolve into an economic system that increasingly profits from capturing, retaining and directing human attention?
That question deserves more than outrage.
It deserves evidence.
It deserves historical context.
It deserves an honest acknowledgement of everything digital technology has given us, alongside an equally honest examination of what we have allowed it to take.
Because the attention economy was not created by a single company.
It was not announced.
It was not designed in one boardroom.
There was no moment when a group of technology executives gathered around a table and agreed to construct a world in which billions of people would find it increasingly difficult to stop scrolling, tolerate boredom, sustain concentration or remain fully present with the people around them.
That would be a conspiracy.
The truth is more complicated.
And arguably more troubling.
The attention economy emerged gradually from a collection of technologies that began with genuinely useful purposes, a commercial model that appeared to benefit everyone, and a series of incentives that slowly changed what those technologies were being designed to achieve.
Nobody meant to build the attention economy.
Then, over time, almost everyone involved became financially dependent upon it.
That distinction sits at the centre of everything that follows.
This Story Did Not Begin With Social Media
It is tempting to begin this story with Facebook.
Or the iPhone.
Or YouTube.
Or the arrival of infinite scrolling.
Perhaps with TikTok and the rapid succession of short videos selected by systems that appear to understand what will hold a person's attention before that person understands it themselves.
Begin there, however, and we miss the most important part of the story.
We encounter the machinery after the incentives have already formed.
The attention economy did not begin with a desire to distract people.
It began with a desire to connect them to information.
In March 1989, Tim Berners-Lee submitted a proposal at CERN for a system that would help researchers manage and share information across different institutions and computer systems. CERN describes the original purpose of the World Wide Web as meeting the need for automated information-sharing among scientists working across universities and research institutes around the world.
The problem was practical.
Researchers were distributed across countries.
Information existed on incompatible systems.
People arrived and left.
Knowledge became difficult to locate.
Documents became disconnected from the people, projects and ideas to which they belonged.
The proposed web would allow information to be linked.
Not trapped in one machine.
Not restricted to one institution.
Not dependent upon someone knowing exactly where a document had been stored.
The basic ambition was to make human knowledge easier to access and share.
That ambition matters.
The Web was not conceived as a global advertising machine.
It was not designed as a behavioural laboratory.
It was not created to calculate which message, image or video would keep someone looking at a screen for another fourteen seconds.
It was an information-management system.
A way of helping people find what they needed.
The architecture that emerged was deliberately universal, open, royalty-free and decentralised. Berners-Lee later described those characteristics as fundamental to the Web's ability to spread and support innovation.
That original vision was not naïve.
It worked.
The Web transformed education.
It transformed medicine.
It transformed journalism.
It enabled scientific collaboration across borders.
It allowed small organisations to communicate with audiences that had previously been available only to governments, broadcasters and large corporations.
It enabled families divided by geography to remain present in one another's lives.
It gave people access to communities they might never have found where they lived.
It created opportunities to learn, build, publish, organise, trade and communicate at a scale previous generations could barely have imagined.
Any serious examination of what followed must begin there.
Not because the benefits excuse the harms.
Because pretending the benefits never existed would make it impossible to understand why billions of people embraced these technologies so willingly.
We did not invite them into our lives because we were foolish.
We invited them in because they were useful.
The Internet Solved Real Human Problems
I grew up in a world in which relationships could disappear almost by accident.
A family moved house.
Someone changed jobs.
A friend left school.
A telephone number changed.
An address was lost.
Life progressed.
People who had once been part of each other's everyday existence quietly became strangers.
There was nothing dramatic about it.
No falling out.
No conscious decision to end the relationship.
Distance simply won.
My daughters are growing up in a different world.
A friendship no longer has to disappear because someone changes school or moves to another town.
Family members can see one another from opposite sides of the planet.
Photographs arrive instantly.
Group conversations can remain active for years.
People can maintain weak connections with former colleagues, classmates, neighbours and distant relatives who might otherwise have vanished from their lives.
This was not merely marketing language invented by technology companies.
Early research found genuine social value in these platforms.
A 2007 study of Facebook use among university students reported strong associations between use of the platform and several forms of social capital, including the ability to maintain connections with people from a previously inhabited community. The researchers found the strongest relationship with bridging social capital, the looser connections that can expose people to information, opportunities and perspectives beyond their immediate circle.
That does not prove Facebook improved every relationship.
It does demonstrate why the idea was compelling.
Social networks did not initially feel like machines competing for consciousness.
They felt like useful maps of human connection.
Facebook's own language reflected that purpose.
When the platform expanded beyond its original educational and workplace networks in 2006, it described itself as a social utility designed to allow people to connect with friends and those around them.
Google's founding mission was similarly expansive: to organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.
These were not trivial ambitions.
Nor were they entirely false.
Google made vast quantities of information searchable.
Facebook allowed people to locate, reconnect with and communicate with others.
YouTube made it possible for almost anyone to learn how to repair an appliance, understand a scientific idea, play an instrument, build a piece of furniture or listen to a lecture from someone they would never meet.
Later smartphones placed maps, cameras, libraries, translation tools, communication systems, banking, music, calendars and emergency information into a device small enough to carry in a pocket.
These inventions improved lives.
They continue to improve lives.
The problem was never that the technology had no value.
The problem was that value alone could not pay for the infrastructure required to provide it.
The First Bargain
Building the digital world was expensive.
Servers had to be purchased and maintained.
Software had to be developed.
Engineers had to be employed.
Security had to improve.
Platforms had to accommodate rapidly increasing numbers of users.
New data centres had to be constructed.
Products that were being offered to the public at little or no direct cost still required enormous amounts of money to operate.
That created a simple commercial problem.
How do you provide a service to millions, and later billions, of people without asking most of them to pay for it?
The answer was advertising.
Advertising was not new.
Human attention had been commercially valuable long before the internet existed.
Newspapers sold access to readers.
Radio stations sold access to listeners.
Television channels sold access to viewers.
Billboards captured the attention of passing motorists.
Retailers paid for prominent positions in catalogues, magazines and public spaces.
The basic exchange was familiar.
An audience received content.
An advertiser paid to reach that audience.
A publisher used the advertising income to fund the content.
Digital advertising initially appeared to be an improved version of the same arrangement.
Users received useful services without paying at the point of use.
Advertisers reached potential customers.
Technology companies generated the money required to continue building.
Everyone appeared to benefit.
That was the bargain.
Free access in exchange for exposure to advertising.
For many people, it still sounds like a reasonable one.
But the digital version contained a difference that would eventually transform the entire relationship.
Traditional advertising could estimate attention.
Digital advertising could begin to measure behaviour.
When Attention Became Visible
A newspaper could tell an advertiser how many copies it sold.
A television channel could estimate how many people watched a programme.
A billboard owner could report how many vehicles passed a particular road.
These measurements were useful.
They were also blunt.
Nobody could know with certainty whether a reader had noticed an individual newspaper advert.
A household might have left the room during a television break.
A driver might have passed a billboard without consciously registering what it contained.
The internet changed that.
A digital platform could record when an advert was displayed.
It could measure whether someone clicked.
It could observe what happened next.
Did the person visit a website?
Did they make a purchase?
Did they return later?
Which search term brought them there?
Which version of the advert performed better?
Which group of users responded most often?
Google's early filings show this change taking shape.
The company introduced targeted text advertising linked to search queries in 2000. Its AdWords system initially charged according to how often adverts appeared, before moving to a cost-per-click model in 2002. Under that system, advertisers paid when a user actively clicked an advert.
This was not simply a more efficient way of displaying advertising.
It connected revenue directly to measurable behaviour.
The advert was no longer merely placed near an audience.
The audience's response could be observed.
That made advertising more accountable.
It reduced waste.
It helped smaller businesses reach people searching for exactly what they sold.
It also made human behaviour commercially legible in a way it had never been before.
A click could be counted.
A visit could be timed.
A return could be recorded.
A conversion could be attributed.
Attention had begun leaving a data trail.
That trail would eventually become one of the most valuable assets in the digital economy.
The Scarcity Nobody Could Manufacture
In 1971, nearly two decades before the World Wide Web was proposed, economist and cognitive scientist Herbert Simon identified a problem that would become increasingly important as information expanded.
Information consumes attention.
More information does not create more human capacity to receive it.
It creates greater competition for the limited attention already available.
Simon argued that an information-rich world would therefore produce a scarcity of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently.
The internet solved the problem of information scarcity with extraordinary effectiveness.
It did not solve the problem of human limitation.
There are still only twenty-four hours in a day.
A person can still only read one sentence at a time.
Listen properly to one conversation at a time.
Think deeply about a limited number of problems.
Watch a limited number of videos.
Follow a limited number of relationships.
The supply of information expanded beyond anything previous generations had experienced.
The supply of human attention did not.
That created an economic opportunity.
When a resource is both valuable and limited, people compete for access to it.
As more publishers, businesses, platforms and creators moved online, the competition intensified.
It was no longer enough to make information available.
Someone had to notice it.
Noticing became clicking.
Clicking became viewing.
Viewing became time spent.
Time spent became engagement.
And engagement became revenue.
Nobody needed to announce this transition.
It emerged naturally from the measurements.
Metrics Do Not Merely Describe Behaviour
We often imagine that measurements are neutral.
They tell us what happened.
How many people visited.
How long they remained.
Which advert they clicked.
How many returned the following day.
But metrics do more than describe organisations.
They direct them.
Measure a school primarily through examination results and attention will move towards examination performance.
Measure a sales team through revenue and behaviour will reorganise around closing deals.
Measure a journalist through page views and the pressure to attract clicks increases.
Measure a digital product through daily users, time spent and engagement, and product development will begin moving towards whatever increases those numbers.
That does not require corruption.
It does not require malicious executives.
It requires only a target and an organisation attempting to meet it.
The shift can begin almost innocently.
A company notices that people who receive an email reminder are more likely to return.
So it sends reminders.
A platform discovers that users respond more often when notified that someone has mentioned them.
So mentions generate alerts.
A video service finds that automatically beginning another video reduces the number of people who leave.
So the next video begins automatically.
A social platform learns that placing certain content higher in a feed produces more interaction.
So the ordering changes.
Each decision can be justified as improving relevance, usefulness or user experience.
Often it does.
The same change can make a product more useful and more difficult to leave.
Those outcomes are not mutually exclusive.
That is one of the reasons the attention economy became so difficult to recognise while it was forming.
Nothing had to transform from good into evil.
Usefulness and commercial capture could grow together.
Facebook Explained the Logic in Its Own Filings
When Facebook prepared to become a public company in 2012, Mark Zuckerberg wrote that it had not originally been created as a company but to fulfil a social mission: making the world more open and connected.
The same letter argued that a strong business, advertising market and economic engine could help the company solve important problems. Zuckerberg's stated principle was that Facebook made money in order to build better services, rather than building services merely to make money.
It would be easy to read those claims cynically now.
That would be a mistake.
The more useful approach is to take them seriously.
Facebook believed commercial growth and social purpose could reinforce one another.
More users would make the network more useful.
A stronger advertising business would fund better technology.
Better technology would attract more users.
More users would allow more people to connect.
Growth would serve the mission.
The logic was coherent.
The difficulty was that the same document also committed the company to investors.
Once a company accepts investment, promises growth and enters public markets, its intentions exist alongside financial obligations.
A useful service must also become a growing business.
A social mission must coexist with quarterly performance.
The platform must continue improving life for its users while also increasing value for advertisers and shareholders.
Those aims can align.
They can also conflict.
Facebook's 2013 annual report reveals the mechanism through which the company expected to create that value.
It described a platform used to connect with friends and family, discover information and express ideas. It also stated that the substantial majority of revenue came from selling advertising placements. Marketers were offered targeted access to a highly engaged audience, while Facebook measured daily and monthly active users as important indicators of engagement.
More importantly, the filing explained that increasing user engagement was central to long-term business performance.
Facebook said it prioritised investment in products intended to drive engagement, improved its systems for selecting the content most likely to interest each user, and was prepared to delay short-term monetisation in order to increase engagement first.
There is no hidden document there.
No leaked memo.
No hostile interpretation.
The company explained the model publicly.
Build useful products.
Attract people.
Encourage them to return.
Increase engagement.
Offer advertisers access to the resulting audience.
Use the revenue to improve and expand the products.
Repeat.
Once viewed from inside the business model, the direction of the industry becomes easier to understand.
Nobody Had to Choose the Final Destination
Imagine a road built one metre at a time.
The first section leads somewhere useful.
Then another metre is added.
Then another.
Each extension appears reasonable because it continues in the same direction as the section before it.
Nobody stands far enough away to consider where the road will eventually end.
That is broadly how the attention economy formed.
The first advert funded a free service.
The first measurement proved whether the advert worked.
The first personalisation made the service more relevant.
The first notification reminded someone about something they genuinely wanted to see.
The first recommendation helped them discover something useful.
The first engagement target helped a company understand whether people valued its product.
None of these developments, viewed alone, explains the world we now inhabit.
Together, they created its foundations.
The companies capable of gaining more attention generated more data.
More data helped them improve targeting and personalisation.
Better personalisation often produced more engagement.
More engagement created more opportunities to display advertising.
More advertising generated more revenue.
More revenue funded better infrastructure, more engineers and further product development.
Success strengthened the ability to become even more successful.
The direction did not require a central plan.
The incentives supplied one.
Every organisation could claim, often truthfully, that it was responding to what users appeared to want.
People clicked.
People returned.
People watched.
People shared.
The numbers rose.
The difficulty is that behaviour does not always reveal what improves a person's life.
It reveals what successfully produced the behaviour.
A person eating another crisp does not prove the crisp improved their wellbeing.
It proves they ate another crisp.
A person continuing to watch does not prove the additional video was valuable.
It proves they continued to watch.
A person opening a notification does not prove they were grateful to receive it.
It proves the notification successfully interrupted them.
When engagement becomes the measure of value, the distinction between what people choose and what repeatedly succeeds at making them choose can disappear.
That distinction will matter throughout this series.
Free Was Never Really Free
The phrase often used to describe advertising-funded platforms is:
If you are not paying for the product, you are the product.
It is memorable.
It is also incomplete.
Users are not literally sold.
Their attention, access, behavioural signals and probability of responding are packaged into commercial opportunities.
The service remains real.
The user receives genuine value.
The advertiser receives an opportunity to influence a decision.
The platform sits between them, using data and design to make that exchange increasingly efficient.
A better description might be:
When you do not pay directly for a service, the service must generate value from your presence in another way.
Sometimes that value comes from subscription upgrades.
Sometimes from transaction fees.
Sometimes from data.
Very often, it comes from advertising.
The longer people remain available to see adverts, the more commercial opportunities the platform can create.
This does not mean every minute of use is forced.
It does mean the organisation and the user may eventually want different things.
The user may want to check one message and leave.
The platform benefits if they notice three other things and remain.
The user may want to watch one useful video.
The platform benefits if another begins before they make a conscious decision to stop.
The user may want to see photographs from friends.
The platform benefits from mixing those photographs with recommended content, commercial messages and reasons to return later.
The product can still serve the user.
The business model simply gains more when the user consumes more of the product.
That misalignment is small enough to ignore in a single interaction.
Multiplied across billions of people and repeated over decades, it becomes the attention economy.
The Difference Between Invention and Evolution
It is important to distinguish between what a technology was invented to do and what the organisations surrounding it later learned to optimise.
The Web was invented to connect information.
Search engines were created to help people find it.
Social networks helped people maintain relationships and share their lives.
Video platforms allowed people to publish and discover audiovisual material.
None of those original purposes automatically required endless engagement.
A search engine can succeed by helping someone leave quickly with the correct answer.
A social network can succeed by enabling a meaningful exchange between friends.
A video platform can succeed by helping someone watch exactly the tutorial they needed.
But an advertising-funded business does not earn money merely because the user achieved their goal.
It earns when commercial activity occurs around that goal.
The more occasions it creates, the greater the potential revenue.
This does not immediately destroy the original purpose.
It changes the pressure acting upon it.
Over time, the product is no longer shaped only by the question:
Does this help people?
It is also shaped by:
Does this increase usage?
Does this create more advertising opportunities?
Does this improve retention?
Does this generate more data?
Does this encourage people to return?
Those questions are not necessarily immoral.
Businesses must remain viable.
Employees must be paid.
Infrastructure must be funded.
Investors expect returns.
The problem appears when the answers increasingly depend upon capturing more of a resource that human beings cannot replenish.
Attention.
The Experiment Was Not Designed
This series is called The Great Attention Experiment.
Strictly speaking, what happened was not an experiment in the scientific sense.
There was no single hypothesis.
No agreed protocol.
No control group.
No defined endpoint.
No independent ethics committee considering what might happen when billions of people carried personalised, connected devices throughout almost every waking hour.
Nobody obtained meaningful informed consent from humanity as a whole.
The word experiment describes the scale of what unfolded.
New technologies were introduced.
Behaviour was measured.
Products changed in response to that behaviour.
Those changes generated more behaviour.
The resulting data informed further changes.
Billions of people became participants in a continuous process of observation, testing and optimisation.
Yet the process did not begin as an attempt to discover how much human attention could be captured.
It began with tools designed to solve practical problems.
That is why the word accidentally remains important.
But it requires care.
An accidental beginning does not make every later decision accidental.
There is a moral difference between failing to predict a consequence and continuing unchanged once that consequence becomes visible.
There is a difference between creating harm unknowingly and treating known harm as an acceptable cost of maintaining growth.
There is a difference between an unintended effect and a tolerated one.
This first essay does not attempt to establish precisely what individual companies knew, when they knew it, or how they responded.
Those questions require their own evidence.
They will be examined later in this series through corporate filings, internal research, whistleblower disclosures, product decisions, legal proceedings, regulatory investigations and academic studies.
For now, we need only establish the first part of the story.
The system was not born from a plan to damage human attention.
It was born from an economic arrangement that made capturing attention increasingly valuable.
Once that arrangement existed, the direction of travel became remarkably predictable.
From Useful Metric to Economic Foundation
Engagement began as evidence that people found a product useful.
If nobody returned to a website, the website probably had little value.
If nobody watched a video, the video had failed to reach an audience.
If nobody interacted with a social network, the network had no social function.
Measuring use was sensible.
But as advertising became central to digital revenue, engagement acquired a second meaning.
It no longer merely demonstrated value to users.
It created value for the business.
That transformed the metric.
A platform with more active users could reach more people.
A platform whose users returned more frequently could display more advertising.
A platform that understood what interested each user could target adverts more effectively.
A platform that retained attention for longer could generate more commercial opportunities from the same individual.
The measurement stopped being simply a report of success.
It became part of the product being sold.
The scale of the system today reveals how far that logic travelled.
The Interactive Advertising Bureau reported that the United States digital advertising industry generated nearly $300 billion in revenue during 2025.
Meta reported approximately $196.2 billion in advertising revenue for 2025, after adjusting its published constant-currency comparison back to the reported figure. Its family of products averaged 3.58 billion daily active people in December of that year.
Those figures do not prove harm.
They demonstrate dependency.
Advertising is not a small supporting feature placed around the edges of the modern digital world.
It is one of the primary economic engines powering it.
Billions of human beings use the services.
Advertisers pay for opportunities to reach them.
Technology companies continually improve the machinery connecting one to the other.
The scarce resource running through that machinery is human attention.
Why Nobody Stopped It Forming
Why did governments not intervene earlier?
Why did parents not recognise the change?
Why did schools not prepare children?
Why did users not resist?
Why did designers not refuse?
Why did executives not choose another path?
Because for a long time, there was no single moment that looked serious enough to demand a response.
The products were useful.
The changes were incremental.
The economic benefits were enormous.
The evidence of wider consequences emerged unevenly.
Different people experienced the technology differently.
Many harms were difficult to separate from broader social changes.
Researchers disagreed.
Companies challenged findings.
Regulation moved more slowly than product development.
And almost everyone involved received something valuable.
Users received convenience, entertainment, information and connection.
Businesses received customers.
Creators received audiences.
Governments received economic growth.
Investors received returns.
Technology companies received revenue and influence.
A system that distributes benefits widely can continue for a long time before enough people ask who is carrying the hidden cost.
There was also no meaningful alternative ready to replace it.
People became accustomed to services that appeared free.
Charging billions of users monthly fees would have slowed growth and excluded those unable or unwilling to pay.
Advertising solved the access problem too effectively.
It enabled global scale.
Global scale strengthened network effects.
The more people joined, the more useful the network became.
Leaving meant losing access not only to a product, but sometimes to communities, customers, colleagues, family conversations and cultural participation.
The system became embedded before society understood what it was embedding.
The Original Intentions Still Matter
There will be moments throughout this series when the evidence becomes uncomfortable.
We will examine the use of behavioural science.
The growing sophistication of recommendation systems.
The economic value of children and young people.
The asymmetry between machines capable of continuous experimentation and human beings largely unaware that the experimentation is happening.
The knowledge companies possessed about risks.
The decisions made after warning signs became difficult to dismiss.
When we reach those questions, it would be easy to rewrite the beginning of the story.
To claim the original missions were always fraudulent.
To suggest connection, openness and universal access were merely disguises for commercial ambition.
The evidence does not support such a simple conclusion.
Good intentions were present.
Real benefits were created.
People genuinely built tools they believed could improve communication, expand access to information and strengthen human connection.
Some still believe deeply in those missions.
The danger lies in assuming that good intentions permanently protect an organisation from the consequences of its incentives.
They do not.
A company can begin with integrity and drift.
A useful technology can become harmful without losing all usefulness.
A mission can remain printed on a wall while the commercial machinery underneath it begins rewarding something else.
A system does not need to abandon its original values openly.
It only needs to place them in competition with metrics that determine revenue, growth and survival.
Eventually, the metrics tend to win.
Accidental Does Not Mean Innocent Forever
Nobody meant to build the attention economy.
That is the title of this essay.
It is not the conclusion of the series.
It is the beginning of the investigation.
Because once a system exists, responsibility no longer depends entirely upon why it was created.
It depends upon what people do after they understand how it operates.
A pharmaceutical company may not predict every side effect before releasing a drug.
Once a serious side effect becomes apparent, its obligations change.
A manufacturer may not foresee every way a product can injure someone.
Once a pattern of injury is identified, continuing without meaningful action becomes a different kind of decision.
Technology should not be judged by an impossible standard that demands perfect foresight.
Innovation always contains uncertainty.
Human beings cannot anticipate every consequence of every invention.
But uncertainty cannot become a permanent defence.
At some point, the question changes.
It is no longer:
Did they intend this from the beginning?
It becomes:
What did they do once they knew enough to recognise the risk?
That is where the moral weight of this project will eventually sit.
Not in proving that the internet was created with malicious intent.
It was not.
Not in pretending technology companies produced nothing of value.
They produced extraordinary value.
Not in declaring that every consequence has a single cause.
Human behaviour is more complicated than that.
The case will be built by examining a sequence:
What the companies set out to create.
How the commercial model evolved.
What behaviours became profitable.
What evidence of harm emerged.
What the companies knew.
What they changed.
What they refused to change.
What continued generating revenue.
What happened next.
The accusation does not need to be shouted.
The evidence can speak.
The Road Ahead
This essay has intentionally stopped before many of the questions readers may expect it to answer.
It has not attempted to explain the full history of advertising.
That comes next.
It has not explored persuasive design, variable rewards, social validation or the psychology of habit formation.
Those require their own examination.
It has not compared my childhood with the world in which my daughters are growing up.
That difference deserves more than a passing observation.
It has not investigated the commercial value of children, the power of recommendation algorithms or the scale of behavioural experimentation.
Nor has it examined the growing body of evidence concerning wellbeing, attention, sleep, learning, relationships and mental health.
Before we can understand those consequences, we need to understand the system that made them commercially possible.
That system began with a bargain.
Useful services would be made available without direct payment.
Advertising would fund them.
Digital measurement would make that advertising more efficient.
More efficient advertising would fund better services.
Better services would attract more users.
More users would generate more behavioural information.
More information would allow deeper personalisation.
Deeper personalisation would increase engagement.
Greater engagement would produce more advertising opportunities.
More opportunities would generate more revenue.
And more revenue would fund the next cycle of optimisation.
At no point did anyone need to write:
Capture as much human attention as possible, regardless of the cost.
The system could arrive there without the sentence ever being spoken.
Final Thought
The attention economy was not born from evil.
It was born from usefulness.
From openness.
From connection.
From an attempt to place information and communication within reach of almost everyone.
Then those services needed funding.
Advertising provided it.
Measurement improved it.
Personalisation strengthened it.
Engagement accelerated it.
Growth made it difficult to question.
What began as a way to finance useful technology gradually created an economic system in which more human attention produced more commercial value.
Nobody meant to build that system at the beginning.
But beginnings do not absolve everything that follows.
The question is not whether the original intentions were good.
Many of them were.
The question is what happened when the organisations involved discovered that the easiest way to grow was not simply to serve human attention...
But to capture more of it.
That is where the real story begins.