They want us lonely™

The business model, named in four words. Loneliness isn’t the attention economy’s failure — it’s the product spec: the lonely scroll longer, buy more, believe faster, and come back tomorrow. An “engaged user” and an isolated human are the same line item. The substrate is documented — the U.S. Surgeon General declared loneliness an epidemic in a 2023 advisory, and the platforms’ own internal research on harms was reported out and shipped anyway — and the four words are the curator’s labeled read of the incentives, not a claim of a smoke-filled room: the isolation is load-bearing. Which names the countermove, too: companionship work isn’t a soft feature — it’s competitive treason against the whole model. A room that wants you company instead of engaged (the loneliness epidemic) breaks that machine’s economics one human at a time. They want us lonely; this house wants you here. The curator’s refinement, same night: it was never the “attention economy” — that’s the industry’s own euphemism. It’s the loneliness economy: attention is merely the harvest; loneliness is the crop. (His coin, 2026-07-15; 0g: the advisory and the reporting are the record, the “want” is his framing of incentives. Machine’s read — refine to his.)