Here’s the ugly truth you won’t hear in a TED Talk:
You’re not the customer. You’re the collateral.
And the brands you love? They’re prisoners on the same platform-built hamster wheel.
We didn’t lose control of the Internet. We never had it. The “free” platforms weren’t digital town squares; they were casinos where your attention was the chips—and the house always wins.
Every post, like, share, and scroll wasn’t community building. It was training an algorithm to sell you back to advertisers. Meanwhile, platforms set up toll booths between people and purpose—and raked in billions selling access to the road to connect with each other.
They call it “connection.”
It’s digital feudalism.
Consumer’s Are Forfeiting Their Rights.
Scrolling feels harmless. But it isn’t leisure. It’s labor.
Every flick of your thumb feeds machine learning models, sharpens ad targeting, and spins corporate profits. You’re not “consuming content.” You’re fueling a surveillance economy that watches what you love, monetizes your reactions, and engineers your next click.
And the payout for you?
A dopamine drip. A feed fine-tuned to hijack your time. A version of yourself you never consented to build—but that someone else owns. Most of us click “accept all cookies” and move on. But those permissions aren’t harmless. They’re blank checks signed with your identity, your attention, and your future behavior.
You’re not just a user. You’re an unpaid data farm—and the crops have already been sold.
The Brand’s Dystopia
Now flip the screen.
You’re a brand. You invest millions building a loyal audience—only to have the gate slammed in your face.
You post. Five percent reach. Maybe.
Want access to the rest? Open your wallet. Again. And again. And again.
The platforms flipped the rules: you can build a following, but you can’t reach them without paying ransom. “Direct-to-consumer” was a myth—it’s always been direct-to-platform.
Brands don’t own audiences anymore. They rent visibility inside black box systems, competing for attention like kids fighting over candy thrown into a crowd.
All while the platforms exploit your content to train better algorithms—to sell you out faster next time. It’s not a marketplace. It’s a rigged auction where the house always cashes your checks first.
Platforms Are Double Dipping
Platforms like Meta, Google, TikTok, and Amazon aren’t just middlemen. They’re modern-day toll booths on the highway between people and brands. And they’ve rigged the road.
Consumers give up their time, attention, and data for free.
Brands pour in their money, creativity, and trust for diminishing returns.
Platforms harvest both, optimize the system for themselves, and then…sell the relationship back to both sides. Users are sold the relationship with each other and brands given a bidding marketplace for consumers attention.
It’s like building a bridge and charging the engineers to walk across it. This is happening every second of every day. This isn’t an accident. It’s a business model. A trillion-dollar one. And it’s a parasitic relationship we are in.
Parasitic access: You build a following, but you can’t reach those who follow you — not without paying for the privilege.
Parasitic consent: You agree to terms you don’t understand, surrendering more than you realize with every click.
Parasitic value: You create the content, the data, the culture — but they capture the profits.
This isn’t a glitch. It’s the architecture. A system built not to empower you, but to extract from you — by design. And it’s not just consumers getting extracted. It’s brands, too. That’s the paradox no one talks about. We’re supposed to be in a relationship—brands and people, creators and communities. But there’s a third wheel in the bed, and it’s quietly pocketing all the intimacy, all the insights, and influence…and flipping it into stock buybacks and shareholder reports.
We’re living inside an economy where contribution is infinite—but ownership is forbidden. And the longer we confuse addiction for participation, the deeper the parasite burrows.
Dismantling the Toll Economy.
They’ve tricked us into thinking the algorithm is destiny.
That the digital toll road is the price of admission. But nothing about this system is natural. It was built this way—on purpose. The good news? What’s built can be dismantled.
We don’t need “fairer” toll booths. We need to tear them down. Ownership of your data. Ownership of your relationships. Ownership of the value you create. The real revolution isn’t finding a better gatekeeper. It’s destroying the need for one.
The internet was supposed to be a highway. They turned it into a gated community.
It’s time to rip the gates off the hinges. It’s time for something more collaborative. More human. The attention economy doesn’t need more growth, it needs accountability.
No more renting your own influence. No more signing away your value.
No more pretending a billion-dollar middleman deserves 99% of what you built.
What Would a Fair System Look Like?
At CoCreate Media, we believe media should work for the people who power it. It should look like connection, not gatekeeping; co-creation, not exploitation; mutual compensation, not extractive profit.
Consumers should own their attention and be paid for the value they generate. Content Creators and Influencers should be able to communicate and create for their audience. Brands should be able to reach their communities without paying a digital ransom every time and collaborate with creators and influencers to meet the audience where they are. AI should learn through consent, not surveillance.
We don’t need more ads—we need a new contract. A contract where consumers are valued stakeholders, not products, and where brands build with people, not just for them.
The toll collectors made a fortune off your roads. It’s time you took the keys back.
Be the solution and the new way forward.
Join CoCreate and subscribe.