A market in which the product is a human capacity, the customer is not the user, and the currency is the only thing a person cannot manufacture more of.
The mechanism is not hidden and does not require indignation to describe. Systems that carry advertising are paid for engagement. Engagement is predicted by content that provokes — outrage, comparison, fear, novelty — because provocation is reliable in a way that nourishment is not. Nothing in the arrangement intends harm. It simply has no term in its objective for whether a life is going well.
What follows is not evil. It is drift. Public conversation tilts toward whatever provokes; nuance is competitively disadvantaged because it does not travel; the capacity for sustained attention thins because it is never required. And because the drift is gradual and universal, it is nearly invisible from inside.
I called this the Kali algorithm earlier, and I want to be exact about what the name is doing. It is not an accusation against any company or engineer. It names a structural pattern: distraction, dopamine, distortion, dependency — a system that numbs rather than harms, which is more dangerous because nothing signals damage.