I Hate the Manipulation Economy

Why social media, video games, and more are so unpleasant

Photo by Sivani Bandaru on Unsplash

It was inescapable all December long. There was advertising everywhere — on TV, on billboards, on the internet. Sports betting was arriving in my state on January 1.

I’m not a gambler at all. I’ve been in probably three casinos in my life, and found them disturbing and sad rather than…

I enrolled in three sports-betting apps. Each of these services, of course, has a business model based on addicting people to sports gambling, but each of them employed a slightly different set of psychological tricks to ensnare new customers:

DraftKings gave me $200 in “free bets” (I could wager this fake money and take home any winnings beyond the original stake). But there was, of course, a catch. I had only a week to use the free bets, and they came in $25 increments, meaning that I’d have to make 8 bets in my first week on the service.

MGM gave me $200 in $50 increments, with a slightly longer time horizon to use my fake money.

FanDuel gave me my $200 only if I deposited at least $10 first, but I could use my free bets as I wished.

All three were handing out essentially guaranteed wins in the first week, as well — with offers like “double your money if the Cavaliers score at least one point tonight.”

Each app had a theory on how to hook me. DraftKings wanted to get me in the habit of betting frequently — presumably, I’d feel the thrill of at least a few wins, and establish a habit of opening the app a lot. MGM wanted me to feel the excitement of a bigger win by letting me bet more often for bigger stakes. FanDuel wanted to make sure I crossed the threshold of giving them my credit card number, assuming that once I’d done it once, it would be psychologically easier for me to deposit more money later.

I should mention that each of these apps had the legally required warnings about gambling addiction, but this felt like it was for show. The whole architecture of these apps is designed to get people into the frequent habit of betting and losing. That’s how these companies make money.

Even though I‘m not disposed to gambling — I’m too risk averse— I can feel the tentacles tightening. I’m getting used to opening those apps on a regular basis. I feel the pull of the various offers these companies are throwing in my face. The apps feel dangerous. In a matter of seconds, I could choose to deposit thousands of dollars I don’t have using a credit card and lose my mortgage on an ill-advised bet. There’s no friction at all.

I’m sure that, within a few weeks of launching in my state, these companies will have manipulated thousands of people into becoming habitual sports gamblers. Many of these gamblers will develop harmful habits. The sports books will laugh all the way to the bank.

The Manipulation Economy

Obviously, companies have long tried to influence us into buying things we don’t need or can’t afford. After all, it’s the mission of the whole advertising industry (a $500 billion market!).

But I found my experience with sports betting to be similar to a lot of other experiences I have in the economy. Something even more insidious than advertising has emerged in recent years. I’ve started to think of it as the “manipulation economy.”

Here are the hallmarks of the manipulation economy:

Products are free or severely underpriced to lure people in.

There’s a lack of friction — making a bad choice is only a couple of finger swipes away.

The business model is based on making money off of a small number of addicts (or, if you like, “heavy users”) who, because they’re hooked, will provide a steady stream of income for companies (which means that the majority of customers are irrelevant).

And, most importantly, firms are employing an increasingly sophisticated set of mechanisms to exploit human psychology and convert the people they’ve attracted with freebies into heavy users.

Where do we see the manipulation economy? Here are a couple of examples:

The credit-card industry is one of the pioneers of customer manipulation. Credit cards are disturbingly easy to get — a while back, I signed up for a new one and was approved and logged into my new account within 5 minutes of typing in a Google search. Credit cards are both useful and dangerous because they’re frictionless. They don’t force you to reckon with how much money you actually have; just pull out your card, swipe, and enjoy the instant gratification!

Credit card companies have gone all in on attracting customers with bonuses (spend $500 in the first three months and get $200 back!) along with complex systems of points and cash back. Is Capital One giving you that cash back out of the goodness of its heart? Nope — the company knows that these incentives will push some percentage of its customers to overspend and carry perpetual balances on their cards, which means the bank can collect those sweet 22% interest payments.

Capital One and its competitors know that many, perhaps most of their customers will spend responsibly, meaning that the banks will lose money on all of the points and rewards they give us. They have an ironic nickname for those of us who pay off our cards each month and collect our points: “deadbeats.”

But for every few people who pay their balance in full each month, there’s somebody that just bought a couch they can’t afford because it was just so easy — and, hey, they got so many miles! — who will end up paying twice the price of the couch in interest payments to the bank.

The video game industry has become a manipulation industry, too. Video game designers used to have a simple job: make a game that is really fun to play, and get people to buy that game. Now, the job of many designers is to make a free game that will hook people into playing it compulsively at first — then, once players have been properly ensnared, find ways to manipulate them into repeatedly spending small amounts of money.

I can’t imagine that many video game designers got into the business with dreams of manipulating children into addictive behavior that drives them to beg their parents to spend money on microtransactions (see this

M.G. Siegler

piece, which inspired this section, for a good lament from a frustrated parent). Video games are many children’s first experiences with the manipulation economy — I wonder what effect it will have on them as they grow up to have their psychology exploited from such a young age.

It must be weird for game makers to design a game to be enjoyable for the first few hours and then to become frustrating on purpose — so frustrating that it drives players toward microtransactions to alleviate the irritation What’s it like to spend your career making games that you know will repel 80% of their players as soon as you start turning the screws?

More simply, it must be weird to design a game that’s addictive rather than fun; a game that tickles the same parts of the brain as heroin or alcohol or gambling rather than the parts of the brain that experience joy, wonder, or awe.

Games are supposed to be fun, but more and more of them are becoming engines of manipulation. I want to play my video games, not fight against all of the ways in which they’re trying to screw me over.

And, of course, there’s the kingpin of the manipulation economy: social media. These companies give you a “free” service that feels very valuable — they connect you to your friends, the news, and the wider world. But they’re working at every turn to addict you. Most of these free services profit from maximizing user engagement — which means keeping you on the site longer than you want to be there so they can harvest your data and serve you more ads.

Lots of people, including me, have already explained the ways in which social media manipulates us, so I won’t belabor the point. We all know that millions of people have become so addicted to Twitter that they can’t quit it — even though they were calling it a “hellsite” in the days before Elon Musk started making it even more hellish. We know how YouTube pushed people toward dangerous political radicalism to keep them on the site. We know that the TikTok algorithm is so effective at hacking our brains that we call it “creepy,” “disturbing,” or even “mind control.”

The business model of these sites is to pull in users, manipulate them into spending time and attention on the site — often by driving them into states of outrage and anger — and then profit. It doesn’t matter if being on social media is depressing children or wrecking our attention spans or making us feel bad, as long as they can keep our eyeballs for a few extra minutes.

Personally, I’m pretty good at navigating the manipulation economy. I pay my credit cards off every month, I quit Twitter, and I’m going to quit those sports-betting apps and take my free money with me.

But even for people who don’t fall into its traps, the manipulation economy is exhausting. Rather than using something I’ve bought and simply enjoying it, I find that more and more often, I have to be on guard against being taken advantage of. When I start a new free video game on my phone or try out a social network, my first questions are: What’s the catch? How are they going to try to screw me over this time? When will using this product cease to be fun and start to become an addictive, compulsive slog?

The manipulation economy means that “our” products are never really ours. It gives us things for free that never stop pushing us to spend. It provides us with services that are designed to make us unhappy — the better to keep us locked in a compulsive behavior loop. It breeds cynicism and distrust, which our society already has enough of, thank you very much.

So, strangely, I think I’d prefer a world with fewer freebies. Tell me the price upfront and I’ll pay it; just stop trying to manipulate me.

I Hate the Manipulation Economy