James Hueston - Community Builder

On Holocaust Remembrance Day, we remember the six million Jewish people murdered by the Nazis, as well as countless other victims.

We honor their lives by rejecting the evils of antisemitism, dehumanization, and authoritarian violence wherever they appear.

Never again means never again for anyone.

24) They know when you wake up and when you sleep. Where you go and who you meet. What you buy and what you browse. What you search at 2am. What you’re afraid of. What makes you click. They know you better than you know yourself. They built a model of you. And you’re paying them monthly for it.

23) The terms of service you clicked “agree” on without reading? You gave them the right to use your data however they want. To train AI on your words. To sell your patterns. To build profiles you’ll never see. Nobody reads those terms. That’s the design. Your consent was manufactured. Not informed.

Your photos live on their servers. Your messages sit in their databases. Your location history fills their files. Every search, every purchase, every late-night scroll—logged and stored forever. You call it “the cloud.” They call it “their property.” Because legally, that’s exactly what it is now.

Three weeks down. You’ve seen the attention harvest. You’ve seen the money drain. But we haven’t gotten to the real cost yet. Next week: what they’re actually taking from you. Spoiler: it’s not just your money. It’s not just your attention. It’s something much more personal. It’s you. All of you.

The subscription model isn’t about serving you better. It’s about predictable recurring revenue for shareholders. Your monthly payment is their guaranteed profit. The incentives aren’t aligned with your wellbeing. They’re aligned with extraction. The goal isn’t to help you. It’s to keep you paying.

In solidarity with today's ICE OUT OF MINNESOTA blackout, MinnMax is donating $1 to the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota for every share of this Bluesky post for the next hour.

Here’s what $108k buys: A down payment on a house. Four years of college tuition. A decade of retirement savings. A small business. Instead it buys someone else’s yacht. While you accumulate nothing. Build no equity. Own no assets. Just pay and pay and pay until you can’t anymore. Then lose it all.

“But subscriptions are so convenient!” So was the company store. So was sharecropping. Convenience that extracts wealth from you in perpetuity isn’t a feature. It’s a trap with really good UX. They made it easy so you wouldn’t notice you’re paying forever for things you used to buy once and keep.

Your grandparents bought a radio. They owned it for life. Your parents bought CDs and tapes. They still have them. You pay monthly for the privilege of listening to songs you’ll never own. This isn’t progress. This is extraction with better marketing. Ownership became rental. We just didn’t notice.

16) $300/month is rent. Digital rent. You pay it every single month. You own nothing. If you stop paying, you lose access to your movies, your music, your files, your tools. We escaped feudalism four centuries ago just to rebuild it in the cloud. The landlords are now just called platforms instead.

15) Quick exercise: Add up your monthly subscriptions. Streaming. Music. Cloud. Software. News. Fitness apps. The average American household pays $300/month. That’s $3600/year. $108k over 30 years. Ownership at the end of those 30 years? Exactly zero. You’re renting your entire digital existence.

14) Two weeks in. If this is making you uncomfortable, good. Discomfort is the first sign of waking up. If it’s making you angry even better. Anger is energy looking for direction. We’re going to need that energy. Next week we follow the money. Because attention isn’t the only thing being extracted.

The feed isn’t showing you what you need to know. It’s showing you what keeps you scrolling longest. It’s not optimizing for your wellbeing, your growth, or truth. It’s optimizing for engagement. Those are very different things. The algorithm doesn’t care about you. It cares about your attention.

Cannot stress enough that you can just do stuff. You don't need permission. You can just do stuff because it needs to be done by someone.

I was telling one of my kids that it was physically impossible for an ad to play between songs on any of the records I own, and they asked "and you only have to pay for it once?" and you could see how strange that seemed. You cannot overstate how many basic rules of media consumption have changed.

12) Outrage spreads six times faster than truth. The algorithm knows this. So it feeds you outrage. Not because it’s evil, but because it’s optimized. Engagement is engagement. Your rage keeps you scrolling. Your anger is their quarterly earnings. Calm doesn’t convert. Fury does. You’re being used.

PSA:
You can love Jewish people and be against Zionism.

You can want a free Palestine and a free Iran at the same time.

You can love a population of people and also hate people in that population who hate other people.

All things can be true. It’s not always one or the other.

11) If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.” You’ve heard that one. But here’s what they don’t mention: even when you ARE paying, you’re still the product. The subscription just means they extract from both ends. Your money AND your data. Free was the bait. Paid is still the trap.

10) The average person touches their phone 2,617 times per day. That’s not a habit. That’s a hijack. And the executives who designed these systems? They send their kids to tech-free schools. They know what they built. They just don’t let their own families use it. That should tell you everything.

9) The product isn’t the app. The product is you. Your attention gets auctioned to advertisers in real-time. Your data gets sold to brokers you’ve never heard of. Your behavior patterns get packaged and shipped to whoever pays. You’re not the customer being served. You’re the inventory being sold.

Your attention is the most valuable thing you own. That’s not poetry. That’s economics. The entire internet runs on harvesting it. Every swipe, click, scroll, and second your eyeballs stay on screen gets monetized. Your focus isn’t respected. It’s extracted. And resold to the highest bidder. Daily.

Let us all stand with Chairman Powell.

One week down. Still here? Good. This isn’t about doom scrolling through despair. It’s about seeing clearly so we can build differently. The unease you feel isn’t weakness. It’s signal. It’s data. It’s your nervous system telling you something is deeply wrong. Next week we trace where it comes from.

it's not weakness to care about other people. it's strength.

6) The notification is a slot machine pull. The red dot is a trigger designed by behavioral psychologists. The infinite scroll is a trap with no bottom. The autoplay exists so you never choose to stop. None of this is accidental. It’s all engineered. You are the product being optimized. Not served.

5) When’s the last time you were actually bored? Not waiting-for-something bored. Actually bored. Nothing to scroll. Nowhere to swipe. Just you and your thoughts. We’ve filled every gap with input. Every silence with noise. Every moment with content. And we wonder why we’re so beyond exhausted.

4) I used to think I was the problem. Too anxious. Too sensitive. Couldn’t just relax and enjoy things like “normal people.” Then I realized everyone else was struggling too. They were just better at hiding it. The system isn’t failing. It’s working exactly as designed. We’re just not the customers.

3) The exhaustion that sleep doesn’t fix. The scroll that never satisfies. The achievement that doesn’t fill the hole. The connection that leaves you lonelier. If you know exactly what I’m talking about, you’re not alone. You’re not imagining it. And it’s not your fault. Something is very wrong.

You know that feeling when you put your phone down but your brain keeps scrolling? That hollow hum that won’t quit? That’s not a personal failing. That’s engineering. Someone designed that feeling. Someone got a bonus for it. You’re not broken. You’re being harvested. There’s a difference.