The "free" economy has become the greatest illusion of our time. We don't pay with money; we pay in kind. And a lot. Every click, every registration, every "free" update is an invitation to surrender something more valuable than our money: minutes of our lives, attention spans, fragments of our identity. Digital freeness has trained us in a lie: if it doesn't hurt the wallet, it doesn't hurt anything. And that's false. The tech industry discovered before anyone else that our scarcest resource isn't money, but attention. And it orchestrated a perfect system to capture it. The entry price is zero euros. The exit price is never clear: it's the trapped users.
We all fall into this trap. We open an app to "look something up" and exit twenty minutes later without remembering what the heck we were looking for. We've stopped paying for services and started funding them with our distraction. The time we give up brings more associated assets. Platforms give us free content in exchange for knowing everything about us. Just look at the recent EU sanction against X for opacity in the use of user information, among other things. Apps turn tasks into notifications. "Free" music services fine-tune their algorithms based on our daily emotions. Nothing is innocent. Being free isn't a commercial gesture, but a method of extraction. Not of money. Of behavior.
The paradox is this: we've never had access to so many resources for free, and yet we've never felt such a lack of time. This is the hidden price: our time, our attention, and our behaviors and preferences. You won't find me on any social network. My profile exists, but apart from those for professional use, I don't use them. One day, while working, I realized I'd spent ten minutes mindlessly scrolling through a social network. I couldn't even remember what I'd gone there to look for. And then I decided to stop. They were consuming my life. I was absurdly shortening my days. Well, one learns late. Besides, when everything seems free, everything seems dispensable. Intellectual work, journalism, music, creation… If they don't cost money, what are they worth? We've confused cost with value. And we've become consumers who believe we deserve everything without effort, even things that require someone else's dedication. We must understand that nothing is truly free. Here are new forms of payment: time given, attention captured, our identity deciphered, our preferences, our interests.
The digital world is an economy where the user is the product, so true digital education will consist of learning to value our time and identity. Until now, paying meant giving money. Now it also means surrendering a part of our lives.
