What an hour of your attention is worth

I spent an evening working out what I'm worth to Big Tech, and then spent the rest of the week trying to stop thinking about it. The clever thing about "free" on the internet isn't that the trade doesn't exist. It's that it's been designed so you can't see it. No money changes hands. No receipt arrives. No app shows you the meter ticking as you scroll. The exchange is real — your attention and your data in, Instagram and Google and LinkedIn out — but by the time the numbers get tallied, they live in a quarterly earnings report you'll never read. So the trade feels weightless. Like you're getting the service for nothing. You're not getting it for nothing. You just can't see the price tag. The strange thing is that the price tag isn't hidden. It's public. Every company listed on a stock exchange tells you, four times a year, exactly what you're worth to them. You've just never been shown how to read it. How to read an earnings report The number you want is called ARPU — average revenue…