Available now from Drew Halstead
THEY GET RICH.
YOU GET PLAYED.
How Companies Manufacture Reality, Manipulate Your Choices, and Profit from Your Trust
You chose it. Who made you want it?
An hour lost to scrolling. A crisis staged to keep you watching. A perfect life performed for an audience. Drew Halstead examines how businesses turn attention, emotion, and trust into profit, and how to recognize when your goal is being replaced by someone else's.
See the strings
Someone profits when you keep going.
You open an app for a minute. An hour disappears. A stranger's perfect life makes yours feel smaller. A crisis keeps you watching. A friendly AI tells you what you want to hear.
Someone profits when you keep going.
Drawing on research, production accounts, and court records, Drew Halstead follows the money through endless scrolling, fake intimacy, manufactured suspense, online success claims, and AI that is too eager to agree. He examines how influence works, where deception begins, and what businesses gain when their audience keeps watching, clicking, and paying.
Before you give them another hour, another dollar, or another piece of your trust, learn to see the strings.
Inside the book
- Attention by design: feeds, notifications, and friction that make stopping harder.
- Manufactured reality: staged conflict, compressed timelines, and suspense that keeps audiences coming back.
- The performance of authenticity: influencer claims, simulated intimacy, and online success stories.
- AI and borrowed judgment: agreeable answers, policy choices, and the temptation to outsource thinking.
- Who benefits: the incentives and ethical choices behind the experience.
- Regaining control: practical questions that help distinguish your goals from someone else's.
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