Repricing the Human Experience
The ambient extraction that is reshaping your market and your consumer.
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I was getting my nails done in a small outdoor shopping center over the holidays when a group of masked men in dark gear swarmed the front doors of every business. They wore hoodies, face masks, black sunglasses and carried mounted cameras that, at first glance, looked like weapons. It was a scary moment and no one inside the salon knew what to do.
They were tall men who stood silent and refused to leave when the shop owner timidly asked if he could help them. I was scared to look into their cameras and scared to walk out. I live in a sleepy retirement town nobody cares about and all I could think was What the hell is this and why is it happening here?
I later learned that these men are First Amendment Auditors, people who film in public spaces to test whether officials will respect their constitutional rights. Except First Amendment Auditors are supposed to look like the guy on the left and usually hang around government buildings trying to catch officials doing illegal things, while my guys looked like the one on the right and were crowding a suburban shopping strip while getting into normal peoples faces:
What I experienced is a new rage-baiting mutation of the movement that is now gaining steam. Men mask up and fashion themselves after militias to deliberately provoke confrontation and generate content. Knowing what I know now, it was all so stupid and juvenile, but at the time it rattled me. They get in your space, intimidate private citizens into lashing out for the camera, then post the footage on rotating Twitch streams and YouTube accounts for tips and ad income, all under the guise of protecting first amendment rights.
But what really happened was I had just been converted into revenue.
A group of strangers had extracted value from my being without my consent, and without even speaking to me. I didn’t need to click, buy, download or engage. I just needed to exist in the frame and it made a faceless person money.
This is a template we’re becoming more and more familiar with.
It’s part of a new economy that functions and profits at scale through a fundamental asymmetry of exposure. You see it with First Amendment Auditors, paid X/Grok users undressing women, betters on gambling platforms, and our new government entities: one side of the market has masks while the other side is fundamentally naked, and in that power difference there is a lot of money to be made.
Whether its legal entities or anonymous usernames or literal hoodies and masks in a shopping center, they get to cover their faces while the rest of us are stripped down. It’s an efficient market that requires no opt-in, no royalties, no rights and no consent. Symmetry is a market ideal in theory, but asymmetry is how profit is made in practice. Any system that can extract value without paying for it will.
Do not mistake this as an aberration of morality. This is the system, and it’s reorganizing everything — including how people relate to visibility, trust, and power, and therefore the environment your brand and business now operate inside.
Ambient Extraction
Kalshi and Polymarket have productized me too, strangely enough. I’ve lived through multiple natural disasters in southern California, and natural disasters are something everyone can profit from now if you’re willing to place a bet.
You can’t really understand the misinformation and demoralization of being someone else’s entertainment until you’ve lived through a televised wildfire, flood or landslide. But I can promise you that entertainment doesn’t even come close to the dehumanization of knowing a private citizen bet on your misfortune and won.
Polymarket is now in an exclusive deal with Wall Street Journal. Kalshi has multi-year deals with CNN and CNBC. Both platforms are being integrated into Google Finance. If we’re worried about the incestuous AI industry creating systemic risk, we should probably be worried about the kissing cousins of the information economy, too. Meanwhile the surface area of profitable dehumanization grows.
It’s the same mechanic when Grok undresses women for a platform fee, or when AI companies scrape all of human creation without having to meaningfully pay any of the people who own the content or the labor, let alone reveal the inner workings of their models. Consent may be cheap, but the penalty for non-consent is even cheaper. There’s an old adage that the margins of any market will eventually be competed away, and this is the last ethical margin left to exploit.
Before anything else, ICE is a sophisticated media machine. The organization embeds videographers in raids in order to manufacture cinematic content from arrests. They then feed that content in the form of viral clips to right wing influencers while the faces of those being detained remain unblurred. They've gamified and monetized deportation and hysteria in a way that only works when ICE is masked and everyone else is not. The asymmetry is what makes that content profitable.
ICE, Grok, Kalshi, Polymarket, OpenAI, and First Amendment Auditors stay hidden while extracting from our visibility. They don’t need our agreement or even need our awareness. The profit comes from the gap between what they can see of us and what we can’t see of them.
This ambient extraction is changing how people orient power in their minds. Power may really live in the hands of just 50 people, but the way it is experienced in our day-to-day lives is far more diffuse. It’s the constant feeling that anywhere and at any given moment, at the nail salon, the grocery store, while you’re walking from your front door to your car, something is being siphoned away from you without you knowing. You might not be able to name it or see it, but you can feel it.
And here’s what I know as someone who studies culture and markets for a living:
When people can feel something but cannot yet name it, it means the market is about to change. That’s what latent demand looks like, in both markets and culture. There is a mounting energy waiting to move, and we sense that energy before we even have the words for it.
And right now there is a growing latent demand for sovereignty. We may have given up a lot when we decided it was ok to have our iPhones always listening to us, or to be tracked across platforms so we’d get better ads, but there was always the thin veil of consent. There was always some promise of exchange of value.
Ambient extraction is different. It’s a level of vulnerability and theft that registers more emotionally and psychically than it does economically, and that will tip the scales of culture and business.
And if you don’t feel it yet, you may be on the benefitting side of the asymmetry.
Latent Demand for Sovereignty
The narrative out there right now is revolution - taking back power, reclaiming control and forcing accountability. And maybe that happens. But I also know that revolution requires collective action at scale, and what I'm seeing in peoples’ behaviors and everyday choices is a very different kind of revolution.
People are leaving. The natural response to ambient extraction is exodus.
When extraction becomes this pervasive, people opt out. They go dark and build walls around what matters to them.
And this is already happening. You can see it in the shift from public social media to close friends lists. In the rise of group chats, Discord servers, and paid Substacks. In people using fake names and burner accounts as default. In the “dark forest” theory of the internet, the idea that the only safe way to exist online is to stay hidden from the masses and speak only in small, trusted circles.
Instagram’s Adam Mosseri posted a confusing essay recently talking about how AI has gotten too good and so imperfection will become proof of authenticity, as if the problem is cameras and polish. Mosseri places the onus on camera companies to create a chain of custody for imagery, so tagged pixels would restore trust. What?
I had the same reaction as Rachel Karten when she said, “The danger to creators isn’t that they aren’t posting enough blurry photos, the danger is a continuing slow creep of AI content leading to their followers using Instagram less, or even leaving Instagram entirely.”
AI is the final boss of ambient extraction, and the rational response to being turned into content without your consent is to leave. Minimize your surface area. Don’t click, don’t share data and don’t feed the algorithm. Find safer, under the radar places for genuine exchange.
Boomers and millennials were the last generations who thought participation was free. We gave away our sovereignty because we were very naive, and then very lazy, and perhaps now very selfish. Every few months a PLEASE READ! DO NOT DELETE post comes across my feed warning me to change the AI training defaults in my LinkedIn account, or my IG profile, or wherever else I've been unknowingly opted in. Gen Z doesn't need these warnings. They've watched us get harvested and they're not making the same mistake. They know how toxic social media is because they watched it happen to us in real time.
Yes we still have to participate to survive, and there’s a reason why trend forecasters are shouting “irl is back!” ad nauseam. This environment of ambient extraction, the non-consent that used to be abstracted in a value exchange but is now in our faces, makes people angry. And anger is a very useful emotion when it’s used correctly. I know a world of social media yappers will tell you that people are resigned and happy to live their frictionless lives, but that only works when there is still an economic upside.
Today’s economy, you could argue, is not presenting a compelling upside for most people right now, and it’s become another ambient extraction with masked players. I’ve written about how work has decoupled from reward, housing costs have surged while wages have barely moved. You can follow every rule, work every angle, and still feel like you're treading water while some anonymous person or entity somewhere is profiting off your effort. Every week I ask myself what it will take for retail investors to get out of a stock market that isn’t what it seems. Perhaps it will be the dismantling of the Federal Reserve, if the AI bubble that’s driving the entire economy doesn’t burst first.
The same masked asymmetries we see online exist everywhere and the retreat won’t be siloed. We will pull away from all arenas, both social and economic.
The Conversation We’re Going To Be Having For A Very Long Time
This is the beginning of a long arc.
My job is helping people who are building the future understand the cultural and emotional systems shaping it and right now, the problem is we are still building for an economy of participation when we're entering an economy where participation itself has become the liability.
Every playbook for the last fifteen years has been about scale, reach, engagement, and data capture. Get people to click, to share, to post, to tag, to submit their email, to turn on notifications, to let you track them across the web. The more surface area, the better.
But what happens when your audience starts treating visibility as a threat?
What happens when the people you’re trying to reach decide the smartest thing they can do is become invisible to you? Indecipherable to you?
I would argue that this isn’t some distant future. This is happening now, in real time, and most builders are too busy optimizing their funnels to notice that the people they’re trying to funnel are building exits. This exodus is in motion.
People will fragment, build walls and go dark. It’s the more tangible form of revolution that will happen alongside whatever we may see in the headlines.
Quite literally speaking, everyone has an exit strategy. Just a few years ago we called it fuck you money, but today we call it vanlife, off-grid living or tiny homes. Raising your own chickens and making your own sourdough are the new “Exit Society” status symbols. That dramatic shift in aspiration, from winning the system to leaving the system, should mean something to you.
People have been experimenting with alternative, smaller scale networks like Mastodon and Bluesky for discourse, Slack groups for communities. Plenty of studies show a decaying of the major social platforms and usage either plateauing or decreasing. Meanwhile Substack continues to grow as a place where you see all manner of people speak freely, but not necessarily openly.
You can’t look at this environment and still think it’s about reach or scale. You have to navigate a world of walled gardens and protected spaces very differently.
Building the future requires a fundamentally different approach and concrete decisions that either earn you entry into the walled gardens people are building, or lock you out permanently.
Reciprocal transparency. If you can see me, I should be able to see you. Not your marketing copy, but your actual ownership structure, how you make money, what you do with my data, who benefits from my participation. The asymmetry has to collapse. This is what Signal figured out early. If you’re going to ask people to trust you with their conversations, you have to show them exactly how encryption works and prove you can’t access it yourself.
Consent as infrastructure. Not buried in Terms of Service that no one reads, but built into the product itself. Opt-out by default. Clear value exchanges. The ability to leave and take your data with you. Apple did this with App Tracking Transparency when they made consent visible and revocable. Users opted out en masse because for the first time, they actually understood what they were consenting to.
Finite games over infinite extraction. People are exhausted by platforms that treat them as renewable resources. There’s a reason why people are willing to pay for newsletters, for Substacks and Discord communities, for anything that feels like a bounded exchange rather than an infinite scroll designed to keep them producing value. Substack doesn’t have an algorithm trying to keep you there forever. You read, you leave, you come back when there’s something new. That finite relationship is why people trust it.
Most platforms and brands right now are still playing by the old rules, and if you’re big enough it will keep working for you. You can keep optimizing for engagement, for virality, and for scale. You can still treat attention as an infinite resource for extraction without consequence.
But if you’re not a monolith, you should know the people you’re trying to reach are already building the walls. The way you act and position yourself now will decide whether you’ll be inside or outside when the gates close.
Trust collapses at scale, but it doesn’t get rebuilt at scale. It comes back in small circles and places where the asymmetry can’t take hold. The ambient extraction economy doesn’t need to take over the world for this to matter, it just needs to drive enough people into withdrawal that your old playbooks stop working.
Our new market has repriced every level of the human experience. Consent is cheap, non-consent is free, and now that people are starting to implicitly feel that shift, they’re protecting what matters.
If you’re building anything that requires trust, participation, or voluntary engagement from real people, you need to decide if you’re extracting or building entry.
The walls are going up and the market is reorganizing itself around insulation. Once they’re built, you don’t get in just because you’re big or because you have reach, even if you’ve always been there. You get in because you’ve earned it by collapsing the asymmetry that made you in the first place.
For The Intellectually Isolated
People want to be better at their jobs, but almost no one teaches you how to actually think.
Strategy isn’t a template. It’s not a trend report and it’s not something you pick up once you’re “senior enough.”
It’s a science and craft… and most people are expected to figure it out alone.
We built Exposure Therapy because there are very few places where serious thinkers can practice strategy in public: pressure test ideas, sharpen judgment, and learn how culture actually moves.
Our members love it here because it takes their skills to a whole new level.
98% say its given them access to insights they wouldn’t see anywhere else
93% say it’s their #1 resource for culture and strategy inspiration
86% say it’s pushed the boundaries of their thinking
If you feel the gap between where you are and how good you could be, this is where you close it. Applications for our February cohort close soon. Apply here.
Back Of The Library
Here’s what we’ve been consuming.
26 Useful Concepts for 2026 (The Prism): “Original Position Fallacy: Far-Leftists favour planned economies because they imagine themselves as the planners, not the planned. Far-Rightists favour a return to feudalism because they imagine themselves as the lords, not the peasants. Many delusional worldviews stem from main-character syndrome.”
Moralization intensifies as economic inequality grows (PsyPost): “New research published in PNAS Nexus reveals a link between economic inequality and the tendency to view the world through a moral lens. The study, which analyzed Twitter data and surveyed people across 41 regions worldwide, suggests that as economic inequality grows, so does the emphasis on morality in daily life. This phenomenon may be a way for individuals to restore a sense of order and control in a society they perceive as increasingly chaotic.”
kirkification: stealing a face (How To Do Things With Memes): “Memes always follow public trauma. Humor is a coping mechanism and Kirk’s death was a horror played out across millions of handheld devices. The background hum of contemporary American life — that sense of chaos around the corner, the imminent puncture of a false normality — rose to the front of your awareness and you had to sit and listen to it. People needed to confront that, talk about it, process it, and so they made memes.”
Japan Is What Late-Stage Capitalist Decline Looks Like (Drops in the Ocean): “It was portrayed as a cultural quirk — Japan having this ultra-serious, ultra-discipline focused culture where cruelty is an accepted, common sense outcome for rule breaking. But this is essentialist thinking that exoticizes dysfunction simply for it being foreign.”
[BONUS 1] My recent video on female desire went viral.
[BONUS 2] I had a great conversation with the Boundaryless podcast about the Age of Potency.
You need to find community right now because "grief demands a witness", and whether you realize it or not, we are all grieving. We're grieving many things. Everything. Both personal and public.
And if we don't metabolize this grief, we will not change. And no matter what the wellness world tells you, this is one wellness ritual that cannot be done alone. If you want your 2026 to actually change you, find your people.
Find a club, a theater group, a professional network, a screaming circle, a coven, a subculture, a group of neighbors. Grief doesn't need to be the center, but your experience of it needs to be seen and held by others.
Yours,
I’m Jasmine Bina, and I’m a brand strategist and cultural futurist.
If you love this newsletter and need more:
My private community Exposure Therapy “will open your third eye” (words from the Head of Google Play Partnerships, not mine).
My brand strategy agency Concept Bureau can build your culture-leading brand.
My LinkedIn, Instagram and TikTok where I post my ideas daily.
My public speaking, and how I can be on your stage.
really appreciate this. the asymmetry point - masked vs. naked, extraction without consent - feels like something that's going to reshape more markets than people realize.
I'm glad to read this article, Jasmine. I truly appreciate your helping readers achieve reciprocal transparency, in addition to understanding the emotional and cultural landscape that shapes our future.
Way to go!