From Service to Scheme: How Business Rebranded Extraction

The Silence Was Installed

There was a time not long ago when the systems that supported daily life were flawed, but functional.

People worked in shifts. Some slept during the day and shopped at night. Others relied on 24-hour grocery stores, gas stations, and pharmacies—not for convenience, but for survival.

There were people working those late-night hours who were part of the community.

You saw them regularly. You might not have known their names, but you knew their faces. These small moments of recognition made a difference.

The world was overstimulated, but it was still relational.

That version of society no longer exists.

When the shutdowns were introduced, they were framed as short-term, protective measures.

What they became was a forced and prolonged interruption of the structures that made ordinary life possible.

Public-facing services were suspended.

Many of them never came back.

The cultural memory of life before lockdown began to fade faster than most people realized.

What replaced it was a newly normalized reality where distance, isolation, and digital mediation were not only tolerated, but increasingly expected.

People learned to interact through interfaces.

They adjusted to the absence of ambient connection—no more shared public rituals, no more casual check-ins, no more lingering near people who weren’t part of your inner circle.

The shutdown taught people to bypass each other. Then it trained them to prefer it.

Apps were already on the rise before 2020, but the shutdown accelerated the shift from human contact to digital transaction.

Every major service industry reorganized itself around delivery, outsourcing, or automation.

What used to require presence and interaction was reduced to a tap, a click, or a passive scroll.

For most people, this felt like an upgrade in efficiency. They weren’t asked to think about what was being lost—only what was being made easier.

The people doing the work behind the scenes—the drivers, warehouse employees, gig workers, dispatchers—were rendered invisible.

Their labor kept society functioning, but they were treated as interchangeable, rating-based extensions of the app economy.

No one asked whether this was ethical. No one asked what was being built in their name.

During this same period, many people found themselves struggling to maintain relationships, identity, and emotional stability.

Children lost access to in-person education and socialization. Teenagers became increasingly dependent on screens to regulate mood, self-image, and peer connection. Young adults entered a world that no longer expected them to engage face-to-face, solve problems in real time, or operate without GPS, scripts, or algorithms.

Their difficulty navigating basic interpersonal situations isn’t a failure—it’s the natural result of being raised in systems that never taught them how to adapt to reality outside of an app.

Adults didn’t fare much better.

Couples who had been avoiding each other through busyness were now stuck in the same space with no buffers.

Families cracked under the weight of unmet needs.

Many turned to numbing: alcohol, screens, escapist media, or workaholism disguised as productivity.

The silence was not peaceful. It was disorienting. It exposed what had been avoided for years.

The businesses that emerged or scaled during this time weren’t filling gaps. They were expanding a model that only works when people are too overwhelmed, too distracted, or too disembodied to resist it.

Predictive data models became more powerful.

People’s buying habits, emotional triggers, sleep cycles, and spending patterns became more profitable than their actual presence.

What mattered to the machine was not whether people were well—it was whether they remained engaged and compliant.

As the infrastructure of daily life changed, the expectations changed with it. People lost their tolerance for uncertainty, inconvenience, or delay.

The expectation became that everything should be on demand. That you shouldn’t have to wait, think critically, ask for help, or confront discomfort.

But a society built on avoidance cannot sustain itself. It depends on people forgetting what they gave up in exchange for convenience.

The children who came of age in this new world are now entering adulthood with fewer skills, less confidence, and almost no exposure to how life used to work.

They do not know what it means to go to a store, speak to a stranger, make a decision without a recommendation engine, or solve a problem face to face.

And the adults around them are too burned out or distracted to model anything different.

This was not the result of a temporary crisis. It was a permanent redirection of collective behavior, justified through emergency and cemented through repetition. And it has left most people with a sense that something is wrong, but no language to name it.

The world did not go silent on its own. The silence was installed.

And the people who benefitted from that silence are still building systems to keep it in place.

If that sounds dramatic, it’s because most people have been taught not to see gradual deterioration until it becomes unbearable. But by the time it’s unbearable, it’s already everywhere.

There is no returning to the past. But there is a need to remember what was lost, and why.

And until that remembering happens, people will continue to blame themselves for feeling anxious, directionless, disconnected, or numb—when the truth is, those feelings are entirely appropriate responses to what they’ve been living through.

From Service to Scheme: How Business Rebranded Extraction

The shifts in daily life were not accidental, and they were not simply adaptations to an emergency. They were opportunistic restructurings of the economy—led by companies that understood how to frame systemic extraction as innovation.

Before 2020, business models still relied—at least nominally—on human interaction. Service industries were grounded in actual services. There were relationships between buyer and seller, employer and worker, provider and recipient.

Once society moved online, those relationships became abstracted. The interface replaced the exchange. What used to require human presence now required only compliance.

This was sold to the public as progress.

Disruption became the dominant narrative.

Startups promised to eliminate friction, streamline logistics, and give people more control. But what they actually did was remove human intermediaries, strip out accountability, and replace resilience with dependence after being built on the backs of free labor and data collection.

Control was never the goal. Behavioral predictability was.

Every time a human decision was replaced by an automated process, that decision became monetizable.

Every time a person avoided a social encounter in favor of an app, that avoidance became measurable.

And every time someone praised the speed or ease of a new platform, they helped to normalize a system that quietly displaced human labor, human wisdom, and human feedback.

None of this was incidental.

The most profitable businesses today are not those that produce anything tangible. They are businesses that collect, interpret, and manipulate behavior—while marketing themselves as empowering, ethical, or efficient.

Many of them entered the scene as solutions to problems that only existed because public infrastructure was allowed to fail.

Some offered access to medical testing, therapy, education, or nutrition outside traditional systems.

Others promised new ways to build wealth, start businesses, or find purpose in uncertain times.

But most of them were not offering alternatives. They were offering illusions. They gave people tools to participate in systems that were still extractive—just branded differently.

The labor behind these tools remained invisible. The risks were redistributed. And the people using them believed they were taking control, when in fact they were being integrated into ecosystems that required their perpetual engagement and emotional investment to stay alive.

This is how extraction became self-directed.

People began selling themselves. Their identities. Their stories. Their trauma. Their transformation journeys. Not to heal—but to stay visible. Not to contribute—but to keep earning. The line between personal agency and marketplace demand was erased.

And in that erasure, the nature of work changed.

Instead of service, we got performance. Instead of ownership, we got affiliation. Instead of apprenticeship, we got tiered access.

The substance of business was hollowed out and replaced with presentation. And many people, just trying to survive, began replicating the very systems that were draining them.

They believed they were building something. But what they were building was a model that couldn’t exist without constant enrollment, constant optimization, and constant reinforcement.

This is where we are.

A society full of people trying to find meaning, connection, and dignity inside structures that are designed to monetize those needs.

Naming the Change

People talk about “post-pandemic life” as if we’ve returned to something stable. But stability never returned.

What came instead was a redefinition of normal that most people didn’t consciously choose.

And because so much of that change was incremental, silent, and masked by convenience, very few recognized the cost as it was unfolding.

What was lost was not just customer service or working hours.

It wasn’t just the ability to speak to a manager or return something without a barcode.

What was lost was the relational scaffolding of society. The ability to witness and be witnessed, to exchange more than product and payment, to be part of something greater than one’s own algorithmically isolated world.

The silence that descended wasn’t peaceful. It was a severing.

And the systems that benefitted from that severing are still active, still expanding, still shaping the terms of daily life.

The way forward begins with naming the shift—not as a glitch, not as an evolution, but as a deliberate realignment of human behavior toward systems that have no concern for human thriving.

That naming is the prerequisite to any kind of repair.

Because without it, people will continue to believe that their exhaustion is personal, their disconnection is circumstantial, and their confusion is a sign of personal failure.

It’s not.

It is evidence of a social system that has been dismantled and replaced with something engineered to keep people isolated, distracted, and emotionally overdrawn.

What comes next will depend on how honestly people are willing to reckon with the fact that what they’ve adapted to isn’t working.

And never was.