Infinite scroll
A page with no bottom. A stopping point is a decision, so the design removed the stopping point.
Roots Charter High School / West Valley City, Utah
They already
They already
priced your time.
Prove them wrong
about what it is worth.
You are not the customer. You are the inventory. Somebody ran the numbers on your attention before you ever opened the app.
Section 01 / The rate
One company. One region. Twelve months.
$0BMeta revenue, US and Canada, Q2 2025 to Q1 2026
0MEstimated North American users. Meta no longer publishes this.
0 hrsEstimated hours per user per year on the feed
$0.00What one hour of you is worth to them
Rate: Meta US & Canada revenue, Q2 2025 through Q1 2026, totalling $92.67B (Meta Q1 2026 earnings presentation, revenue by user geography), divided across an estimated 270 million North American users and roughly 383 hours per user per year. The user count is our assumption. Meta stopped publishing regional user counts, so this number is an estimate and we say so every time we print it.
Section 02 / Do the math yourself
Run your own receipt.
Move the sliders. The receipt on the right recalculates live at their rate of $0.90 an hour. Change nothing and you get the median: 43 minutes a day, 180 days, one school year.
Write the source next to every number you use. If you cannot source it, it does not go on the wall. That rule is the whole campaign. Adults go first, and they show their work too.
Roots Charter High School
UNPAID / EST. 243 / PTW
RUN YOUR OWN
Live math
Hours sold / year129
Their rate / hour$0.90
Revenue denied
$116.10
Hours returned
129
Amount they paid you
$0.00
Times 275 students35,475
Years of human life4.05
No refunds. No returns.
Section 03 / The design
None of this is your fault. All of it is on purpose.
What this is
- An argument with a business model that sells a young person's hours to advertisers.
- A price, printed at hallway scale, with the source next to it.
- Evidence anyone can check, including the parts where we guessed.
- Four weeks, one crew, one wall.
What this is not
- This is not about your phone.
- It is not a rule, a consequence, or a compliance program.
- It is not a lecture about willpower. The design beat willpower on purpose.
- Nobody here tracks your device, your hours, or your name.
Time: 97 percent of students use a phone during the school day and the median in-school use is 43 minutes (Common Sense Media, “Constant Companion,” 2023, n=203, ages 11–17).
Section 04 / The blueprint
PTW-02-A
PTW-02-B
PTW-02-C
PTW-02-D
Four parts, engineered, shipped, and measured.
Variable reward
Sometimes the pull is worth it. Sometimes it is nothing. Unpredictable payouts hold attention longer than reliable ones. This was known before the feed existed.
Streaks
A counter you did not ask for, that you now stand to lose. The cost of leaving goes up every day you stay.
Notification timing
Alerts are held and released when you are most likely to return. The moment is chosen. It is not the moment the thing happened.
These mechanisms are described in company documents and in state attorney general complaints against Meta and TikTok. Read the filings and the earnings decks yourself on The Receipts.
Section 05 / The other ledger
The hours do not disappear. They go somewhere.
0Hours returned per student, per year
0Hours across 275 students
0 yrsOf continuous human life, kept
Lead with the years, not the dollars. The money is how they measure you. The hours are how you measure yourselves. Week three hangs the harvest receipt beside the price wall so the two ledgers sit in the same hallway and argue.
The four weeks
Week 01
Week 02
Week 03
Week 04
The Price
The price wall goes up. The rate gets printed at the size of a door.
The Design
Blueprints of the mechanisms. Read the filing. Nothing here is an accident.
The Other Ledger
The harvest receipt. Hours grown, fed, kept, and counted.
The Us
The room, the showcase, and the ledger goes public. Admission is free.
We are not asking you to put your phone down. We are asking you to send them the bill.
Break the algorithm