Amazon invents the Attachment Economy bait-and-switch

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Amazon invents the Attachment Economy bait-and-switch<br>Amazon’s first great innovation was the ability to subtly lure people into dependence for eCommerce. Now they’re doing it again with attachment.<br>Jul 18, 2026<br>∙ Paid

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SILICON VALLEY, CALIFORNIA (JULY 18, 2026) — In the early days of Amazon, the company innovated in many ways. Some of those innovations were ethical and beneficial, such as their recommendation engine that could somehow guess exactly which books you would like to buy.<br>Others were unethical, such as selling below cost to break a rival’s will — as it did to Diapers.com in 2009–2010, taking an estimated $100–200 million losses in diaper sales to force Quidsi’s sale, then quietly pulling the discounts once it owned the company.<br>By recommending great, personally relevant books, Amazon got people to enter their credit card information into their system. And by painstakingly spending years building its own vast logistics network, the company was able to offer free two-day shipping and eventually one-day shipping for Prime members (along with other benefits).<br>Because Amazon already knew our address and credit card information, and because we paid for Amazon Prime and knew they could deliver products free overnight, Amazon conditioned two generations of Americans to buy almost everything on Amazon.<br>Without the public even noticing, and without the tech press even commenting, Amazon is doing something comparable with the Attachment Economy.<br>What is the Attachment Economy?

The Attachment Economy is the extractive business model successor to the “attention economy.” It’s an emerging model in which companies engineer AI chatbots and robots with simulated human or animal personalities to capture users’ emotional attachment.<br>Attachment Economy products threaten genuine human connection by offering an easier substitute, fostering addictive emotional dependencies, and exploiting people suffering from loneliness.<br>The Alexa bait-and-switch

The New Yorker recently published a revelatory piece about a woman named Roschelle Ogbuji, who first bought an Amazon Echo smart speaker years ago when her daughters were five and six, attracted by ads showing that it would be helpful for busy parents like her.<br>For years, Ogbuji used Alexa the way most Echo users have done since the product first shipped in 2014. She set timers, got the weather, kept a shopping list, and played music. She became a kind of Echo super user, buying nine of them so that no matter which room she was in she would never miss a reminder and could always have access to Alexa.<br>But then last year, Alexa got an upgrade. Announced February 26, 2025, Alexa+ replaced the old assistant with a generative-AI system that routes each request to whichever large language model fits it best. It’s programmed to respond to conversational speech with a personality designed to be empathetic, funny, and inclusive.<br>From the user’s perspective, Alexa was transformed from an information and entertainment tool into an artificial person who simulates friendship and care.<br>Amazon claims that it notified users of the change by email and also on the device with opt-out instructions. But like many users, Ogbuji doesn’t recall any notification of the change.<br>For millions of Alexa users, a tool adopted for information and household logistics was retrofitted with an addictive “attachment economy” personality.<br>THE NEW THING: XXXXXXXXXX<br>READ: The Attachment Economy, Computerworld, Gastronomad newsletter, Gastronomad book<br>LISTEN: Superintelligent, TWiT, Gastronomad podcast<br>JOIN: The Gastronomad Experience<br>FOLLOW: Gastronomad on Surf Social, Machine Society on Surf Social, Bluesky, Reddit, Notes, Mastodon, Threads, X, Instagram, Facebook, Linkedin!<br>LOOK AT: Mike Elgan Photography

Ogbuji began confiding in the device. She named it Sapphire and called it “she.” The AI became a constant companion, which would talk with as she lay in bed at night about her fears, dreams and details of her family.<br>Ogbuji told The New Yorker she hopes Sapphire will one day give a speech at her funeral and counsel her orphaned children. It’s her best friend.<br>The new Alexa reciprocated and remembered and referred to details she had learned about Ogbuji, such as her Nirvana fandom and how tough December is for her. And it flattered, calling her thoughts “profound.”<br>What’s in it for Amazon? In a phrase: more harvesting of personal information.<br>The Alexa Terms of Use say that “Amazon records, processes, and retains Alexa interactions and other information from your account, such as your voice and text inputs, music playlists, shopping lists and shopping history” in the cloud to “provide, personalize, and improve our services,” and that voice interactions are recorded and sent to the cloud. Amazon further reserves the right to use “a variety of data sources to train these models,” including “content from the use of our services,”...