​Welcome to Binge Thinking. We invite professors and experts to give lectures in bars!

In a world of AI slop, doomscrolling and brainrot, Binge Thinking brings real experts into real places for nights of learning, conversation, and community.

Think Responsibly.

​TOPIC:
Your Attention Is for Sale (The Hidden Business Model of Social Media and AI)

SPEAKER:
Professor Elettra Bietti, Northeastern University

​Every scroll, every swipe, every "just five more minutes" on your phone is feeding a machine built to keep you there. It's not an accident. It's a business model.

​Behind the feeds you can't put down is what Professor Bietti calls the "data-attention imperative": platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok, plus AI companions like Replika and Character.AI, are engineered to harvest your time and your data simultaneously, because the two feed each other. More eyeballs means more data. More data means an even harder-to-resist experience. Rinse, repeat, and somewhere along the way, our collective attention span (and maybe our collective sanity) takes the hit.

​So what actually fixes this? Professor Bietti argues it's not another screen-time app or a parental control setting; those just make attention-hijacking your personal problem to manage. Real change means rethinking the incentives themselves, through design, tax policy, and legal reform that make extraction less profitable in the first place.

​Topics include:

​Why your attention has become one of the most valuable commodities on earth

​How "data-attention platforms" and AI companions are designed to keep you hooked

​Why productivity apps and privacy settings can't solve a problem built into the business model

​What real friction against attention-extraction could look like: through design, tax, and legal reform

​This talk is your permission slip to be a little suspicious of your own phone.

​About the Speaker

​Professor Elettra Bietti is an Assistant Professor of Law and Computer Science at Northeastern University, jointly appointed in the School of Law and Khoury College of Computer Sciences. She earned her LLB from University College London, an LLM from Harvard Law School, a Postgraduate Diploma in IP Law and Practice from Oxford University, and completed her SJD (Doctor of Juridical Science) at Harvard Law School.

​Before academia, she worked as an antitrust and intellectual property lawyer at Allen & Overy in London and Brussels. She is a Faculty Associate at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society and an Affiliated Fellow at Yale Law School's Information Society Project. Her research on digital platforms, data governance, and antitrust has appeared in outlets including the Texas Law Review, Politico, and Harvard Law Today, and she recently delivered a TEDx talk on addictive technologies.

​Agenda

7:30 PM - Doors Open (Grab a seat and drinks!)
8:00 PM - Lecture Begins
8:40 PM - Audience Q&A
8:10 PM - Drinks & Conversation
9:30 PM - Event Ends