Why the mobile is the new supermarket of attention?
The Supermarket: The Birth of Consumer Engineering
Today, mobile technology embodies a logic that was previously only clearly observed in the supermarket: permanent abundance, continuous exposure, accelerated choice, and design-driven consumption. This is not just a metaphor. Just as the supermarket reorganized shopping around the multiplication of stimuli and choice management, mobile reorganizes our relationship with products, information, leisure, and desire. To understand this parallel, it is worth going back to the moment when scarcity ceased to be the central problem and abundance began to demand new forms of organization.
This framework began to transform in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when industrialization simultaneously altered three fundamental dimensions of food: production, sales, and choice. This change not only reorganized consumption; it solved one of humanity's central historical problems: scarcity. For the first time, food could be mass-produced, preserved, transported, and stably distributed to growing populations. The problem shifted from lack to the management of abundance.
Production, Sales, and Choice: The Shift from Scarcity to Abundance
Firstly, production changed. With industrialization, food ceased to be just cultivation and preparation to become manufacturing. Preservation, refining, transport, and standardization techniques emerged, allowing food to be mass-produced, regardless of the local context. The goal was no longer just to feed, but to feed growing urban populations stably, cheaply, and repeatably.
Secondly, sales changed. In 1916, in the United States, Clarence Saunders opened Piggly Wiggly, considered the first modern self-service establishment. In 1930, Michael J. Cullen opened King Kullen, the first fully developed supermarket, with large areas, low prices, and visible abundance. From the 1930s and, above all, after World War II, the model expanded massively in the United States and then in Europe. The supermarket became the central food distribution device of the 20th century.
This change is not minor: the supermarket eliminated the human intermediary and placed the consumer directly in front of the product. It introduced self-service as the norm. For the first time, food choice became an individual, immediate, and repeated experience.
And here the third decisive change occurred: the way of choosing changed. When choice becomes self-service in an environment of abundance, the problem ceases to be producing food and becomes capturing the consumer's decision. The supermarket not only sells food; it organizes attention. Products no longer compete for necessity, but for being chosen. Visibility, packaging, price, and taste began to be as important as the food itself.
Consumer Engineering: Optimizing Consumer Response
It is in this context that consumer engineering emerged. From the mid-20th century, especially between the fifties and seventies, the food industry began to systematically rely on nutritional science, food chemistry, and marketing to answer a new question. It was no longer about what food is best, but what food is chosen most.
This shift had a decisive consequence. When choice is organized as massive, self-service, repeated hundreds of times in silence by thousands of people, cultural and normative criteria lose effective relevance. There is no longer transmission of habits, community validation, or time for shared reflection. In this context, the only criterion that remains is behavioral.
What matters then is not what the consumer claims to prefer or what they “should” choose culturally, but how they effectively respond to the product: what they accept without initial rejection, what they remember, what they repeat. Attention is thus directed to the body, not as an organism to be nourished, but as a system capable of reliably responding to certain stimuli.
Sugar, Salt, and Fat: The Basis of Ultra-Processed Foods
This is where the industry began to observe something fundamental: there are components that consistently activate the human reward system, regardless of cultural context. Substances that require no prior learning or habituation, and whose effectiveness is repeated across different audiences and markets. This is not yet a closed theory, but an empirical finding: certain sensory stimuli work better than others.
In this process, sugar takes a central place due to its ability to generate immediate pleasure. It produces a rapid response, reduces initial rejection, and facilitates product acceptance. Salt, for its part, intensifies perception: it enhances flavors, makes the food “noticeable,” increasing its sensory presence. Fats fulfill a different but complementary function: they provide texture, prolong the feeling of satiety, and encourage repeated consumption.
The combination of these elements does not arise from a theoretical decision, but from progressive optimization. Over decades, the industry learned to adjust proportions, concentrations, and forms of presentation to develop products that are effortlessly consumed, gratifying, and encourage repurchasing. Thus, ultra-processed food was born: not as a cultural deviation, but as the logical result of applying behavioral performance criteria to food.
The Economic Logic of the System: Performance vs. Criterion
The direction taken by consumer engineering is neither arbitrary nor inherently perverse. It responds to precise economic logic. When the supermarket turns food into self-service and abundance becomes the norm, the system organizes itself around a dominant goal: maximizing economic performance in an environment of mass competition.
In this framework, nutritional, cultural, or ethical criteria do not disappear, but they cannot compete if the only variable considered is economic performance. Not because they lack value, but because they do not produce an immediate, repeatable, and scalable response that translates directly into profit.
The only criterion that does so is the behavioral one. Because it allows observing, almost in real-time, how the consumer responds to the product. What matters then is behavior: what is chosen, what is repeated, what is abandoned, what remains in memory. In this context, the winning product is not the best in absolute terms, but the one that minimizes friction in choice, is accepted without prolonged deliberation, and provokes a rapid response before conscious judgment intervenes.
From this perspective, the orientation of production towards certain stimuli is not an ideological decision, but a functional consequence. The industry observes that there are components capable of activating consistent and transversal responses. Substances that work in all bodies, regardless of social, educational, or cultural context. They do not require learning or adaptation: they operate directly on basic biological mechanisms.
Thus, sugar ensures immediate acceptance; salt intensifies perception and increases the product's sensory presence; fats prolong the experience and encourage repetition. The combination of these elements maximizes a simple but decisive equation: frictionless choice, sustained consumption, and repurchasing.
In this sense, the drift towards ultra-processed foods is not the result of malicious intent, but the logical outcome of applying economic optimization criteria to a massive self-service food environment. When success is measured in terms of immediate response and sustained repetition, the system learns—without needing to explicitly formulate it—which stimuli to favor to maximize profit.
This logic is self-reinforcing. The more these products are consumed, the more the palate and metabolism adapt; and the more they adapt, the more effective the intensified stimuli become. The system does not correct course because, from its own evaluation framework—always defined exclusively by economic performance—there is nothing to correct. It produces, sells, and scales.
For much of the 20th century, industrialized food was associated with progress: abundant, cheap, stable, and accessible food. Compared to the scarcity of the past, the problem does not seem to be the excess of the present. In this context, consumer engineering was consolidated as a solution, not a threat.
Only towards the end of the 20th century did a broader critical awareness begin to emerge. It was recognized that the food environment is not neutral, that choice is studied and behaviorally designed, and that there are sustained effects on health. But recognizing the problem does not mean deactivating it. The architecture that produces it remains intact.
The supermarket remains the central device. Self-service continues to organize choice. And consumer engineering continues to optimize what guarantees immediate response, because the economic system that sustains it has not changed its logic: it has only incorporated warnings.
Today we know that the problem exists, but the economic model that produces it remains intact. Warnings are added, without altering the logic of profit maximization. Responsibility is shifted to the individual, while the system continues to push in the same direction.
Mobile: The Consumer Engineering of Digital Ultra-Processed Goods
At this point, one might think that historical experience with food would have taught some lessons. After decades of observing the effects of ultra-processed foods on health, it could be assumed that humanity would have developed a certain threshold of caution when faced with consumption environments designed to eliminate friction and maximize behavioral responses. However, the reality is that consumer engineering remains intact, continues to operate in the same way, and has become generalized as a principle.
From Material Self-Service to Cognitive Self-Service
In the food industry, this engineering could only fully unfold when the supermarket—and later the shopping mall—introduced a decisive condition: massive self-service. Not because there was no interest in influencing choice before, but because there was no environment capable of organizing consumer attention continuously, repeatedly, and without intermediaries. Consumer engineering does not create desire: it organizes the way choice occurs.
For decades, this logic remained confined to the consumption of material goods. Food, clothing, or objects could be arranged in a space and offered to the user to help themselves. Information, entertainment, and forms of social interaction, however, could not yet be organized in this way. Not because there was a lack of interest in guiding them, but because there was no environment capable of offering them directly, continuously, and without mediation.
20th-century media—newspapers, radio, cinema, television—distributed content, but did not configure continuous self-service. They were delimited by times, rituals, and clear mediations: what was available was consumed, when it was scheduled, for a defined interval. Even the home computer, despite introducing interconnectivity, remained an episodic device: one had to sit down, turn it on, decide to use it. It was not integrated into the continuity of daily life.
What was missing, therefore, was not a new intention or a different strategy, but a device that actually brought together certain characteristics to enable cognitive self-service. The mobile phone brings them together for the first time: permanent portability, immediate access, minimal friction in choice, temporal continuity, and the ability to record user response. Not because that was its original goal, but because this technical convergence made it possible.
Mobile phones began to become widespread at the end of the 20th century, but it was not until the consolidation of the smartphone, from the 2000s and, above all, from 2010, that this set of features stabilized. The phone ceased to be a punctual communication device and became a permanent environment for accessing information, entertainment, and social interaction. It is always on, always close, always available. It does not occupy a specific place: it occupies time. One does not have to enter: one is already there.
As with the supermarket, the change is not just technological, but organizational. Mobile eliminates cultural intermediaries: editors, programmers, schedules, explicit hierarchies. The user believes they freely choose what to look at, but they do so within an environment carefully organized to maximize certain responses. They are not told what to think; they are offered what to consume.
Attention as an Object of Real-Time Optimization
From this point on, consumer engineering finds an even more precise field of application than food. Attention is not only accessible, but measurable in real time. The system observes which stimuli work and adjusts the environment continuously. While in food, the relationship between stimulus and response could only be known through aggregated and delayed data—sales volumes, periodic reports—in mobile use, this relationship is recorded immediately, continuously, and at an individual level, for every gesture, every pause, and every minimal user decision.
The internal logic is identical to that which already operated in the supermarket. The content that is optimized is not the truest, deepest, or most relevant, but the one that reduces the friction of choice and provokes an immediate response. The one that is consumed without thinking too much. The one that activates the body before judgment intervenes. At this point, the digital equivalents of sugar, salt, and fats reappear, almost unchanged.
Cognitive Sugar, Salt, and Fat: The Digital Ultra-Processed
Cognitive sugar corresponds to immediate reward. It is the rapid dopamine that arrives in the form of novelty, validation, surprise, or recognition. Brief, easily consumable content that produces instant pleasure and quickly exhausts itself, leaving behind the need to repeat. It requires no context, continuity, or deep understanding: it merely needs to provoke a response. Its function is not to sustain attention, but to capture it again and again.
Cognitive salt does not provide stable pleasure, but it intensifies the experience. It manifests as urgency, indignation, conflict, alarm, or confrontation. It does not make the content likable, but it does make it imposing, make it stand out among others, make it “noticeable.” It keeps the body alert, raises the activation level of the nervous system, and prevents disconnection.
Cognitive fats fulfill a different function: they do not activate or surprise, but they sustain. They operate through repetition, familiarity, confirmation, and frictionless continuity. Autoplay, personalized feeds, chained recommendations, consumption routines. They do not generate emotional peaks, but they prolong permanence. They are what allow consumption to not be interrupted.
As in food, the most effective content is that which combines these three elements: immediate reward to capture, activation to intensify, and continuity to retain. Rapid pleasure, constant excitement, and prolonged permanence define what can be called cognitive ultra-processed.
None of this depends on a specific culture, a specific ideology, or a particular social context. It works because it operates on universal biological mechanisms. The human reward system is not culturally learned; it is inherited. It responds similarly in all bodies, regardless of language, education, or tradition. That is why this engineering scales so quickly and so well.
Consequences: Attention, Dopamine, and Indifference
Mobile doesn't need to convince anyone of anything. It just needs to activate physiological responses that are already there. The success of this model is not due to the manipulation of ideas, but to the exploitation of biological regularities. Exactly as happened with sugar, salt, and fats.
The consequences of sustained exposure to this environment are not primarily ideological, but cognitive and physiological. Constant activation of the reward system produces dopaminergic dysregulation, difficulty sustaining attention, intolerance to delay, and preference for immediate stimuli. Complex thinking becomes costly and uninteresting. Silence becomes uncomfortable.
It's not that people can no longer think, but that consumer engineering trains other responses. Just as a palate accustomed to sugar, salt, and fats loses sensitivity to simpler flavors—and even to signals of well-being—a mind trained by digital ultra-processed foods loses tolerance for cognitive processes that do not offer immediate reward.
As with food, the harm does not appear as a singular event, but as a drift. It is cumulative over time. It is not perceived as an external aggression, but as a daily habit. The body and mind adapt first, and only later do the costs become visible. That is why it is so difficult to identify the problem while being within it. The system does not break: it works too well.
In the medium term, the first clear effect is an alteration of the reward system. Constant exposure to stimuli designed to provoke rapid dopamine flattens the response: what previously generated interest no longer does. The system needs more frequency, more intensity, or more novelty to produce the same effect. This does not translate into greater pleasure, but into greater dependence on the stimulus. The subject does not enjoy more; they need more not to feel empty.
This process has a direct correlate in attention. Sustained attention—the ability to stay on something without immediate reward—begins to weaken. It does not disappear, but it becomes increasingly costly. Thought that requires continuity, delay, or effort begins to feel unnatural, even physically uncomfortable. Not because it is more difficult, but because it does not activate the reward circuit quickly enough. The mind learns, without anyone teaching it, to avoid it.
Along with this, a basal hyperactivation is established. Cognitive salt—urgency, conflict, alert—keeps the nervous system in a constant state of excitement. The body gets used to living at an activation level that was previously reserved for exceptional situations. The result is not energy, but fatigue: irritability, difficulty resting, sleep problems, fatigue with no clear cause. The system does not know how to slow down because it has learned to always operate under pressure.
On the cognitive level, this dynamic favors a growing preference for quick closure. Open questions, ambiguity, and nuance begin to feel uncomfortable. Not for ideological reasons, but physiological ones: they do not offer immediate reward. Thinking is oriented towards quick conclusions, simple explanations, and clear narratives.
From this, a progressive externalization of judgment derives. The subject increasingly relies less on their own internal process to decide what is interesting, relevant, or valuable. They need external signals: popularity, visibility, collective reaction. Judgment ceases to be an internal activity and becomes an interpretation of the environment. One does not think first and then contrast; one reacts and, if anything, rationalizes.
In the long term, these effects not only persist but consolidate into deeper transformations. One of the most significant is the erosion of cognitive initiative. Actively searching, exploring the unknown, or sustaining long processes without immediate reward becomes increasingly less frequent. Not impossible, but exceptional. Mental behavior ceases to be organized as a search and begins to operate reactively: it responds to what appears, instead of generating its own trajectories. Desire ceases to organize behavior as a search and is activated only in response to immediate stimuli.
Over time, something more subtle yet more serious emerges: a fatigue of meaning. Continuous exposure to intensified stimuli produces a form of functional indifference: nothing ultimately matters too much because everything competes to matter right now. Emotional saturation does not generate engagement, but detachment. The world becomes noisy and, paradoxically, flat.
Finally, this dynamic drastically reduces tolerance to uncertainty. Silence, waiting, and boredom—conditions historically fertile for reflection—begin to be experienced as dysfunctions that must be immediately corrected with stimulation. Mobile is no longer used only for information or entertainment but takes on a regulatory function: it manages internal, physiological, cognitive, and emotional states.
And none of this depends on a specific culture, a particular educational level, or a determined ideology. These mechanisms work because they are anchored in biology. The human reward system responds in a similar way in any context. That is why this cognitive consumer engineering is so effective and so difficult to neutralize: it does not appeal to beliefs, but to reflexes.
As with food, the problem is not that the individual “chooses poorly.” The problem is that the environment systematically trains certain responses and untrains others. And when that environment occupies several hours a day, for years, the effect ceases to be anecdotal and becomes structural.
We are not facing a sudden loss of capabilities, but a gradual reconfiguration of possibilities. The mind continues to function, but it does so within an increasingly narrow range of effective stimuli. Judgment does not disappear; it arrives late. When it appears, the body has already responded.
Cognitive consumer engineering does not eliminate freedom; it shifts it to a terrain where exercising it requires increasing effort. Just as a diet based on sugar, salt, and fats progressively weakens metabolism, an environment saturated with ultra-processed digital stimuli does not prevent thinking, but makes thinking increasingly less frequent and less probable.