1 June 2026 by Mondo2.0

If the Internet Were a Restaurant: The Psychology of Free

Have you ever wondered why the services we use daily aren’t paid for? Probably not. And this lack of demand is, in itself, a sociologically interesting phenomenon. Indeed, we often take it for granted that this free service is somehow owed, almost an acquired right, or even a merit.

Yet, it would be enough to stop and think for a moment. The servers that host billions of conversations, photos, videos, and searches must be enormously expensive, even more so today, with the explosion of artificial intelligence services, whose models require computing power and energy consumption on a scale completely different from any previous technology. Behind every free screen are engineers, designers, software architects, and physical infrastructures distributed across every continent. No one works for free. No datacenter runs on air. The question, then, is simple: who pays?

Imagine a restaurant down the street that offers free meals every day to anyone who sits down at the table. No menu with prices, no cash register, no bill at the end. How many of us would stop to ask why? Very few. Most would sit down, eat, and come back the next day. They’d add a late-night meal. A triple breakfast. An unsolicited snack.

Free has a specific effect on behavior: it suspends judgment. When something costs us nothing, we almost automatically deactivate our evaluation filter, we don’t ask if we need it, we don’t assess whether we’re overdoing it.

The Internet is exactly that restaurant.

Behavioral economists have shown that “free” isn’t simply a very low price: it’s a psychological category in itself, bypassing rationality and triggering almost automatic desire mechanisms. When something costs even a penny, we ask ourselves if it’s worth it. When it costs zero, the question doesn’t even arise.

But the real issue isn’t so much that platforms collect data about us; this has been happening for over a decade, and we know it. The more subtle, and sociologically relevant, point is another: these platforms don’t wait for us to get hungry. They keep bringing food to our table, relentlessly. A notification. A new piece of content. A suggestion. An update.

The endlessly scrolling feed isn’t an archive to be browsed, it’s an ever-replenishing buffet, designed to keep you sitting even when you’re no longer hungry.

And when you sit at that table for a long time, something else happens: the barriers between private and public blur. People share their lives in photos, videos, and opinions with a naturalness that would have seemed unthinkable just twenty years ago. And since the system rewards content that generates a reaction, positions tend to become clearer, more extreme, more visible: polarization isn’t a side effect, it’s part of the menu. It’s as if the customers at the table who toast, gesticulate, and speak loudly get more food and more attention.

Scrolling through your feed at 2 a.m. is almost never a conscious choice: it’s the digital equivalent of returning to the buffet unhungry, just because it’s there, just because it costs nothing to do so, and especially because someone keeps putting new dishes in front of you before you can get up.

The mechanism does not leverage addiction in the clinical sense of the term, but something more ordinary and pervasive: our natural tendency to prolong a benefit, even an unnecessary one, when the perceived cost is zero and the stimulus is continuous.

The question that should be asked is not “why is this service free?” but “why can’t I stop using it?”

An example? Drivers of all ages with their eyes on their phones, not out of necessity, but simply out of fear of missing something. A post, a notification, an update. It’s clear that “getting up from that table,” even while driving, has become very difficult.

Recognizing this mechanism doesn’t mean demonizing the Internet or abandoning digital services—that would be anachronistic, simply impossible. It means recovering that small, precious habit: asking ourselves why we do it .

The restaurant downstairs is still open, it’s free, the tables are full, and the food is good. But maybe it’s worth it, every now and then, to look up from your plate, notice that the waiter is already there, put down your fork, and go for a long, healthy walk.

Mondoduepuntozero

This article is inspired by Chapter 2 of Ovunque Internet : ‘We are the online customer: nothing is free on the Internet’.”