This is not a
phone lecture.
Your student is going to come home able to explain how an attention business makes money. That is the entire goal, and it is the only thing we measure.
The adversary is an industry, not your kid.
What we do
- Print what an hour of a teenager's attention sells for, with the source beside it.
- Show the design decisions that make leaving hard, using public filings.
- Count what the hours become when students keep them.
- Put students in front of the room to present the ledger in their own words.
What we never do
- We never track an individual device, a student's hours, or anyone's compliance.
- No dashboard, no log-in, no monitoring, and no report to a parent.
- No asset in this campaign carries a rule, a consequence, or a compliance instruction.
- We never tell a student their value is their output.
Your school may have a phone policy. This campaign never mentions it.
Whatever the policy is, it exists and it stands on its own. UNPAID is not its enforcement arm, its explainer, or its friendly face. The moment a poster reads like a rule, it belongs on a different wall.
- Never on an asset
- Policy text, rules, consequences, compliance instructions.
- Never the target
- The phone, the student, the law, or any individual's choices.
- Always the target
- The business model that treats a young person's time as inventory to be sold.
- Who goes first
- Adults. Every time, with their own receipt on the wall. Before a single student is asked for a number, staff post theirs, in their own handwriting.
Four things to say, and one to avoid.
The research on this is unusually clear. Adult messages aimed at a teenager's own behavior tend to land flat or backfire. Messages that hand a teenager an adversary and a status stake move real behavior. Aim upstream of your kid.
The evidence that adult-authority behavior messaging underperforms comes from evaluations of the tobacco industry's own youth prevention advertising and from meta-analysis of school-based drug education. The evidence that status and adversary framing moves behavior comes from a randomized experiment with 536 eighth graders published in PNAS, 2016. Full citations and the counter-arguments are in the playbook.
One question, asked twice.
At week zero we ask a random sample of thirty students one open question. Who pays for the feed, and what are they buying? We keep the answers.
At week four we ask thirty different students the same question. The headline result is the change in the percentage who can describe the business model in their own words.
That is the primary measure. Nothing else is the headline, and nothing in it is tied to any student's name.
- Sample
- 30 students at random, week 0. 30 more at week 4.
- Scoring bar
- Names the trade: hours given, attention sold, money collected.
- Reported as
- Percent at week 4 minus percent at week 0, with both counts shown.
- Never measured
- Device use, hours on a phone, or any individual's compliance.