Welcome to Cognitive Capitalism (defragzone.substack.com)

OpenAI’s new ChatGPT Pulse turns the assistant into an always-on, proactive “digital roommate” that runs overnight research on your behalf—pulling from chats, feedback and connected apps (email, calendar, documents, browser history) to deliver personalized morning briefs. Currently gated to Pro subscribers (~$200/month), Pulse marks a shift from reactive Q&A to asynchronous, continuous data collection. OpenAI is also building advertising infrastructure and reportedly plans to monetize free users by 2026, which frames Pulse as both a premium testbed and a pipeline for large-scale behavioral profiling. Technically, Pulse aggregates multiple data streams to build high-resolution models of your work patterns, decision triggers, communication style and rhythms—precisely the kind of training signal LLMs use to mimic or automate cognitive tasks. That raises two linked risks: privacy and commodification. Integrated, context-aware ads could evolve from banners into subtle, personalized nudges embedded in assistant responses; the same models that help you write emails could also replace jobs by replicating your cognitive labor. The article’s recommended defenses are practical: favor local, on-device models (e.g., Ollama, GPT4All) and be wary of incremental integrations. Economically, rising costs and VC pressure make data monetization a predictable outcome, echoing Facebook’s attention-economy path and creating what the author calls “cognitive capitalism.”