The Attention Economy Is a Losing Trade

Here is a transaction that happens ten billion times a day: a human being exchanges a fragment of their attention for a piece of content they will not remember by evening. The exchange rate is spectacular — the content is free, personalized, infinite. The cost is invisible. Like most bad trades, it only looks good in the moment.

The Marketplace

The attention economy did not arrive with a manifesto. It arrived with a notification. Then another. Then a design pattern called infinite scroll, which a former engineer at one of the platforms later compared to removing the last page from a book. You never reach the end because there is no end. There is only the next thing.

What makes this market unusual is that the product being sold — your focus — is also the mechanism by which you might recognize you're being sold. This is the snake eating its tail. The less attention you have, the less capacity you have to notice how little attention you have.

The platforms understand this with exquisite precision. Internal documents from multiple companies, surfaced by whistleblowers and congressional inquiries, reveal metrics like "time spent" and "sessions per day" treated not as neutral measurements but as scores to be maximized. The language in these documents is the language of extraction: capture, engage, retain.

The Political Consequence

A democracy requires a particular kind of attention — slow, sustained, uncomfortable. You have to read the bill, not the headline about the bill. You have to sit with ambiguity, weigh competing claims, tolerate the friction of thinking. This is expensive attention, metabolically and emotionally. It is exactly the kind of attention the platforms are designed to undercut.

The result is not that citizens become uninformed. They become differently informed — saturated with takes, drowning in signal, unable to distinguish between understanding something and having seen something about it. The feeling of being informed replaces the work of being informed, the way the feeling of exercising replaces exercise if you watch enough fitness videos.

This is not a left-right problem. It is a depth problem. Every political position, from every ideology, is being flattened into content — optimized for shareability, stripped of nuance, reduced to the version most likely to produce engagement. Engagement, in the platform's usage, is a euphemism for emotional activation. The most engaged citizen is not the most informed. They are the most agitated.

The Personal Cost

Set aside politics for a moment. Consider what it means to live without the ability to concentrate.

You cannot read a difficult book. You cannot sit with a problem long enough to solve it. You cannot be bored, which means you cannot be creative, because creativity requires the empty space that boredom provides. You cannot be present with another person without the itch to check, to scroll, to see what else is happening somewhere else.

This is not a moral failing. It is an environmental condition. A person raised in a room with no silence will not develop the ability to hear quiet sounds. A person raised in an attention economy will not develop the ability to sustain focus, any more than a person raised on refined sugar will naturally prefer vegetables. The architecture shapes the inhabitant.

What Would Recovery Look Like?

The honest answer is: we don't know, because we've never tried it at scale. We have individual experiments — people who delete their accounts, families who lock their phones in a box at dinner, schools that ban devices. These are encouraging but insufficient, in the way that one person recycling is encouraging but insufficient to address climate change.

The structural version of recovery would require treating attention the way we've learned to treat other exploited commons — with regulation, with limits, with the recognition that some things are too important to be left to the market. We regulate what companies can put in food. We regulate what they can dump in rivers. We have not yet decided to regulate what they can do to human attention, perhaps because the damage is harder to photograph.

Until then, the trade continues. Ten billion times a day, we exchange something irreplaceable for something forgettable, and we do it for free.