Okay, I want you to picture this for a second.
You're walking down a narrow street in Tokyo.
It's a Tuesday afternoon. Maybe you're just looking
for a quiet spot to grab some ramen. The air
is crisp. The city hum is pretty low. Right.
You're in your own world. You're in your own
world. And then slowly this truck rolls around
the corner. It's covered in neon banners, but
the visual isn't what hits you first. It's the
sound. The sound trucks. I know exactly what
you're talking about. The sound trucks. Yeah.
Massive loudspeakers strapped to the roof, and
they are just blasting political slogans or some
ad jingle at a volume that, I mean, it literally
vibrates your ribcage. It's an absolute sensory
invasion. There's no escaping it. None. It just
fills the entire street. It bounces off the concrete.
You cannot ignore it. You can't even hear yourself
think. And in that moment, your attention isn't
something you're giving. It's being taken. It's
being taken. It's aggressive. It's loud. And
it is right in your face. And that's a really,
a very visceral place to start. Because while
most of us, you know, we're probably not dodging
sound trucks in Tokyo today. Yeah. That feeling,
that inability to shut out the noise, it's the
perfect physical metaphor for what we're digging
into. Because that truck isn't just annoying
you, it's a thief. Right. And that's the key
concept, attention theft. It sounds a little
abstract until you realize you're carrying a
miniature version of that sound truck in your
pocket every single day. Which brings us to the
mission for this deep dive. We have a massive
stack of sources today. We're talking economic
theory, some pretty heavy psychology studies,
the history of information management, and even
some Wikipedia dives on Internet culture. Yeah,
it's a big pile. It is. And we are going to unpack
the attention economy. It's a term that gets
thrown around a lot, you know, at dinner parties
or in tech articles. Oh, it's just the attention
economy. Right. It's become a bit of a buzzword.
It has. But when you actually dig into the source
material, you realize it's not just a buzzword.
It is a fundamental tectonic shift in how our
world assigns value. That's what struck me most
going through all of this. We usually think of
economies as being about, you know, money or
oil or labor. But in this framework, the currency.
is us. It's our focus. Yeah. Our consciousness.
Precisely. So if we really want to understand
why we feel so overwhelmed all the time, why
those free apps are actually costing us a fortune
and how this model is reshaping everything from
scientific research to social justice, we have
to follow the money. Or in this case. Let's fall
the eyes. Okay, let's unpack this. I want to
start with the basics because the sources make
a really interesting distinction right off the
bat about what attention actually is. Because
I think I know what it is. It's me looking at
something. But the economic definition is it's
a lot more specific. It is. If you look at the
work of Matthew Crawford, he frames attention
strictly as a resource. And the defining characteristic
of any resource is that it's finite. Like oil
or gold or time. Exactly. You do not have an
infinite supply of focus. Davenport and Beck,
who wrote one of the seminal books on this, they
define it as focused mental engagement on a particular
item of information. Okay. Focused mental engagement.
But here's the kicker. They argue that attention
is the necessary precursor to action. Which makes
sense. I can't buy the shoes if I haven't seen
the ad for the shoes. I can't vote for the candidate
if I've never even heard their speech. Right.
So in any marketplace, whoever controls the attention,
they ultimately control the action. If you control
the precursor, you have an incredible amount
of influence over the outcome. But here's where
the history just gets wild for me. I honestly
assumed this whole attention economy thing was
a product of, what, the iPhone era? Yeah, or
the dot -com boom at the earliest. Right. But
the sources, they took us back to 1971. Herber
Day Simon. 1971. I mean, we are talking about
a world of rotary phones and like three TV channels.
What on earth could he have seen back then that
predicts where we are right now? Simon was a
Nobel laureate, a psychologist and an economist.
And honestly, reading his work today, it feels
like reading a prophecy. He saw the very, very
beginning of the computer age, the first hints
of the information explosion. And he wrote something
that is basically the founding scripture of this
entire field. He really did. I have the quote
here. It's just it's fantastic. He said, in an
information rich world, the wealth of information
means a dearth of something else. A poverty of
attention. A poverty of attention. A wealth of
one thing creates a poverty of another. It's
a seesaw. It's so elegant and it completely flips
the historical script because for literally all
of human history, the problem was the opposite.
Exactly. If you were a scholar in, I don't know,
1850 or a business owner in 1920, your biggest
challenge was information scarcity. You couldn't
find the data. You couldn't get the book from
the other library. You didn't know the price
of grain in the next town over. So naturally,
we spent the last century building systems to
solve that one problem. We built libraries, then
the telegraph, then radio TV, and then, you know,
the internet. We designed the entire world to
flood us with information. And we succeeded.
Man, did we succeed. We succeeded too well. We
completely overshot the target. Simon's whole
point was that we kept building systems to produce
and distribute information, when we should have
pitted it decades ago to building systems that
filter information. And because we never made
that pivot, we are now just we're drowning. We
are all trying to drink from a fire hose because
we designed a faucet that can never, ever be
turned off. And that feeling, that sense of drowning
is where the economics really kick in. And this
leads us to the next big concept from the sources,
this idea of mental capitalism. This was the
part of the research that started to feel a little.
a little dystopian to me. This idea from Michael
Goldhaber and Georg Frank in the late 90s, they
weren't just saying attention is important. They
were saying it would actually replace money.
In a sense, yeah. Goldhaber's prediction was
that as we move deeper and deeper into this information
age, transactions that involve attention would
just grow much faster than purely financial transactions.
And eventually, attention becomes the primary
currency. For many sectors, yes. I mean, think
about it. For a media company or a social media
influencer or even a modern politician, income
and attention often ranks higher in importance
than immediate financial income. Because if you
have the attention, you can always figure out
a way to get the money later. But if you have
all the money in the world and no one is paying
attention to you... You're dead in the water.
You don't exist. In this model, the eyeballs
aren't just a step in the sales funnel anymore.
They are the wallet. You're paying with your
time and your focus. Which is a terrifying thought
because I can always go out and make more money.
I absolutely cannot make more time. And that
brings us right to the biological mechanism.
Because if attention is this finite, valuable
resource, and everyone is trying to mine it.
And they have to get very, very good at extraction.
Extremely good. We have to talk about the brain.
The sources get into the neuroscience of this,
and it essentially describes this zero -sum game
that's happening inside our own heads. It is
absolutely a zero -sum game. This is a crucial
concept to grasp. Your brain has a limited amount
of metabolic energy and a limited amount of processing
power at any given moment. So if I'm allocating
cognitive resources to scrolling through Instagram...
Then those are resources that are physically,
biologically unavailable for anything else, for
deep reading or for complex problem solving,
or even just for being present and listening
empathetically to your partner. It's like the
RAM in a computer, right? If Chrome is eating
up 90 % of it, every other program is going to
lag and crash. That is the perfect analogy. And
the tech companies, they know this. They know
they're all competing for your limited mental
RAM. So they have to utilize what... we call
the dopamine loop. The notes referenced the social
dilemma here, which I think a lot of people have
probably seen. But can you break down the actual
mechanism? How are they like hacking our brain
chemistry? It all relies on the brain's basic
reward system. Evolution wired us to seek out
novelty. When our ancestors found a new berry
bush or heard a new piece of gossip about a rival
tribe, their brain gave them a little hit of
dopamine. It feels good. It feels good. It's
a little reward that encourages you to do that
again. It's a survival mechanism. It was a survival
mechanism. It was. Now it's a business model.
Modern apps are engineered to trigger that novelty
-seeking and positive feedback loop constantly.
Every notification, every like, every single
pull to refresh. Oh, the pull to refresh? That
little animation? That is designed mechanically
to resemble a slot machine lever. That split
second of anticipation, what am I going to get?
What's going to be there? That's what psychologists
call variable ratio reinforcement. If you knew
it was going to be there every time, You wouldn't
pull. It's the unpredictability that spikes the
dopamine. They are literally mining that chemical
reaction to keep you on the platform longer.
So they're mapping the geography of our brains
and building a strip mine right on top of the
pleasure center. That is a very apt, if slightly
depressing, analogy. Yeah. And all of this creates
a massive bottleneck in what traditional advertisers
call the AI model. A -I -D -A. Okay, break that
down for us. It's the classic marketing funnel.
Attention, interest, desire, action. First, I
have to get your attention. Then, I have to make
you interested in what I'm selling. Then, you
have to actually desire the product. And finally,
you take action and buy it. Simple enough. Right.
But in the old days, the main barrier was the
cost of transmission. It was really expensive
to buy a TV ad or a full -page magazine ad to
get someone's attention. But no. Now, transmission
is effectively free. The cost of sending an email
or posting an ad online is basically zero. We're
living in an era of what the sources call a super
fluidity of information. The gates are just wide
open. Wide open. But the human funnel, the ATI
funnel, it hasn't changed. The bottleneck is
jammed right at the very top. Attention. We haven't
evolved bigger brains or more hours in the day
in the last 50 years. Exactly. So the only real
limit on the entire global economic system right
now is your finite ability to look at things.
Which explains why the tactics have to get more
and more extreme. It's an arms race. If everyone
in the room is screaming, you have to scream
louder or weirder or more aggressively. And that
arms race has casualties. This is where we really
need to look at what the sources call the dark
side. In economics, the technical term for this
is negative externalities. I want to pause on
that term negative externality because it comes
up a few times in the source material. It's basically
a side effect of a business that somebody else
has to pay for, right? That's a perfect way to
put it. The classic example is a factory. A factory
produces steel, which is good, but it also produces
smoke that pollutes the air and makes the neighbors
sick. And the factory owner doesn't pay for the
doctor bills. Exactly. The neighbors do. That
sickness, that cost that's pushed onto a third
party, that is the negative externality. So in
the attention economy, the app is the factory.
The engagement is the steel. What's the smoke?
There are several different kinds of smoke, and
they're all pretty toxic. The first and most
obvious one is our mental health. We have seen
a very clear data -backed link. In numerous studies
between heavy social media using social media
addiction, really, and soaring rates of depression,
anxiety, and low self -esteem, particularly in
younger users. Because the algorithm doesn't
care how you feel. It just cares if you're looking.
Precisely. The algorithm's only goal is to maximize
engagement. Yeah. And unfortunately, from a purely
mathematical standpoint, humans engage. very,
very highly with things that make us feel inadequate
or outraged or fearful. So if making me anxious
keeps me scrolling for 10 more minutes. The algorithm
will choose anxiety every single time. It's hopelessly
efficient. That's chilling. The algorithm will
choose anxiety. Then there's the second cloud
of smoke, which is the data component. The whole
surveillance capitalism model. To win the attention
war. Companies need to know exactly what triggers
you personally. So they collect everything. Your
demographics, your location, how long you hover
over a photo of your ex, where your political
leanings are, everything. And then they sell
that data. Or they use it to build a scarily
accurate profile that allows advertisers to target
you with surgical precision. This raises massive
ethical concerns about privacy and consent, but
it also fundamentally changes the information
ecosystem itself. And that leads to the third
cloud of smoke. Disinformation. The sources mentioned
a study from the Hankin School of Economics on
this, and it basically said that fake news isn't
just an accident of the system. It's a feature
of the economy. It is an economically rational
outcome. Yeah. Just think about the incentives.
If you are a publisher and you get paid an attention,
what is more valuable to you? A nuanced, complex,
maybe slightly boring truth or a shocking, emotional,
simple lie? The lie. The lie always travels faster.
Much, much faster. Novelty grabs attention. Outrage
grabs attention. So the economy we've built effectively
subsidizes disinformation. It makes lies more
profitable than facts. truth versus lies in the
abstract, one part of the research that really
upset me was how this disproportionately impacts
marginalized communities. It feels like the algorithm
itself has a bias. It does, but it's a bias born
of pure math, not malice. If you program a system
with the single goal of maximize engagement,
it will naturally, logically prioritize content
that resonates with the largest possible demographic.
Which is usually the dominant cultural identity.
Exactly. So if you are a minority, voice or you're
talking about a niche issue that's important
but maybe doesn't appeal to the mainstream, the
algorithm might just suppress you because you
aren't efficient enough from a click's perspective.
And we saw this with the reports from Black creators
on TikTok. Yes. They've documented numerous instances
of what they call shadow banning, where their
content just mysteriously stops appearing in
feeds, specifically when they post about topics
like Black Lives Matter. So they're just shouting
into a void. The system decides. that their message
might cause friction or might not appeal to the
broadest common denominator, so it just throttles
it. If visibility is the currency of this economy,
then these creators are being economically sanctioned
by a machine. It hinders activism. It hinders
awareness. You can't organize if you can't be
heard. Exactly. There was one other negative
externality in the notes that really caught me
off guard. I just did not expect to see this
in an economics discussion, and that's the corruption
of science. Yes. The paper from Adrian Lenardic
at Rice University. This is a fascinating and
pretty recent piece from 2022. I usually think
of scientists as being sort of immune to all
this. You know, they're in the lab, they're doing
the work. They aren't trying to be influencers.
Well, they still operate in the real world and
they still need to secure funding. And Lenardic's
argument is that science itself has started to
succumb to the attention economy. The very metrics
for academic success are shifting. It used to
be all about the long -term impact of your published
research. Now, scientists are literally listing
their media exposure counts on their resumes.
You're kidding. I was quoted in the New York
Times three times this year. That's a line item.
That's a line item. PhD candidates are tracking
their Twitter engagement on their latest paper.
And the danger here is that this creates a really
perverse incentive. If you want to get ahead.
you might be tempted to release results that
are flashy or shocking before they've been fully
peer -reviewed or replicated. So we get bad science,
or at least premature science, just because it
goes viral. Or we get science by press release.
And the bigger danger is that if the funding
always follows the attention, then the research
into unsexy, slow, complicated problems, which
are often the most important ones, that research
gets defunded in favor of whatever can generate
the headline. OK, so we've painted a pretty bleak
picture here. I mean, we're addicted. We're being
spied on. We're being fed lies. And now even
the scientists are starting to click bait us.
It's it's a lot. It is. But I want to pivot now
to section four of our outline, because there
is a paradox here that we need to address. We're
paying with our attention for all of this because
the actual stuff, the content itself is mostly
free. Right. This is the flip side of the coin.
If I can get basically any song, any movie, any
article for free, either legally or illegally,
why do we still pay for anything? This is where
Kevin Kelly's analysis from back in 2008 comes
in. And it's just brilliant. He asks a very simple
question. In a world where reproduction costs
zero, what is left to buy? And his answer is
what he calls the intangibles. Exactly. things
that cannot be copied. If the digital file itself
is free and abundant, you have to sell something
else that wraps around the file. Let's run through
these because I think a lot of listeners will
recognize their own spending habits here. I know
I definitely did. The first one on his list is
immediacy. Immediacy is the premium you pay for
time. You can probably get the new blockbuster
movie for free on a pirate site eventually. Right,
in a few weeks or months. But you pay $20 to
see it in the theater on opening night. Why?
Because you want it now. You are paying for priority
access. I do this with books all the time. I
could wait for the paperback or wait for it to
come to the library, but no, I buy the hardback
the day it drops because I can't wait. That's
immediacy. Okay, number two is personalization.
A generic medical article on WebMD is free. A
diagnosis of your specific symptoms by a real
doctor costs a lot of money. You can't copy personalization
because, by definition, it only fits one person.
The value isn't the raw information. It's the
tailoring of that information directly to you.
That makes perfect sense. Okay, number three
is interpretation. This one is huge in the tech
world. A piece of software like Red Hat Linux
is technically free. The source code is open
to everyone. But big companies will pay millions
of dollars for the support contract. They're
paying for the manual. They're paying for the
manual and the guide. They pay for the experts
who can explain how you use it. how to customize
it, and how to fix it when it inevitably breaks.
You're not buying the product. You're buying
the expertise to make it work. Okay, next up,
authenticity. This is the entire market for collectibles
or art or NFTs. You can copy a JPEG a million
times for free. You can print a perfect copy
of the Mona Lisa. But you can't copy the originality.
People will pay a huge premium for the assurance
that this is the real deal. Signed by the artist.
Bug free and genuine. Accessibility. This is
probably my biggest. Oh, yeah. This is all about
convenience. I could torn a movie for free, but
then I have to find a good cedar, worry about
getting a virus, maybe convert the file format.
It's a whole process. It's a hassle. It's a huge
hassle. Or I can pay Netflix $15 a month and
just click one button. I am 100 % paying for
the button. I am paying to not have to think
about it. That's it. You are paying for the absence
of friction. Okay, next. This is about the physical
manifestation of something digital. The MP3 of
the song is free, but the concert ticket is $200.
The experience of being there? The experience,
or the text of the book is free online, but the
leather -bound special edition copy feels good
in your hands and looks good on your shelf. We're
biological creatures. We still value physical
objects and real -world experiences. For sure.
All right, what about patronage? This is the
whole Patreon model. This is, as Kelly puts it,
paying simply because it feels good. I do this.
I support a few podcasters and YouTubers. I don't
even really use the extra content they offer.
I just, I want them to keep existing. I want
to support their work. It's a relationship. It's
not a transaction for a good. It's a signal of
support for the creator. And the last one on
the list, findability. And this brings us right
back full circle to Herbert Simon. When there
are millions of books, millions of songs, millions
of movies, the hardest thing isn't making one
more. It's finding the good ones. The filter
is the valuable thing. The filter is everything.
If you are a trusted curator or an aggregator
or a critic that helps me filter through all
that noise and find the one thing I'll love,
I will absolutely pay you for that service. So
the value has shifted from the content itself
to the context that surrounds it. In an attention
economy, context is king. The stuff is cheap.
The filter is expensive. But speaking of filters,
sometimes the filter gets completely clogged.
We need to talk about Section 5 of the outline,
information pollution, because not all information
is just content. Some of it is just garbage.
Spam. Spam, yeah. The source material uses this
analogy of spam as pollution, and I really like
it. It completely reframes how you think about
the annoyance. It's a very helpful economic framework.
If we agree to treat attention as a clean, valuable
resource like fresh air or clean water, then
spam and intrusive ads are basically smog. They
impose a burden on the breather. Exactly. The
burden is on you, the recipient. So when I spend
10 minutes every single morning deleting junk
emails from my inbox, that's me coughing on the
digital smog. That's you coughing on the smog.
And the economics of spam explain exactly why
there's so much of it out there. Why do spammers
send it? Because it is incredibly, unbelievably
cheap to produce and distribute. The sources
mention the conversion rates, and they're just,
they're tiny. Infinitesimal, like .001 % or even
less. But here's the math. If it costs me $5
to send 10 million emails, and just one of those
people buys my fake Rolex for $50. You've made
a massive profit. The math works perfectly for
the spammer. It works perfectly. But the cost
of that transaction is distributed to everyone
else. The Internet service providers have to
process all adjunct data, and all 10 million
recipients have to waste their time and attention
deleting it. It's a classic tragedy of the commons.
A perfect example. So how do we clean up the
pollution? The outline brings up the Coase theorem,
which sounds very serious and academic. Ronald
Coase was a Nobel Prize winner in economics,
and he looked at exactly these kinds of social
costs. He argued that... You can manage these
externalities by clearly defining property rights.
So, if you define who owns the air, you can start
charging people for polluting it. That's the
core idea. Okay, so how do we apply that to my
email inbox? Well, there are some really fascinating
theoretical solutions that have been proposed.
One is called the sender bond. A sender bond?
How would that work? Okay, imagine if every time
you sent an email to a stranger, someone not
in your contacts, the system required you...
to post a very small bond say five cents all
right five cents goes into escrow exactly if
the person who gets your email opens it and hits
reply or marks it not spam you get your nickel
back instantly no cost to you but but if they
mark it as spam you forfeit the nickel The recipient
might even get to keep it as a tiny compensation
for their wasted time. Oh, I love that. That's
genius. So if I'm a legitimate business emailing
a new client or I'm emailing my grandma for the
first time, I don't care. I'm happy to put up
the nickel because I know they want to hear from
me. I'll get it right back. But if you're a spammer
trying to send 10 million unsolicited emails,
you would lose $500 ,000 in 10 seconds. You would
go bankrupt. Immediately. Right. It completely
destroys the economic model of spam by forcing
the sender, the polluter, to actually take on
the financial risk of their actions. Why haven't
we done this? This sounds like the best idea
I've ever heard. It's technically very difficult
to implement across the entire decentralized
Internet, but the economic logic is absolutely
sound. And there's another version of this idea
called interrupt rights. Which is what it sounds
like. Pretty much. Literally selling the right
to demand someone's attention. Imagine if your
phone had a sort of a digital gatekeeper. If
a telemarketer wants to make your phone ring,
they have to pay a fee to get through. A tollbooth
for my brain. A tollbooth for your brain. Yeah.
And the really cool part is that the price could
be dynamic. The notes really dive into this.
If you're a Fortune 500 CEO, maybe your interrupt
price is set at $500 a minute. But if you're
a student, maybe it's 50 cents. Right. And you
could change it based on your situation. During
the holidays or when you're on a tight deadline
at work, you crank your price up to $100. The
message is, do not disturb me unless it's really
worth $100. And then in the summer when you're
bored, you can lower it. You lower it to $1?
Sure, pitch me something. I can just imagine
my friends getting a bill because they sent me
a meme at 2 o 'clock on a Tuesday. Sorry, that
meme just cost you $5. Well, presumably you'd
whitelist your friends and family. But for advertisers
and strangers, it forces them to do the math.
Is this ad really worth pitching $2 to show to
this specific person at this specific time? If
the answer is no, they don't show it. The smog
clears. It fundamentally reassigns the property
rights. It says, I own my focus, and if you want
to enter my property, you have to pay the entrance
fee. That is the dream of the attention bond
or the interrupt right. It's about realigning
the economic incentives to protect the individual.
But right now, we obviously don't have that.
We are living in the Wild West. And in the Wild
West, people cheat. Which brings us to section
six, the search engine war. Right. If attention
is the most valuable commodity and Google is
the main gatekeeper of attention on the Internet.
Then ranking high on Google is like owning beachfront
property in Malibu. And everyone wants to steal
that property. This is the world of SEO search
engine optimization. But more specifically, the
gray market. We're talking about things like
link farming. Right. Link farming, reciprocal
linking, keyword stuffing, private blog networks.
I mean, the list of tactics goes on and on. It's
all about tricking the search algorithm into
thinking a particular website is more important
or authoritative than it actually is. It's an
endless game of cat and mouse. Completely. Google
updates its algorithm to catch the spammers,
and the spammers invent a new trick to get around
the update. It never stops. There was a specific
and kind of famous example in the notes about
Google bombs. This was a huge deal a few years
ago. It was. A Google bomb is essentially when
a large group of people on the Internet conspires
to all link a specific, often derogatory phrase,
to a specific website. Usually for political
reasons. Like linking the words miserable failure
to a specific politician's official biography.
Exactly. And when enough people do it, the algorithm,
which is just following the math, says, oh, wow,
thousands of websites are saying that this page
is the authority on miserable failure. And so
it ranks at number one for that search term.
It's a form of digital protest, really. But it
forces the search engines into a really, really
awkward position. It makes them judges. They
have to decide, is this spam? Or is it protected
political expression? If Google goes in and manually
fixes the result, they're admitting to the world
that they edit their supposedly objective results.
But if they leave it up, their product looks
broken and biased. It just shows how fragile
these automated systems are. They're built on
the assumption that links equal trust. But links
can be weaponized. And on the user side of this
war, we're developing our own defenses, too.
We have what the sources call ad fatigue. Oh,
absolutely. I know I have this. My brain has
just been trained to automatically ignore the
top three results on any search page because
I know they're sponsored ads. I don't even consciously
see them anymore. It's like a blind spot. That
is a real measurable biological adaptation. Our
brains are learning to tune out the signals that
we've identified as commercial or inauthentic.
But that just makes the advertisers more desperate.
Of course. They see you ignoring the banner ads,
so they pivot to native advertising. That looks
like a real article. Or they start using AI to
track you across all your devices to find that
one moment of weakness when you're most likely
to click. You're ignoring us. Fine. We'll just
get smarter and more invasive at finding you.
It just goes right back to that same arms race.
The more we defend our attention, the more sophisticated
the weapons of attention theft become. Okay,
before we wrap this all up, we have to talk about
the final section, section seven. So far, we've
kind of blamed the tech companies, the spammers,
the advertisers. But there's another culprit
in the attention economy. Us. It's us. We're
doing it to each other. We are both the consumer
and the producer of the noise. We have to talk
about social interaction overload. This is that
feeling of complete exhaustion from just maintaining
digital relationships. Think about the scale
of it. In, say, 1990. You might have kept up
with maybe 20 or 30 close friends and family.
You talk on the phone occasionally, send a letter.
That was it. Now, you might have 500 friends
on Facebook, 200 followers on Instagram, a professional
network on LinkedIn, and five hyperactive WhatsApp
group chats, all demanding your input. Every
single one of those connections is a potential
demand on my finite attention. Every happy birthday
wall post, every comment you feel obligated to
like, every photo you're tagged in. The researchers
call these social solicitations. They're like
these tiny accumulating micro debts. When someone
comments on your photo, you feel a social obligation
to comment back on theirs. It feels like work.
After a while, it genuinely feels like a job.
Because it is work. It is cognitive labor. We
are overwhelming each other with constant low
-grade demands for attention because the platforms
have made it frictionless to demand it. And then
there's the concept of collective attention,
the wave. The viral cycle. Yeah. We can actually
measure this now with data. A topic, whether
it's a dress that changes color, a celebrity
slap at an award show, a silly meme, it just
spikes. The entire world, it feels like, looks
at this one thing at the exact same time. And
then, poof. It's gone. And the decay rate is
getting faster and faster. The sensation of the
moment used to last for a news cycle, maybe a
week. Now it lasts for maybe six hours. Why do
you think that is? It's that super fluidity of
information again. There's always the next wave,
the next shiny object pushing up right behind
the current one. We don't have time to process
or dwell on anything because the next thing is
already screaming for our focus. So after all
of this. Where does this leave us? We've traveled
from Herbert Simon in 1971 predicting this poverty
of attention, through the dopamine labs of Silicon
Valley, through the pollution of our inboxes,
and right into our own exhausted brains. It's
a heavy realization to sit with. We build an
entire global economy on the extraction and resale
of human consciousness. It is the fuel that runs
the modern internet. And we are seeing the costs
all around us. Addiction, surveillance, political
polarization, bad science, and just a general
pervasive loss of individual and collective focus.
It really feels like we're the frogs in the slowly
boiling water. The water is bubbling and we're
just sitting here scrolling. But understanding
the mechanism is the first step to taking back
control. We've talked about some of the big theoretical
fixes like interop rights. We've talked about
the importance of finding good filters. But those
systemic fixes aren't here yet. I can't start
charging spammers a nickel for their emails tomorrow
morning. No, you can't. So for right now, today,
the real so what of all this is this. Critical
thinking is your only real defense. You have
to actively recognize when your attention is
being thefted. versus when you were giving it
willingly and consciously. You have to become
the bouncer at the door of your own mind. That's
a great way to put it. Precisely. You have to
start treating your attention like you treat
the money in your wallet. You wouldn't just walk
down the street throwing dollar bills out the
window at every loud truck that drives by. I
definitely would not. So why do we throw our
focus, which is arguably more valuable, at every
single notification that buzzes? Why do we let
that sound truck park itself inside our brain
for hours on end? That's the challenge. The notes
did mention this concept of the intention economy
as sort of the counter idea, the utopia. Yeah,
it's a hypothetical future where the power dynamic
is flipped. The buyer notifies the market of
what they want. I intend to buy a new car in
the next three months. And the market responds
to them with relevant offers. Instead of the
market just yelling at everyone all the time,
hoping someone somewhere wants a car. It sounds
peaceful, doesn't it? Sounds very peaceful. a
hopeful concept. But until we get there, we are
stuck here living in the attention economy. So
here is the question we want to leave you with
today. If your attention really is a currency,
are you actively spending it or is it just being
stolen from your wallet while you aren't looking?
And here's a fun little thought experiment to
go with that. If you could charge just one single
dollar for every non -essential notification
that interrupts you today. How rich would you
be by dinnertime? I'd certainly be able to afford
a very nice lunch, maybe even that bowl of ramen
from the intro. I think I could probably retire.
Thanks for diving in with us. Keep your wallet
close and your attention even closer. See you
next time.