Do we have your attention? If so, you've just handed over a piece of the most precious stuff on the planet. Considered purely as a commodity, it’s more valuable than data, more valuable than capital & labour, more valuable even than oil. It’s obviously much more than a ‘just a commodity’ though, yet still, many people willingly give it away free.
But here's what very few discuss clearly. There’s no Moore's Law equivalent for attention – everyone gets ~16–18 waking hours a day and that's it - a hard biological ceiling. Attention doesn't compound, doesn't scale and nor does it improve with investment.
And meanwhile, the supply of content, information and stimulation stretches toward the infinite with generative AI making it more infinite by the day.
Psychologist & scholar Herbert Simon, best known his work on decision-making, saw a lot of this coming. As far back as 1971 he famously argued ‘a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.’ How right he turned out to be, even if he was fifty years early. Consider. Every second of focus you give one thing is literally stolen from everything else. Attention is probably the only truly zero-sum game.
Not only that, almost the entire Internet is built on one business model - ‘capture attention then convert it to money’. Global ad spend will surpass $1 trillion this year, the vast majority of it digital. Meta, Google, ByteDance & the others can’t be called ‘tech companies’ in any real sense; what they actually are, are attention merchants - their valuations a measure of how good they are at grabbing & holding your eyeballs.
People spend an average of 4–7 hours a day on screens - higher among the young and getting higher by the year. And what this amounts to is a significant portion of their – and your - finite, non-renewable life being auctioned off in millisecond increments to the highest bidder. The auction is automated, the bidders always ready and no-one sees the gavel come down.
So why exactly is attention more commercially valuable than everything else? It’s simple – all those other things scale. You can always produce more data, raise more capital, automate labour but what you can’t do is produce more attention. As such, it's the only resource at the end of every economic chain that remains irreducibly, stubbornly human.
But this is where it starts to get interesting and where market forces stop being enough. Attention isn't just valuable economically; it’s the raw material of your entire conscious life – and this is meant literally, not metaphorically.
William James, the father of American psychology, said in 1890: ‘My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind.’ What he was getting at was your world (and everyone else’s) isn’t ‘what's out there’, it’s what your attention grants entry to, with everything else as periphery, in fact mostly nothing. For you.
This is backed up by Neuroscience too, robustly - with proven phenomena such as ‘inattentional blindness’ - where people fail to see a gorilla walking through a basketball game because their attention is focused elsewhere. Or ‘predictive processing’ through which your brain builds your reality from what you've repeatedly attended to before.
Attention then becomes self-reinforcing - you see more of what you expect, and expect more of what you've seen - attend to (for e.g.) grievance long enough and the world becomes a grievance; attend to (for e.g.) beauty and that multiplies too.
Your ideology and your ontology are attention filters. They determine what you even notice in the first place - which threats feel urgent, which beauty registers, which people seem ‘real’ (or genuine) to you. That means two people can live in the same city, read the same news, walk the same streets and inhabit completely different subjective universes. The difference is what they've trained their attention to see.
That’s why attention isn’t just an economic issue but a moral and philosophical one, so this next point is worth emphasising….
Where you point your attention is one of the most consequential choices you can make. Because it doesn't just reflect your values it actually constructs your reality and shapes who you become. Attending is an act and like all acts, it carries genuine ethical weight.
At its best, philosophy gives you meta-attention - the capacity to notice what you're attending to, and why, and then lets you deliberately shift it. Buddhism calls this ‘mindfulness’, in phenomenology it’s known as ‘intentionality’ but both are pointing at the same thing. Which is that you can become the master of your attention rather than its victim, although many people seem never bothered to try.
Maybe real maturity means attending to what's uncomfortable - what your current lenses want to filter out. But it also means knowing when to rest your attention entirely. Boredom, idle staring, the shower thought, the walk alone with no podcast.
None of these is a waste of attention, they’re more like ‘diffuse mode’ in which the brain can update its priors, integrate what it's learned and generate original thought. James knew this and neuroscience seems to confirm it. Sovereignty over attention therefore includes the wisdom to occasionally let it lie fallow.
As we’ve said, attention can’t be scaled and that’s true of the individual but the points being made here definitely can be. Societies, for example, are shaped by what they collectively attend to, and / or refuse to attend to. That much has always been true.
But now something new seems to be happening. Platforms don't just harvest individual attention, they distort the shared reality that cultures, democracies & institutions run on, and they do so not because of malice but through optimisation. Engagement trumps accuracy and outrage trumps coherence. In other words, as we all apprecaite, the algorithm doesn't care (or even know) what's true, it only cares about what holds.
This is the civilisational version of the attention problem and it's probably the most dangerous one. Few would disagree a democracy requires a minimally shared reality to function and a culture requires some common ground of attention to cohere.
And here we’re running an uncontrolled experiment on what happens when you hand that substrate – the substate of attention – over to systems optimised for engagement.
The full results aren’t yet in, but the early signs don’t seem encouraging.
Whoever controls attention controls what counts as real – which is a statement about power of the deepest kind. It’s the kind that operates below the level of argument and before the level of debate. It’s at the level of what even gets noticed.
That’s why ‘attention as power’ isn’t just an individual concern, but a political, even civilisational one. And what’s scary is it’s almost entirely invisible.
So now we have ‘attention as scarce resource’, ‘attention as reality-builder’, ‘attention as moral act’ and ‘attention as civilisational substrate’, all of which may look like separate ideas – except they aren’t. They're the same idea at four different depths.
So, treat your attention like it's sacred, because it is. It's not an open tab, it’s your life. And at scale, it's all of our lives.
Thank you for your attention to this matter!