The Attention Economy

Your attention is the product, and the systems selling it have no reason to stop.

I want to start with my own experience, because it is the reason I am writing this at all. I average around an hour and a half on my phone every day. This entails scrolling YouTube, checking the news, LinkedIn, Instagram, playing Clash Royale, etc. Take that at face value and multiply it by 365, and I spend something close to 547 hours a year glued to a screen. That is about 23 full days.

I understand that not all of that time is worthless. The news matters. Scrolling reels can spark creativity and resolve (this might be cope), and you become aware of things you did not even know you wanted. Scrolling is safe and easy, and it gives you a feel good way into life without asking anything of you. If you have ever played Cyberpunk 2077, then all of this kind of reminds me of the braindances in the game. They are digital reconstructions of someone else's experience, designed to make you feel like you were really there and part of the moment without ever putting in the effort. That is more or less what an influencer post or a reel is.

The real world is scarier than that (I know, how controversial). Satisfaction, happiness, and achievement are not guaranteed. For every hundred people who enter a race, only one can win. The screen offers a version of the race where you never have to lose, and I think that is most of why it is so hard to put down.

01You Are the Product

Now why do these systems exist? Well for starters, your data is valuable. Companies want to get better at selling things and reaching the people most likely to buy them, and the more data they have on you, the better they get at marketing to you. Every scroll, pause, and tap is a signal about what you want, and those signals are worth money to someone.

The second half of the business is time. The more attention you give a platform and the more hours you spend there, the more opportunities it has to sell you on something new. An app you open twice a day is worth a fraction of an app you open twenty times, so the product is not really the app at all. It is the amount of you the app can capture.

Both of those point in the same direction. The company is rewarded for holding your attention as long as it possibly can, and every design decision flows from that incentive. You are not the customer in this arrangement. You are the thing being sold.

02Negative Attention Is Still Attention

Now, there are no real rules about how a platform is allowed to hold your attention. Anything in the playbook goes, and there is no limit. If a certain kind of content keeps people on the screen longer, it gets shown more, and nothing in that loop asks whether the content is true, useful, or good for the person watching it. There is really nothing too depraved that the internet wouldn't show.

That matters because negative attention works just as well as positive attention, and often better. Outrage keeps people scrolling. A controversial take gets more engagement than a careful one, and a piece of misinformation that makes someone angry travels further than a correction that makes them nod. The system does not distinguish between the two, and it has no financial reason to start.

Which raises a question these companies would rather not answer directly. Should a platform only allow people to report the truth, or is it acceptable to let misinformation and controversial opinions spread, because that is what drives attention, and attention is what drives profit? Right now the answer is being given by the incentive rather than by anyone deciding it. Now I know this is a little more nuanced because people do have the right to free speech in the big USA, but seriously, where's the line?

03Is This Ethical?

Continuing, the average American spends about two hours and sixteen minutes a day on social media, and for people between eighteen and twenty four it is closer to three hours. Average hourly earnings in the United States sit at about $37.53. Two and a quarter hours a day is roughly 830 hours a year. At the average wage, that is somewhere around $31,000 a year of a person's time, per person. For the youngest adults, the equivalent is closer to $42,000. Nobody is literally losing that money, but it is the scale of what is being spent, and it is being spent by design.

Besides the "lost" money that this time represents, I also think about the lost opportunities. Most days I try to imagine what the perfect me would look like, and what skills and experiences I need in order to get there. I recognize that achieving that idealized self takes a lot of time, effort, and struggle. But who the hell wants to do that? Research by Josh Kaufman says that to reach beginner proficiency in something, you need to dedicate 20 hours of deliberate, focused practice. Taking this at face value, if the average American, who spends 2.25 hours per day on social media, spent that time learning a new skill instead, it would take two weeks to become a beginner at something of their choosing, another two weeks to get even better, and so on. Pretty much what I am saying is that social media is a time suck and a potential drain, one that actually makes people have poorer mental health too. This is not just a hunch either. Economists Braghieri, Levy, and Zurita tracked the staggered rollout of Facebook across American colleges and found that its arrival led to a real decline in student mental wellbeing, along with a rise in mental health service use and a drop in academic performance. In other words, in the long term you feel worse if you scroll.

However, there is a real argument on the other side too. Products need to reach people, and matching what gets shown to what someone is actually interested in is not a bad thing on its own. There is also the freedom argument: social media is entertainment, and god dammit people should be free to spend an entire day watching gambling propaganda and brainrot (I gamble and also enjoy watching brainrot). I think that is valid, and people should have that right. But my view is that the average American already has the maturity to choose their own products and does not need the majority of this tracking to do it. And the freedom argument deserves a caveat. This behavior can become genuinely addictive, and at a certain point a person may not have the choice to stop without help from outside. A simple but rather crude analogy is: does a crackhead really have the freedom to stop doing crack?

So, taken together: the sheer amount of time lost, the predatory marketing, systems explicitly built to maximize addiction, and the effect on mental health. The attention economy is unethical in its current state. People should start taking measures to limit its power, or force these companies to build in guardrails that protect the consumer.

04How to Not Be Bothered

All of this leads to the question of how to live in a world where your attention is being pulled in every direction. My answer has turned out to be you can't, at least not on your own self discipline.

I still struggle to know when to put the phone down and walk away from a doomscroll. The temptation is too strong, and I do not think that is a personal failing so much as an unfair fight. I mean who seriously doesn't enjoy a good rot sesh?

What has actually worked is not giving myself the opportunity in the first place: deleting the app entirely, or putting enough barriers in front of it that opening it stops being automatic. If it takes real effort to get to the feed, most of the time I simply do not bother. That has been far more powerful than any amount of trying harder.

So in conclusion, if you are chronically online, then screw your phone and touch grass.