On attention

The web's real product isn't information — it's your attention, harvested and sold. Understanding that changes how you see everything on the screen.

The oldest trade

Most of the free web runs on a single transaction: it gives you something to look at, and sells your looking to someone else. This isn't a conspiracy; it's just the business model, and it's remarkably honest once you see it. But its consequences aren't neutral — when a system's entire incentive is to capture and hold attention, it will relentlessly optimize for whatever does that, and what does that is rarely what's good for you: outrage, novelty, the endless scroll, the interrupted thought.

The cost is focus itself

The individual costs are familiar — the fractured attention span, the reflexive reach for the phone. But the collective cost may be larger: a public discourse shaped by what spreads (the inflammatory, the tribal, the simple) rather than what's true or useful. When attention is the currency, the loudest and most divisive content wins, and a society optimized for engagement is optimized against its own ability to think together. The mechanism doing the optimizing — the recommendation system deciding what surfaces next — deserves its own scrutiny; see On algorithms.

Reclaiming it

Attention is reclaimable, but not through willpower alone — the systems are engineered to defeat willpower. It takes structural changes: friction against the frictionless (turning off the feeds, the notifications), and deliberately choosing the slow, effortful, non-optimized media — the long article, the book, the single-tasked hour. Your attention is the most valuable thing you own precisely because so many are spending so much to take it. Guard it accordingly.

Boredom was doing something

A quieter cost is the disappearance of unoccupied time — the queue, the waiting room, the walk without a podcast. Boredom used to be where ideas incubated, where a mind wandered somewhere the feed never would have sent it. Filling every gap with optimized content doesn't just take your attention in the moment; it removes the raw material — idle, undirected thought — that other kinds of thinking depend on. What gets automated away here isn't a task but a mental state, and that trade rarely gets named honestly; the broader pattern of automating away things we didn't know we valued is the subject of On AI and work.

The discourse we're left with

Zoom out from any one feed and the collective effect is a public conversation increasingly shaped by attention-optimized incentives rather than civic ones — a slow, structural cost to shared life, not just to any one person's focus. That wider civic dimension is the subject of On technology and society.