Attention economy
2012-01-13 — 2026-01-30
Wherein attention is framed as a rivalrous scarce resource, is formalized as a constraint in optimization, are platform incentives described to capture user time, and are billboards’ links to road fatalities noted.
We’re all agents acting with limited and local information. What sort of behaviour can we expect from a multiscale system composed of such actors? Especially, consider what we can expect if all the actors in such a system have not only finite computational resources and time to calculate the risk and return for each problem facing them, but also finite resources to spend even on working out which problems to allocate their other finite resources to.
If attention really is the central scarce resource of the contemporary economy, then we should be able to describe it with something better than vibes, metaphors, and denunciations.
At least at first pass, the economics might be standard. Herbert Simon suggested we understand that an abundance of information implies a scarcity of attention. That scarcity can be formalised. Attention is rivalrous, limited, and allocable; it can be modelled as a constraint in optimization problems faced by both individuals and firms. Platforms compete to relax that constraint in their favour by predicting which stimuli will secure marginal increments of user time. This looks like a straightforward consequence of incentive design in two-sided markets where advertisers subsidise user-facing services..
This might break down when these economic models intersect with cognitive and neural mechanisms. The attention “budget” metaphor might break when we think about the implementation. What we pay attention to is coupled with our desires in a complicated way. Sustained selective attention depletes executive control, novelty captures orienting responses, and intermittent rewards increase persistence. If you give engineers access to these regularities and ask them to maximise engagement, the resulting systems will look “addictive” even if no one explicitly sets out to addict anyone.
But dopaminergic reward prediction error seems to be a real signal, and environments saturated with cheap, high-frequency rewards do alter behaviour in predictable ways. The pattern of things to which we are invited to attend in the modern world shifts the local equilibrium of self-regulation, especially in populations already under cognitive load. If we want to analyze individual or social harms, it seems that this is the level at which the argument has to live.
Which optimization objectives matter? Over what time horizons? For which users, under which constraints, with what compensating benefits? The attention economy seems like a competitive system operating on biological substrates that did not evolve for this regime. How do we model this?
HYPER-REALITY, by Keiichi Matsuda
1 Incoming
Andy Warhol, Clay Christensen, and Vitalik Buterin walk into a bar connects the attention economy to value generation and to self-fulfilling prophecy
Anthony Lee Zhang, The War for Eyeballs
There is thus an interesting analogy between control rights for Twitter and other social media platforms, and the recent “Curve wars” in web3. Eyeball space in social media is like liquidity in web3: everyone values it and everyone wants to control it. Curve is thus similar to Twitter, in the sense that it controls a resource — incentivized liquidity provision — which is more valuable than the profits CRV extracts from providing the resource. As a result, many parties find it in their interest to buy control rights over CRV/CVX, and run it in a purposefully non-profit-maximizing way. In web3, large protocols amass piles of CRV/CVS governance tokens, to redirect liquidity towards their own tokens. Again, the fundamental principle behind the Curve wars is that the liquidity that Curve controls is much more valuable to some market participants, than the potential profits Curve generates using that liquidity.
My thesis is thus that Twitter and similar platforms are, in some sense, doomed to exist in perpetual governance conflicts similar to the Curve wars. Market forces will not allow Twitter and similar companies to exist as independent, reasonably objective, profit-maximizing companies. Since the eyeball time rents that Twitter controls are vastly larger than the profits it generates from those rents, Twitter is essentially doomed to be locked in an endless governance war. Interested forces will fight endlessly for control over Twitter, to run Twitter in a purposefully non-profit-maximizing way, to channel eyeballs towards one’s desired objective. Parties which value eyeball time for various reasons will endlessly struggle for control over Twitter, not for its ad profits, but to funnel eyeball time, in a purposefully non-profit-maximizing way, towards causes that they value.
- Cat and Girl on Distraction
- Billboards kill people (Hall and Madsen 2022)
- Guided by Vices – Pixel Envy