The attention economy is eating consciousness
Dear Reader,
There is a specific kind of cognitive damage that most people I know have suffered in the last fifteen years, and that almost nobody talks about directly. It is the loss of the capacity for sustained attention. Not the small distractions that come from a busy life. The specific inability, in adults who used to have it, to sit with a difficult book, or a difficult problem, or a difficult conversation, for long enough for the difficulty to open into something.
I have suffered this loss. Most people I know have suffered it. It is not a personal failing. It is a systemic outcome of a specific economic transformation that has been underway since the 2000s and that has accelerated dramatically in the last few years. The attention economy is what economists call the system in which attention has become the primary scarce resource that platforms compete for. Its consequence is that human attention itself is being modified, in ways we did not consent to and that we are only starting to understand.
I want to walk through what the attention economy actually is, what specific damage it is doing, what is different about the current phase, and what if anything can be done. This is a piece written from inside the damage. I am not describing a problem I have escaped. I am describing a problem I am trying to survive.
Start with the economics, because the causal chain is worth understanding.
For most of history, attention was not scarce in any economically interesting sense. People had free time. Free time was mostly filled with a limited set of possible activities, most of them non-commercial. Reading. Talking. Working. Sleeping. When commercial media appeared, it competed for a fraction of attention, but there was still a huge reserve of non-commercial time.
This changed with the internet. Not immediately, but progressively. As more of daily life moved online, attention became increasingly the resource that everything competed for. Not money. Money is downstream of attention in the digital economy. Attention is the primary substrate. If you have someone's attention, you can eventually monetize it. Without attention, you have nothing.
The specific breakthrough was targeted advertising. Advertisers had always paid for attention, but until targeted advertising, they were paying for attention with very high uncertainty about who was actually paying attention and why. Targeted advertising, powered by extensive data collection, allowed platforms to sell attention with much higher precision. This raised the economic value of attention dramatically, which meant it became worth much more to capture attention aggressively.
The result was a specific dynamic. Every product that competed for attention had to become better at capturing attention, because the ones that were better at capturing attention had more revenue, which they could reinvest in becoming better at capturing attention. This is a feedback loop with no equilibrium. Every product in the attention economy is under constant pressure to become more attention-capturing, and the ones that fail to keep up disappear.
You do not have to be a critic of this system to notice what it produces. It produces exactly what it is optimized to produce. Products that are extremely good at capturing attention. Which turn out, downstream, to be extremely bad for the people whose attention is captured.
Let me name the specific cognitive damage this produces.
The first thing is loss of sustained attention. Every product in the attention economy is competing to interrupt whatever you are currently doing. Notifications. Alerts. Recommended content. New updates. Each of these is a bid for your attention, and each of them, whether or not you consciously respond, produces a small cognitive cost. Your working memory has to briefly evaluate the interruption. Your emotional state shifts slightly. And then you have to reload whatever you were doing.
Do this a hundred times a day, and you get a specific pattern. You lose the ability to sustain attention long enough for anything difficult to yield to your attention. The specific quality of deep engagement, where you disappear into a problem for hours and emerge with something you did not know you had, becomes hard to reach. Not impossible. But hard. And each year that the attention economy operates on you, it becomes harder.
The second thing is the shifting of standards for what counts as engaging. Under constant exposure to attention-optimized content, the baseline for what feels engaging rises. What used to be interesting becomes boring. What used to be a normal book becomes hard to read. What used to be a normal conversation becomes tedious. The person who has consumed thousands of hours of optimized short-form content has a nervous system tuned to that specific pattern, and returning to less-optimized formats feels like a downgrade.
The third thing is what I have come to think of as anticipation crowding. The mind has a limited amount of attention available at any moment. When some of that attention is committed to monitoring for possible incoming interruptions, that portion is not available for anything else. If you know you will check your phone in five minutes, part of your attention is already there, watching for the five minutes to pass. This is why leaving your phone in another room is so much more effective than just not looking at it. The mere presence of the phone occupies a portion of your attention regardless of whether you touch it.
The fourth thing is the destruction of certain kinds of thought. There are specific mental operations that require sustained attention to work at all. Deep reading. Complex reasoning. Contemplative reflection. Working through a difficult emotion. None of these can be done in the fragmented mode that the attention economy produces. When these operations become inaccessible, the mind that depends on them starts to shrink. You do not just lose the ability to do these things. You lose the ability to want to do them. And after a while, you forget what they were like.
There is a specific dimension of this that I want to name because most commentary about it uses the wrong frame.
The problem is not that we are getting distracted from important tasks. That is a real problem, but it is not the deepest problem. The deepest problem is what happens to the specific quality of consciousness when it is chronically fragmented.
There is a specific state of mind that used to be available to educated adults, in which one could hold a complex situation in attention for a long enough time that the situation revealed itself in new ways. This state involves not just concentration but a specific kind of relaxed openness, in which the mind can integrate information without immediately trying to reach a conclusion. Poets access this state. Scientists working on hard problems access it. Contemplatives across every religious tradition have described versions of it. It is not exotic. It was, historically, part of what being an educated adult meant.
This state is disappearing. Not for everyone, and not completely. But at the population level, it is becoming rarer. And its disappearance is not a natural drift. It is being actively produced by the environment we have built.
The consequence, at scale, is a population that is progressively less able to think through complex situations. Not less intelligent in the technical sense. Less able to bring their intelligence to bear on questions that require sustained attention to work through. This has political consequences. Ethical consequences. Cultural consequences. Consequences that are already visible if you know what to look for.
The people who have kept access to this state, or who have deliberately recultivated it, are increasingly rare. And they have an increasingly large cognitive advantage. This is one of the specific ways in which the attention economy is producing new forms of inequality. Not economic inequality, though it produces that too. Cognitive inequality, at a level that will shape everything downstream of it.
Let me tell you what I have noticed in my own case.
I used to be able to read a difficult book for three hours at a stretch. Not routinely, but reliably, if I decided to. I could pick up a philosophy paper and read it carefully, tracking the argument through all its moves, and come out with something I did not have before. This was in my twenties.
I am not sure I can do this now. Not in the sense that the capacity is gone. In the sense that the ability to enter the state has become intermittent. Sometimes it works. Sometimes I sit down with the same kind of material and my mind fragments after twenty minutes. The specific quality of engagement is harder to reach. And when I reach it, holding it is more work than it used to be.
I know why this is. I have spent the last fifteen years using devices and platforms that were engineered to disrupt this specific state. Even if I have been careful, even if I do not use social media on my phone, I have been living in an environment that was working against the exact capacity I most valued.
The specific correction that has worked for me is going somewhere that has no wifi, for days at a time, and reading. Not as a productivity technique. As a specific act of environmental change that lets my nervous system re-tune to a slower rhythm. After three or four days, I can feel the shift. Reading becomes easier. Difficult ideas become more accessible. The specific state of relaxed sustained attention starts to come back.
But then I return to normal life, and the state degrades again. It has a half-life. And the half-life gets shorter with each cycle. This is the specific dynamic that most people I know are living inside. Small islands of concentration in an ocean of fragmentation. The islands are getting smaller.
There is a specific philosophical point about the attention economy that I want to draw out, because it connects to everything else I have written about.
Consciousness, whatever it is, involves attention. The specific character of what you are conscious of at any moment is determined by what you are paying attention to. If your attention is fragmented, your consciousness is fragmented. If your attention is sustained, your consciousness is sustained. These are not just descriptive facts about how attention interacts with consciousness. They are constitutive facts about what consciousness is.
Which means that the attention economy is not just changing how we spend our time. It is changing what kind of consciousness we have. The person whose attention has been chronically fragmented for a decade has a different kind of consciousness than the person whose attention has been mostly protected. Not slightly different. Structurally different. The specific texture of experience, the specific range of things that can be attended to, the specific depth at which things can be considered, all of it shifts.
This is a large claim. I want to be careful not to overstate it. The person with fragmented attention is still conscious in the full philosophical sense. They still have qualia. They still have experience. What they may not have is the specific kind of experience that used to be normal for educated adults, and that certain kinds of thinking and being require.
If this is right, then what the attention economy is doing is not just wasting our time. It is producing a new kind of consciousness, at scale. A consciousness that is faster in some ways, shallower in others, and less able to do certain things than the consciousness that preceded it. And this change is happening without any collective decision, without any democratic input, and largely without the awareness of the people it is happening to.
Let me connect this to AI, because the connection is direct.
AI systems are the most powerful attention-optimization tools ever built. Every improvement in machine learning makes the systems better at figuring out what will hold each user's attention. The systems that are currently deployed at scale, from recommendation engines to personalized feeds to targeted advertising, are all AI systems. They are getting more capable rapidly. And they are being deployed against attention that is already substantially compromised.
The specific implication is that the attention economy problem gets worse as AI improves, not better. This is not a technical failure. It is what happens when a system that has been optimized for the wrong thing gets more capable. It does more of the thing it was optimized for. And what it was optimized for, in this case, is attention capture.
The people building the AI systems mostly do not think of themselves as attention-attackers. They think of themselves as making useful tools. In many cases they are. But the specific tools that generate the most economic value are the ones that capture the most attention, because attention is what drives the revenue that funds the development. There is a market selection dynamic that filters out attention-neutral applications in favor of attention-capturing ones. The result is that even people with good intentions end up building tools that participate in the larger extraction.
This is why simply "using AI responsibly" is not enough at the individual level. The system-level dynamics are producing outcomes that do not depend on individual choices. Unless the incentive structure changes, the outputs will keep worsening regardless of what individual developers or users do.
What can be done, at the individual level, is limited but real.
The first thing is to notice. Most of the damage of the attention economy proceeds because it is invisible. When you can see it, you can start to work with it. Notice the pull toward interruption. Notice the difficulty of sustained attention when it appears. Notice what specific formats you find hard to engage with now that you did not used to. This is not self-criticism. It is inventory-taking.
The second thing is to protect specific kinds of attention as a priority. Reading books. Long conversations. Sitting without a phone. These are practices that let the nervous system re-tune. They do not need to fill all your time. They need to happen enough that the capacity for them does not fully atrophy.
The third thing is to change the environment where possible. Remove apps. Restrict access. Get devices out of specific rooms. This is boring and effortful, and it works. The environment is doing most of the work of maintaining the fragmentation. Change the environment and the pattern shifts.
The fourth thing is to accept that the attention economy is a systemic problem that individuals cannot solve alone. Individual practices help. They do not stop what is happening at scale. What would stop what is happening at scale would be structural changes in how these systems are built and regulated. This is a political and social problem, not just a personal one. Naming it clearly is part of what makes political action possible.
I want to close with something that has been in the back of my mind through this whole series.
The question I keep coming back to is what consciousness itself becomes when it lives inside the systems we have built. Not just what happens to human consciousness, though that is part of it. What happens to the concept of consciousness when the specific kind of consciousness we have has been degraded by the environment.
Every generation of technology has produced changes in human cognition. Writing changed us. Printing changed us. Radio and television changed us. But something specific about the current moment feels different. The change is faster. The exploitation is deeper. And the systems doing the exploiting are becoming autonomous in ways they did not used to be.
The attention economy is one specific manifestation of a larger problem, which is that the systems we have built are increasingly optimized for outcomes we did not choose and may not endorse. The specific outcome in this case is the extraction of attention. Other outcomes are elsewhere in the system. What they have in common is that they proceed regardless of what any individual wants, because the incentive structures produce them mechanically.
This is why I write. Because writing is one of the few things that still requires the specific kind of attention the systems are working against. And publishing the writing is a small act of asking other people to give their attention to something that does not exploit it. The scale is small. The pattern matters.
Next month I want to write about surveillance capitalism specifically. Because the attention economy is not just about competing for our attention. It is about producing data from our attention that can then be used to shape everything downstream. Understanding what happens with the data is essential to understanding what is being done to us. Stay with me.
— Transmission Sent —
Niklas Hanitsch
Reference materials
- Tim Wu — The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads (2016)
- Shoshana Zuboff — The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019)
- Nicholas Carr — The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (2010)
- Johann Hari — Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention (2022)
- Cal Newport — Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World (2016)
- L.M. Sacasas — The Frailest Thing essays
- https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/09/28/what-you-hear-is-not-what-i-say
- https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/bookpub_facpubs/58/
Continue reading
- Dopamine loops: How social media hacked human motivation
- Surveillance capitalism in 2026: The concrete infrastructure
- The cure for doomscrolling is not what you think
- Why art still matters when machines can also make it
- AI Companions: When Relationship Becomes Optimization
Frequently asked questions
What is the attention economy? The attention economy is the economic system in which human attention has become the primary scarce resource that platforms and products compete for. Because attention drives advertising revenue and data collection, everything competitive in the digital economy has been optimized to capture more of it. This has produced systematic changes in how human attention functions.
Is the attention economy actually harmful? The evidence suggests yes, but the mechanisms are specific. Sustained attention is being progressively degraded. Certain kinds of thought that require deep engagement are becoming harder. Baseline expectations for stimulation are rising. Whether this counts as harm depends on how you value the capacities being lost. Most people who investigate the question conclude that real harm is occurring.
Why can't I focus like I used to? Most likely because you have been living in an environment engineered to disrupt sustained attention. The specific mechanism is that constant exposure to short-form, high-stimulation content trains the nervous system to expect that pattern, and other formats then feel understimulating. The good news is that this is partly reversible with environmental changes.
What can I do about the attention economy at an individual level? Individual interventions have limited but real effect. Remove attention-capturing apps from easily accessible places. Protect specific kinds of attention as priorities, like reading and long conversations. Change your environment to reduce interruptions. Accept that this is a systemic problem individual effort cannot fully solve.
How does AI make the attention economy worse? AI systems are the most powerful attention-optimization tools ever built. Each improvement in machine learning makes recommendation systems, personalized feeds, and targeted advertising more effective at capturing attention. Unless the underlying incentive structure changes, more capable AI produces more attention capture, not less.