The Economics of Attention

In 1971, the economist Herbert Simon wrote a sentence that took fifty years to come true. “A wealth of information,” he observed, “creates a poverty of attention.” He could not have known how literally the poverty would be engineered, nor how profitable the engineering would prove.

The only thing that doesn’t scale

Almost everything got cheaper. Information went to nearly free. Storage, bandwidth, compute — all of it fell off a cliff. One thing did not: the number of waking hours in which a human being can pay attention to anything at all. That number is fixed at roughly a thousand a year, and it cannot be manufactured, borrowed, or scaled.

Which makes it the only genuinely scarce resource in the information economy. And the first law of economics is that scarce resources get fought over.

You are not the customer of the free internet. You are the seam of ore it is mining, and your attention is the metal.

What the wall is for

We charge for this journal, and the charging is not incidental — it is the argument. The moment a publication is free to the reader, it must be paid for by someone else, and that someone else wants something: your time, your data, your slow conversion into a demographic. A paid publication has exactly one master, and you are it.

This is the uncomfortable middle of the piece, and it is for members, because the rest of it makes a specific and falsifiable claim: that the business model of a thing determines its soul, and that you can read a publication’s incentives directly off its balance sheet. The evidence — and the awkward implications for our own — continues below.