The Hidden Economy of Human Attention: What Happens When Your Focus Becomes Someone Else’s Business?
Your Attention Is Being Sold. And You’re Paying the Price. You wake up, and the first thing you do is reach for the phone, the dopamine hit you get with each scroll, and soon enough, you realize you spend the first 30 minutes of your day doomscrolling. But you still feel good, as you haven’t bought anything and you skipped each ad. Your money is still on your card, so you feel like you didn’t lose anything valuable. Well…you lost something more valuable than your money. Your attention. Did you ever wonder why everyone is fighting for our attention? Why are digital platforms designed to keep us looking? What makes our attention so economically valuable? Every day, we enter one of the world’s largest marketplaces. We don’t bring money, and we don’t consciously sign contracts. We bring something much more valuable: our attention.
