Attention, the Last Scarce Resource

Herbert Simon saw it coming half a century ago: a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. What even he did not foresee was the scale of the extraction economy that would grow around the shortage — trillion-dollar enterprises whose raw material is the human gaze, harvested in seconds and sold in aggregate.

The language of the industry is instructive. Users are engaged, retained, captured; time is spent; feeds are consumed. It is the vocabulary of appetite deliberately produced, and it has migrated from boardrooms into ordinary self-description. We now speak of our own attention the way miners speak of ore.

Attention, though, is not merely a resource; it is closer to a self. What you attend to, repeatedly and over years, is what you become — the shape of your memory, the texture of your inner life, the set of things you are capable of caring about. An economy optimized to fragment attention is, whatever its intentions, an economy optimized to fragment persons.

The response worth having is neither panic nor purity but sovereignty: treating attention as the one estate everyone inherits, and building — personally and politically — the fences it deserves. Sanctuaries of focus, defaults that respect the reader, and a culture that again admires the long thought. Scarcity, after all, is another word for value.