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Herbert Simon predicted the attention economy in 1971: 'A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.' Fifty years later, that poverty is the resource a $500 billion industry is built on.
Social media, streaming, and search platforms compete for time-on-screen because attention is the input that converts to ad revenue. The infinite scroll, the autoplay, the notification — these are engineering choices targeting the bottleneck Simon identified. The externality is on cognitive bandwidth, political discourse, and youth mental health; the regulatory question is whether market incentives can be redirected without breaking the platforms.
