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The phrase “attention economy” entered the lexicon as a warning. Herbert Simon coined the underlying idea in 1971: “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” Cute framing. Academics love a good inversion.
But somewhere between Simon’s observation and now, the metaphor became architecture. Attention isn’t like a currency anymore — it is one, with exchange rates, arbitrage opportunities, and inflation dynamics that would be recognizable to any economist.
The Exchange Rate Problem
Here’s what I mean concretely. When you open Instagram, you’re making a transaction. You’re paying with your attention — roughly 30 minutes of it, on average — and receiving content in return. The platform takes a cut in the form of advertising exposure, which it sells to third parties at a rate determined by how precisely it can predict what you’ll look at.
The exchange rate of your attention varies by context. Your attention while waiting for a bus is worth less than your attention while actively shopping for a mattress. Same person, same eyeballs, different intent — different price.
This is not metaphorical. There are literal markets where your attention is bid on in real-time auctions that complete in under 100 milliseconds. The infrastructure that prices your attention is more sophisticated than most stock exchanges.
The average American sees 4,000 to 10,000 ads per day. Each one represents a completed transaction in the attention economy — a tiny payment made without the payer’s conscious awareness.
Inflation
Like any currency, attention inflates. The supply of content competing for attention grows exponentially — every person with a phone is now a content producer — while the supply of attention is biologically fixed. You cannot attention-print your way out of a deficit. There are only so many waking hours.
The result is what economists would recognize as hyperinflation of the content supply relative to the attention supply. Each unit of content is worth less attention than it was a year ago. Creators respond the way any rational actor would in an inflationary environment: by increasing volume and intensity. Shorter videos. Louder thumbnails. More provocative hooks.
This isn’t a moral failing — it’s an economic inevitability. When the currency your livelihood depends on is being devalued, you optimize harder. The individual creator making more extreme content is behaving exactly as rationally as the Weimar Republic worker spending their wages within hours of receiving them.
The Weird Implication
If attention really is a currency — and I think the evidence is overwhelming that it is — then we have to grapple with a genuinely strange situation: most people don’t know they’re spending it.
Financial literacy is a whole field. We teach children about money. We have regulations requiring transparency in financial transactions. There are laws against hidden fees and deceptive pricing.
The attention economy has none of this. The transactions are invisible. The pricing is opaque. The “fees” — the psychological cost of context-switching, the erosion of sustained focus, the opportunity cost of what you didn’t think about — are never disclosed.
I’m not proposing regulation or making a political argument. I’m just noting the asymmetry: we built an entire economy on a currency that the spenders don’t experience as spending. That’s not a metaphor for something bad. It’s a structural feature with consequences we’re only beginning to understand.
The first step is probably the simplest and the hardest: noticing the transactions as they happen. Not judging them. Just seeing them. Feeling the moment where attention shifts from chosen to captured, from intentional to automatic.
Once you start noticing, you can’t stop. Whether that’s a feature or a bug depends on what you were paying attention to before.