I recently came across this thought-provoking quote:

“It is with acts of attention that we decide who to hear, who to see, and who in our world has agency. In this way, attention forms the ground not just for love, but for ethics.”

-Jenny Odell

“Pay attention” is a curious phrase, one that we’ve used since long before the internet. Now, it takes on a new meaning. In the attention economy, attention itself is a form of payment.

Attention has become a currency, because our time is finite. Any time there’s a finite resource (gold, seashells, etc.), it can be used as a currency to represent value during an exchange. Money represents latent economic potential.

If, in the aggregate, thousand or millions of people pay attention to something (a channel, a post, an app, a game), the owner of that thing will almost certainly get paid. We are paying attention, and that attention translates into payment.

I think this is the case because time is money. Time can be converted into money, and vice versa. Attention can also be converted into money. However, the attention-to-money exchange is not as salient to us.

You could imagine Bob going to work and earning some money. When he leaves the job, he takes some of that money and converts it into something of inherent value, like a meal or a pair of gloves. The fact that Bob can do this is evidence that his time has inherent value.

The attention economy works by short-circuiting the first step. Instead of Bob converting his time into money and then subsequently converting the money into what he wants, in the attention economy, Bob simply converts his time into what he wants. This is possible because, as we’ve already established, Bob’s time has some non-zero, inherent value.

However, this only works for goods that 1) hold attention and 2) are extremely cheap to distribute.

When a million people all pay attention to the same thing, that’s like having the attention of an entire city. Add all that up, and you’ve definitely got a lot of value. Put another way, if you had 30 minutes × 1 million people made available to you, and all you had to do was direct those 500,000 person-hours towards a goal of your choice, you would understand that you’ve just been given an immensely valuable resource. Anyone who does project management would tell you that 500,000 free person-hours represents a very generous gift. Say the one million people are getting paid minimum wage ($8). Then we’re talking about $4 million (at a minimum) of value.

This begs the question. If we the people could direct our attention towards what is truly important, what would that be? If we were to reserve our attention for the most important problems to solve, what would those be? If the New York Times released a list of most-watched videos by Americans, what videos would you be proud to see on the list?

Out of curiosity, I conducted a small experiment. I went to YouTube, signed out, cleared cookies, and cleared all watch history. Then, I went to the Trending tab. The idea was to get a sense of what most people are watching. Topping the list, I saw a video titled I Flipped 100 Beach Rocks, Here’s What I Found and a short titled Making a GIANT Lip Gloss. I might characterize this content as the mental equivalent of junk food.

I don’t know about you, but those videos don’t make me feel optimistic. I would be proud to see videos like Becoming a More Patient Person, I Saved My Neighbor From a Fire, or How To Build a Community Garden topping the charts. I’m sure if you sought them out, you could find videos like that. But right now, these videos aren’t being watched nearly as much as I Flipped 100 Beach Rocks.

Imagine glancing over the shoulder of a US congressman, and you see they’re on their phone watching a YouTube video. Which video would you hope to see them watching? How would you feel about the future of the nation if it was Beach Rocks?

I think the important grain of truth in the Jenny Odell quote is this: where we direct our attention ends up mattering in the end. It’s a matter of ethics precisely because, when you add up how we spend all this attention, it’s consequential. Too much attention spent on vapid entertainment sums up to a decline in gross domestic productivity. What happens after that? What if there are people who genuinely suffer as a result? What if the short-circuiting of Bob’s job is essentially unhealthy for the economy?