The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource

by Chris Hayes

Economist Herbert Simon, whose 1971 essay on the attention economy is one of the single most insightful meditations on attention ever published, observed long before the age of constant smartphone push notifications that a “wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients.”[1] Information is abundant; attention is scarce. Information is theoretically infinite, while attention is constrained. This is why information is cheap and attention is expensive.