When people talk about “the attention economy,” they’re talking about the buying and selling of our time: time we used to spend with our minds “turned off,” meandering on a walk, staring into space at a traffic light, those seventeen minutes before you fall asleep. It’s an economy based on taking up residency in the interstitial moments of our lives but also through subtle, repeated disruption of the main events—so much so that Netflix’s CEO famously joked that the company’s main competitor is sleep.
