🚨 Where attention goes, money flows: This has become the economy’s new resounding mantra. Land, labor, capital, and attention are the main resources according to today’s experts, with marketing and entertainment platforms increasingly vying to capture our collective gaze. With our attention spans getting shorter and shorter, our mental resources have become scarce and fiercely contested, says the Economist.

The attention economy: In an era of information surplus, we grant extraordinary power to whatever claims our attention. Investing in the attention economy requires a solid understanding of how our attentional capacities function because, unlike land and labor, attention is reflexive and hard to regulate. This mental resource encompasses working memory, selective concentration, and visual focus, according to research by behavioral economist Zachary Wojtowicz and economist Goerge Loewenstein.

Attention depends heavily on our emotional states and our (extremely variable) informational environment, making it susceptible to forces beyond our conscious control. When the markets exploit this vulnerability, we essentially hand over a fundamental component of our identity. Consider how social media platforms use variable reward schedules — the same psychological mechanism that drives gambling addiction — to keep users scrolling indefinitely. They deliberately utilize (and optimize) the dopamine hit of likes, comments, or new content to create a compulsive need to check for updates, turning our neurochemistry into an Orwellian profitable commodity.

“Attention is the stuff of consciousness itself.” Before thought and speech comes attention, The Atlantic writes. Our focus is often captured before we realize it’s happening; it exists in a perpetually vulnerable state. Those first stirrings of consciousness — before awareness fully kicks in — make our attention remarkably easy to steal and commodify. The modern economy increasingly rests on attention, with speculation and market betting as primary vehicles for capital expansion, according to The New York Times.

Where else can attention take us? Right now, our attention is the ultimate cashcow, forming the cornerstone of social media, entertainment, ads — have you been on 6 October Bridge recently? — and marketing. Economics writer Kyla Scanlon notes that the attention economy exists primarily within the digital realm, though social media can potentially redirect our focus toward more valuable pursuits. For politicians, attention has become value creation itself — a dangerous development for democratic discourse.

How can we regulate the rampant effects of this new economy? Establishing age limits for social media seems like a logical starting point. Much like labor laws protect children from exploitation, young people’s attention should not be sold or commodified, especially unwillingly — at which point does the economic vision of unfettered monetization become involuntary indentured servitude? While placing limits on how much attention can be monetized and extracted from us may seem elusive, such regulation is essential if we hope to maintain some control over our minds, and protect this uniquely personal aspect of ourselves.