Like oil, gold, and cobalt, attention is a finite resource, and yours is being mined for profit. And not only by the players you think of—Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram—but also by Netflix, Google, Nintendo, Samsung, and all the other corporations vying to keep brains and eyes locked to their products. Combined, these companies have an annual revenue of well over $1 trillion, and all that money is made by extracting your time and attention from you and selling it to other people. Attention is time, and we all have a limited amount. We have to know how it is being taken from us, and, as lawyers and leaders in our political and regulatory world, we have to fight to protect the attention of everyone.
It’s Not the Data, It’s How They Use It
All too often these days, we find ourselves talking about our data and the dangers that come with Meta, Apple, Google, and others having lots of data about us. While I don’t wish to trivialize the importance of data security in our modern age, data is nearly worthless in the hands of someone who fails to capture your attention. Your phone number, for example, is worth a lot more to a telemarketer if you have a cell phone in your pocket all day instead of a phone stuck to the wall at home. And your phone number is basically worthless unless you have been trained to answer the phone when someone calls. In any consumer data product, it is your attention that carries the vast majority of the value.
There are a number of ways for companies to profit off your attention with the data they collect, and many companies combine these to multiply their profits. Streaming services use data to present you with a steady stream of content that suits your interest, holding on to you as a paying customer. Social media services sell your data to companies that can precisely target ads to the consumers whose attention that social media service has captured. Business software providers expand their roots throughout your operations to ensure the cost of their service never exceeds the cost of your switching to a program offered by a competitor. And hardware companies control the ecosystems we spend our time in, profiting off giving app developers access to our eyes, ears, and pockets. Apple is a great example of a company doing just that, all while expanding its market share with promises not to share data.
A New Era for a Timeless Issue
This isn’t a new issue. Since the beginning of time, people have tried to profit off the attention of others. Television and video games were lambasted as dumbing down the world as they captured the attention of humanity in new and exciting ways. Long before that, the ancient Greeks ridiculed their youth for the act of reading instead of memorizing, which was sure to atrophy their brains. I’m sure even prehistoric cave painters were given some extra food as a thank-you for giving their fellow cave people something colorful and distracting to look at.
But this is a new era and one for which we are frankly unprepared. Even the great technological advancement from books to recordings to television is nothing like what we face today. In the attention-mining economy, we have entered the era of fracking and offshore drilling, and we have to recognize the danger this new era poses.
Where before our attention was divided across various physically separated items and spaces, they have now come together. In our pockets is a device that combines the television, music player, video game, community space, phone, exercise equipment, computer, and, for some of us, even our office. It will surprise no one that parts of this article were written on the “phone” in my pocket. Work now comes home with us, and television goes to work. With this unification of worlds has come massive quantities of data and technological advancements that have made each of these things better at mining our attention. Social media is the easiest example of all to see this, but you can now spend an entire work day, including phone calls, meetings, water cooler chats, and tasks completed, within Microsoft’s or Google’s ecosystem. The era we are in now is different, and that, in many ways, is a very good thing, but it also comes with bigger problems.