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Essay

The Seat Is Already Filling — With Attention

June 17, 20268 min read

Most arguments about a world of abundance stay philosophical. They picture abundance as a destination and debate what life would feel like once we arrive. We want to make one of those arguments urgent instead, because the part people treat as speculation is already running. In our digital lives, money has started to lose its grip as the scoreboard we rank each other by. And we can watch, in real time, what is moving in to take its place.

This is not a thought experiment. It is a decade of evidence about a score that emerged on its own.

When information got cheap, attention got scarce

Online, copying anything costs nothing. A post, a song, a video — once it exists, there is effectively an unlimited supply. So the old logic of scarcity stops applying to the content itself and jumps to the one thing that stays finite: the human capacity to notice. There are only so many waking hours, only so much attention to go around, and no server farm can manufacture more of it.

Herbert Simon saw this in 1971, before the web existed. In a world flooded with information, he wrote, the bottleneck shifts to what that information consumes. His line has aged into a near-law: “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” Simon identified the scarcity precisely. He did not name the “attention economy” — that phrase came later, from others — but he named the mechanism that makes one possible. When attention is the scarce resource, attention becomes the thing worth competing for.

A new score emerged on its own

Nobody convened a meeting and chose this. Once attention was scarce, a way of counting it appeared by itself: followers, views, likes, engagement. It is a real scoreboard, and it now organizes a sizable share of human ambition. People orient their work, their words, sometimes their identities, around a number that measures how widely they are noticed.

We do not have to guess what that score rewards. We have studied it for a decade, and the picture is consistent enough to be unsettling.

Start with what spreads. Analyzing a large corpus of political messages, researchers found that each moral-emotional word in a message was associated with roughly a 20% higher chance of it being shared (Brady et al. 2017). This is correlational — a pattern in how content diffuses, not a controlled experiment — so we hold it loosely. But the direction is clear: heat travels.

Then look at what the ranking itself does. A preregistered audit compared an engagement-ranked feed against a simple chronological control and found that the ranked feed amplified content hostile to people’s political out-group — and that users’ own stated preferences ran against what the algorithm fed them (Milli et al. 2025). The machine was optimizing for something people did not actually want more of.

And look at how the optimization was tuned. One major platform, at the peak of this logic, weighted an angry reaction as five times the value of a like in deciding what to show — a configuration its own internal documents describe, later reduced to zero (reported in the Facebook Files coverage). We say “at its peak” deliberately: it was a particular setting at a particular time, not a permanent law of the platform. But it shows what a literal-minded attention score will do when left to run. Anger performed, so anger was promoted.

None of this requires a conspiracy. It is just what happens when the yardstick is noticeability. Optimize for being noticed, and the loudest rises, not the best. That is the structural problem with attention as a measure of standing: it has no opinion about whether what gets noticed is any good.

Be careful with our own claim

An economist would push back here, so we will push first. Attention online is not free of money. It pays — through ads, sponsorships, brand deals — which is a large part of why people chase it. So we are not describing a clean world where attention floats free of income as the measure. The two are tangled.

That is why we keep the claim narrow. Here is the precise version. Wherever standing gets scored apart from income — in feeds, followers, fame, the running tally of who gets seen — the score that actually emerged, on its own, is attention. That is the best evidence we have about what fills the seat when money’s grip loosens. Extending it to a whole culture’s measure is an extrapolation, not a finding. We would rather get ahead of that extrapolation than test it live on a civilization.

There is a deeper pattern under all of this, and it is worth stating because it warns against easy fixes. Any ranking that becomes worth money gets gamed. When Google’s PageRank made link structure the measure of relevance, link farms appeared to manufacture the signal almost as soon as the signal was worth manufacturing (Brin & Page 1998). A score is not a neutral mirror. The moment it carries value, people optimize for the score rather than the thing it was meant to track. Attention is no exception, and neither would any naive replacement be.

The seat is contested now

Put it together. The desire to matter in other people’s eyes is one of the oldest things about us — psychologists who reviewed the evidence across cultures, ages, and personalities concluded that the wish for status is a fundamental human motive (Anderson, Hildreth & Howland 2015). That motive does not switch off when the basics are covered; it looks for a yardstick. And in the one arena where money has already weakened — our digital lives — the yardstick that arrived to fill the gap is attention, with all the distortions a decade of research has documented.

This is the part we want to be honest about: the seat is not opening sometime in an abundant future. It is contested now. Something is already filling it, and it filled the seat the way defaults always do — not because anyone judged it the best measure, but because it showed up first and nobody was guarding the door.

A yardstick left unchosen is not a yardstick avoided. It is a yardstick chosen by default, and defaults are rarely chosen well. The point of saying this plainly is not despair. It is the opposite. If attention took the seat by default, then a default is all it is — not destiny. We can choose what fills the seat instead. We think the better candidate is impact: the difference your existence makes in other people’s lives, conferred by the people you affected, never converted into a price. The full case is on Foundations, and the homepage frames the choice in one line — impact over attention, impact over money.

We are not predicting the future here. We are pointing at a contest that is already underway and insisting it is a contest, not a fate. The seat is filling. We would rather it were chosen than inherited.

For the longer history of how attention became something to harvest, two books are the standard starting points: Tim Wu’s The Attention Merchants and Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing (reading list).

Sources

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