Definition
Attention Economy
The business model in which products compete to capture and monetise your attention, often at the cost of your wellbeing.
In the attention economy, free products make money by holding your attention and selling it to advertisers. Feeds, notifications, and autoplay are engineered to maximise time-on-app, not your benefit.
Why it matters: when attention is the product, your focus is the thing being extracted. Recognising the incentive lets you set deliberate boundaries instead of being optimised against.
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