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To illustrate, let's do a little thought experiment. Let's say tomorrow you decide to run for local office. After you google around to learn what paperwork you need to file, how many signatures you need, and what the deadlines are, you'll have to figure out two main things: how to raise money, and how to let voters know who you are. You'll probably start with your social network for both tasks: neighbors, friends, and relatives. You might host events, stand out on a street corner, go to local farmers' markets or bowling leagues or subway platforms to shake hands and introduce yourself. You'll need a staff, a message, campaign signs, positions on the issues, and on and on. But in all cases, what you need to win is other people's attention. It is necessary for anything else that happens in a successful campaign.

Or let's say you want to start a business. During the pandemic you developed a specialty chocolate chip cookie recipe with a hint of habanero chiles for heat, and everyone who tries it loves it. You're going to have a bunch of logistical challenges that will keep you very busy—how to incorporate, acquire the right equipment, maybe secure a business loan. But ultimately, you're going to end up in the same place as a political campaign: How do you let people know that you have cookies to sell? How do you get people's attention? Answering this question is the foundation for a shockingly wide array of modern human endeavors—from getting a job to finding a date.

Attention is a kind of resource: it has value and if you can seize it you seize that value. This has been true for a very long time. Charismatic leaders and demagogues, showmen, preachers, great salespeople, marketers, advertisers, holy men and women who rallied disciples, all have used the power of attention to accrue wealth and power. What has changed is attention's relative importance. Those who successfully extract it command fortunes, win elections, and topple regimes. The battle to control what we pay attention to at any given instant structures everything from our inner life (who and what we listen to, how and when we are present to those we love) to our collective public lives (which pressing matters of social concern are debated and legislated, which are neglected; which deaths are loudly mourned, which ones are quietly forgotten). Every single aspect of human life across the broadest categories of human organization is being reoriented around the pursuit of attention.

 

How did it get this way? Toward the end of the twentieth century, many wealthy nations began moving from an industrial, manufacturing economy to a digital one. In 1961, six of the ten largest US companies by assets were oil companies. The assets these companies controlled—fossil fuels—were the single most valuable resource in the postwar global order. Alongside fossil fuel companies were car companies like Ford Motor and industrial behemoths like DuPont.

Today, Forbes' list of the largest US companies is dominated by banks and tech firms: Microsoft; Apple; Google's parent, Alphabet; Meta; and Amazon. The central locus of economic activity has moved from those firms that manipulate atoms to those that manipulate bits. Typically, we tend to think of the rise of this new form of economic production as being dependent on information and data. "Data is the new oil" has become a kind of mantra of the age; whoever controls large stores of information are the power brokers of our time.

This view is not completely wrong; information is vitally important. But it crucially misstates what's both so distinct and so alienating about the era we've entered. Information is the opposite of a scarce resource: it is everywhere and there is always more of it. It is generative. It is copyable. Multiple entities can have the same information. Think for a moment about your personal data, information about who you are and what you like. Maybe there are half a dozen firms that have it or maybe there are a hundred, or maybe a thousand, and while it might have some effect on you in terms of which advertising you get, you don't really know and functionally it doesn't really matter. But if someone has your attention, you know it. It can't be in multiple places at once, the way information can.

If I put a picnic table in my backyard and my neighbor steals my idea by putting a picnic table in his own backyard, that doesn't change my experience very much. But if my neighbor steals my picnic table, well, then, he's made my life a lot worse. The brilliant legal scholar Lawrence Lessig uses that example to illustrate the difference between intellectual property and physical property, but it's also a good way to think about the difference between information and attention. Information is the idea of the picnic table; attention is the actual picnic table.

I'm going to discuss the relationship between information and attention a lot more over the course of this book, but for our purposes here at the start, the axiom I want to drive home is that information is infinite and attention is limited. And value derives from scarcity, which is why attention is so valuable.

So if we return to the largest corporations of our times, they are dominated not by information companies, but more accurately by finance and attention companies. Apple is the company most singularly responsible for inaugurating the attention age with its 2007 introduction of the iPhone. Microsoft runs the operating system that hundreds of millions of people spend their attention on all day long, along with another attention magnet, the Xbox gaming console. Alphabet runs YouTube, as well as the internet's largest advertising network, which profits from our attention. Meta and the Chinese social media company Tencent (which makes WeChat, the largest social network in China) similarly convert eyeballs into cash.

Amazon is also on the list of largest companies and is the world's largest online retailer outside China, but even to call Amazon a "retailer" misstates the source of its market power. Amazon is an attention and logistics company, and the products it sells are an afterthought. You see this anytime you search for a product on Amazon and are confronted with dozens of nearly identical versions, all produced by companies you've often never heard of, in places you couldn't name, primarily competing for the attentional space at the top of the search results, attentional space that Amazon owns. In many cases, Amazon has seen which products dominate that attentional space and then started producing them itself, cutting out the middleman.