There is a quiet war being fought over something most people don't think of as a resource at all. Attention — the raw, unfiltered kind — has become the scarcest input in the modern economy. Not compute, not capital, not even talent. What we lack, more than anything, is the capacity to notice.
For most of the internet era, attention was bundled. You went to a newspaper and got news, opinion, sports, and weather in a single artifact. You opened a social feed and received a stream curated by time, then by algorithm. The bundle worked because distribution was expensive and curation was a service. But that model is fracturing.
The Economics of Noticing
The rise of generative AI hasn't just changed how content is produced — it has fundamentally altered the economics of noticing. When anyone can produce a competent summary, a polished essay, or a synthetic analysis, the bottleneck shifts. It moves from "who can create" to "who can attend." The question is no longer whether the information exists, but whether anyone is paying enough attention to find and use it well.
This is a deeper shift than it first appears. We tend to think of attention as a psychological phenomenon — something individuals have more or less of. But attention is also an economic phenomenon. It can be directed, harvested, sold, and wasted. And increasingly, it can be automated. AI systems that scan, filter, and summarize are not just tools; they are attention proxies, acting on our behalf in an environment too vast for any single mind to navigate.
The scarce resource is no longer information. It isn't even wisdom. It's the willingness to sit with something long enough to let it become interesting.
What concerns me is not that we'll run out of content — we won't — but that we'll lose the ability to be genuinely surprised by it. Surprise requires a kind of openness, a willingness to encounter something that doesn't fit the model you walked in with. Algorithmic feeds, by their nature, optimize for engagement over surprise. They give you more of what you already attend to, not what you haven't yet learned to notice.
Building Attentional Infrastructure
The unbundling of attention means that each of us must now build our own attentional infrastructure: the feeds we follow, the newsletters we read, the people we trust to surface the unexpected. This is both a burden and a gift. A burden because it requires effort and intentionality in an environment designed to erode both. A gift because, for the first time, the individual has more power than ever to shape the information landscape they inhabit — if they choose to use it.