Originally published on robatdasorvi.com
Sometime last year I caught myself doing something embarrassing. I had opened a tab to read an essay I genuinely wanted to read, one I had bookmarked specifically because it looked interesting, and within forty seconds I had opened three more tabs, checked a notification, and completely forgotten the essay existed. The tab sat there for eleven days before I closed it unread.
I am not particularly proud of this. But I also do not think it is purely a character flaw. Something structural has been shifting for a while now, and it is about to get significantly worse in ways that will make a single, sustained minute of human attention genuinely rare and economically valuable.
What happens when content supply becomes unlimited?
The supply of content is now effectively decoupled from human effort, and that changes the economics of attention permanently.
