Your Attention Is Being Strip-Mined

And you're not getting royalties.

Think about what attention actually is. It's the ability to direct your consciousness toward something. It's finite. You only get so much each day. And it's yours, the most personal resource you have, more intimate than your money, more you than your time.

Now think about how that resource is being treated. Every app on your phone is designed to capture as much of it as possible. Every notification is a demand. Every feed is optimized to keep you scrolling. The entire architecture of the digital world treats your attention as a raw material to be extracted, refined, and sold.

You are the mine. You're not getting paid.

The Attention Economy, Literally

When people talk about the "attention economy," they usually mean it as a metaphor. But it's not a metaphor. It's an accurate description of how money flows.

Advertisers pay platforms for your attention. Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, they all make money by delivering your eyeballs to advertisers. The more attention they can capture, the more they can sell. This isn't incidental to their business. It is their business. The numbers are staggering.

What does this mean for how the platforms are designed? It means every feature exists to maximize time-on-platform. The infinite scroll. The autoplay. The notification badges. The "people you may know" suggestions. None of this is neutral. It's all engineered to make you stay longer, look at more content, generate more data, see more ads.

Tell me more about design patterns that capture attention

The product isn't the app. You are the product. Your attention is being harvested and sold. And unlike when a company extracts oil from your land, you don't get a royalty check.

What You're Losing

Attention isn't just about what you notice. It's about what you think, what you feel, what you remember, what you become. Where you put your attention is, over time, who you are.

When your attention is constantly hijacked by notifications and feeds, you lose the ability to direct it yourself. Studies show that people who use smartphones heavily have less capacity for sustained focus. The muscle atrophies. You start needing stimulation to concentrate on anything at all. The research on this is concerning.

You also lose something harder to measure: the experience of deep engagement. The feeling of being fully absorbed in something, whether it's a book, a conversation, or a walk in the woods. That kind of attention is fragile. It requires protection from interruption. And our devices are interruption machines.

The Bargain You Didn't Make

Here's what's strange. We didn't agree to this.

When you sign up for a social media platform, you click through terms of service that nobody reads. You grant access to your data, your contacts, your location. But you don't explicitly consent to having your attention harvested for profit. That's just how it works. You accept it because you want to use the app, and using the app means being the product.

We wouldn't accept this in other contexts. Imagine if every time you walked through a shopping mall, invisible workers were following you, recording where you looked, how long you paused, what caught your eye, and then selling that information to the stores. You'd find that invasive. You'd demand compensation. But online, we've normalized it.

The normalization is the achievement. We've been trained to accept attention extraction as the natural order of the internet. Free services in exchange for attention that gets sold. It feels like a fair trade until you think about what you're actually giving up.

The Depletion Effect

Attention is depletable. You don't have infinite focus. Every decision you make, every notification you process, every piece of content you evaluate consumes some of your daily cognitive budget. This is well documented in psychology.

When apps compete for your attention all day, they're depleting a resource you need for everything else: your work, your relationships, your creative projects, your self-reflection. The attention you give to scrolling is attention you can't give to anything else.

This is the real cost. Not just the time spent on the phone, which you can measure. But the cognitive capacity that gets drained by constant small interruptions, which you can't measure but can feel. The fog. The difficulty concentrating. The sense that your mind is always partially elsewhere.

Reclaiming the Resource

I don't have a simple solution. "Delete your apps" is advice that works for some people in some situations but isn't realistic for most of us. The digital world is where much of modern life happens. Withdrawing isn't an option.

What I do think helps is awareness. Knowing that the extraction is happening. Noticing when your attention is being captured by design. The notification that makes you check your phone. The autoplay that keeps you watching. The feed that keeps you scrolling. These aren't neutral experiences. They're engineered harvests.

Some practical things: turning off notifications for apps that don't need them. Using tools that limit your time on certain platforms. Scheduling times when you're unreachable. Protecting blocks of time for deep work. These are small measures against a massive industry, but they're something.

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Your attention is being strip-mined. Extracted, processed, sold. The wealth it generates flows to platform shareholders, not to you. And the environmental damage, the cognitive depletion, the fragmented focus, the inability to sustain engagement, that stays with you.

I can't tell you to stop using the internet. I'm writing this on a computer, and you're reading it on a device. We're both part of this system. But I can suggest that you think of your attention the way you'd think of any valuable resource. Protect it. Be intentional about where it goes. Notice when it's being taken without your consent.

The attention economy treats your consciousness as a commodity. You're allowed to disagree.