Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising and the Time Bomb at the Heart of the Internet (FSG Originals x Logic)

. Years ago, the idea that online life would be dominantly funded by advertising coalesced into conventional wisdom, and we’ve been living with the consequences ever since. The utopian assumption that views and clicks would accrue to the highest-quality content failed to understand a basic lurking reality - that the monetization of attention leads

As a result, the news and information ecosystem that is so important to a functioning democracy and civil society has suffered a double whammy. First, as we have seen, the social media platforms’ recommendation engines have promoted misinformation and disinformation. Second, we have now seen how programmatic advertising has provided financial suppo

Economist Herbert Simon, whose 1971 essay on the attention economy is one of the single most insightful meditations on attention ever published, observed long before the age of constant smartphone push notifications that a “wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes.

Unfortunately, advertising has been ingrained into the internet as the basic model for so long and to such an extent that it’s hard to envision online life without the systematic manipulation of attention and all its evils. So we’re bound to wind up here, at the bitter end of “content.” Which is a good excuse to withdraw deeper into books, movies,