Attention in our sense of it was not vital for commerce as it has become. In a manner that still holds for some professions, like medicine, or for small businesses, merchants typically relied on a good reputation or a network of custom to attract business.

In 1835, not long after the launch of The Herald, the Sun ran a headline story, styled as a reprint from an Edinburgh newspaper, of “astronomical discoveries” by the famous scientist Sir John Herschel. Herschel, son of another famous astronomer, had in fact moved to the Cape of Good Hope in 1834 to build a new telescope.

Buffeted by constant intrusions, we sometimes reach the point of feeling we’ve had enough, and that feeling is ultimately one the attention industries cannot ignore. In Paris, the municipal authorities did indeed take aggressive action, restricting the placement of posters, which they came to view as a blight, a weed in need of containment. Those

As adults, we are hardly ever unreachable; seldom away from a screen of some kind; rarely not being solicited or sold to. From this perspective, the school administrators are merely giving students a lesson in reality, exposing them to what is, after all, the norm for adults. But where did the norm come from? And how normal is it?

But there is more to the posters’ allure. Significantly, they catch the viewer on his way somewhere, the “in between” moments of the day that are in the interstices of our more purposeful mental engagements. That is, times when one might be bored, waiting for a streetcar, or simply strolling around, looking for something to catch the eye. The

Before the nineteenth century, human attention was a largely untapped resource in relation to its eventual commercial and political applications.

But our capacity to ignore is limited by another fact: we are always paying attention to something. If we think of attention as a resource, or even a kind of currency, we must allow that it is always, necessarily, being “spent.” There is no saving it for later.

Now, however, most of us carry devices on our bodies that constantly find ways to commercialize the smallest particles of our time and attention. Thus, bit by bit, what was once shocking became normal, until the shape of our lives yielded further and further to the logic of commerce—but gradually enough that we should now find nothing strange about

Attention, after all, is ultimately a zero-sum game. But let us not get too far ahead of the story.