The Long Way Back to Ourselves

8.7

The Attention Economy: How Predictability Became a Commodity

This episode starts from Herbert Simon's 1971 sentence that a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and shows that what a real-time ad auction sells is a probability statement about a particular person. Internal studies made public in 2021 by Frances Haugen found that a photo service worsened body image among some teenage girls, yet the design did not fundamentally change. Optimizing for time spent favors outrage and follows the reward schedule B. F. Skinner demonstrated with pigeons in the 1940s. Whether this drives adolescents' psychological problems stays open: Jonathan Haidt's thesis meets Amy Orben and Andrew Przybylski's finding of an effect comparable to that of eating potatoes.