Attention Economy

Lyrics

Before the coin, before the debt was written in clay...
There was a quieter transaction.
A more intimate ledger.
The first and final currency.

Your mother said it at the kitchen table.
Your teacher said it in the chalk-dusted room.
Pay. Attention.
Did you ever wonder at the verb?
Not 'give,' not 'lend,' but 'pay.'
As if you spent something irreplaceable.
As if each focused second was a piece of silver
flickering from your purse into the air.
A wage paid to the world for the privilege of seeing it.

They call it the new economy.
A clever name for the oldest theft in human history.
They are harvesting your gaze.
Mining the flicker of your eyes across the glass.
Every pause, every scroll, every half-formed thought
Is weighed and sold in humming warehouses you will never see.
This is the attention economy.
And you are the only one paying.

A man named Simon saw it coming.
Nineteen seventy-one.
He smelled the ink on the page and wrote the prophecy.
A wealth of information, he said,
creates a poverty of attention.
He could not have imagined this glowing rectangle.
This river of light that asks for everything
and offers only the next distraction.
The next bright, empty thing.

They call it the new economy.
A clever name for the oldest theft in human history.
They are harvesting your gaze.
Mining the flicker of your eyes across the glass.
Every pause, every scroll, every half-formed thought
Is weighed and sold in humming warehouses you will never see.
This is the attention economy.
And you are the only one paying.

Marx spoke of congealed labor in the factory's heat.
This is congealed thought.
Your daydreams, your worries, your quietest moments,
spun into code, into capital.
The engineers who built the trap remain nameless.
The cost of what you've lost is never counted.
The deep conversation abandoned for a notification.
The book left unread. The silence... never found.

It is nine o'clock. January fifteenth.
Your thumb is tired but it moves again.
Down. And down again.
You are paying.
With the only life you have.
Second by second.