The Tragedy of the Attention Economy

March 2026

Why is everyone looking at their phones all the time?

Because it's extremely profitable.

Not for the vast majority of people glued to their phones, of course. It's profitable for the companies that show people advertisements on their phones. It's also profitable for the whole ecosystem around that advertising pipeline.

The fact that so many people are spending obscene amounts of time on their phones every day is not the explicit goal of the vast majority of operators in this space, whether individual founders or corporates answerable to their shareholders. It is a side-effect of their collective actions.

So what drives those actions? Well it's pretty simple: they want to make as much money as possible. If we talk about platforms specifically, they do this by maximising advertising revenue. Where does that revenue come from? From businesses who want you to buy their products and services. Those businesses pay digital platforms to display ads for their products and services.

So how can platforms maximise revenue? They have two dials they can turn: price of ads, and volume of ads sold.

Ad Pricing

This is somewhat of a detour from the concept of screen addiction, but it's part of the economics which drive it and so is worth understanding.

A naïve assumption is that the more effective an ad is, the higher the price that can be charged for it. The reality is that the higher the perceived effectiveness of an ad in the eyes of a seller, the higher the price.

Platforms maximise this perceived effectiveness by collecting as much information about you as possible, and then using that information to convince sellers that they have shown the right people the right ads and therefore that the ads are worth paying top dollar for.

Not only are you being manipulated into staring at your screen all day, you're also being spied on to justify the prices charged for all those ads.

Ad Volume

This is the second lever platforms can pull to increase advertising revenue. The volume of ads a user can be shown is a function of the rate of ads they'll tolerate while on a platform, and the total time spent on that platform.

How can you get someone to spend more time on your platform? Well, you employ a bunch of psychologists and researchers and UI design experts to hyper optimise every element of your UI to grab attention. Or you can copy patterns from other platforms who already invested in figuring all that out.

Tragedy of the Commons

The concept of the tragedy of the commons was popularised by Garrett Hardin in an article published in the Journal of Science in 1968. In it he describes a common pasture used by farmers to graze their cattle. The assumption is that individuals acting in self interest will maximise the number of cattle they graze until the pasture's carrying capacity is exceeded and it is ruined for all.

The article uses the concept in the context of overpopulation, which is not particularly relevant to screen time addiction, and I don't agree with Hardin's conclusions, but the concept is nevertheless useful and has been discussed at length in the years since.

What relevance does it have to screen addiction?

Human attention is a finite and precious resource. Perhaps the most valuable thing we have.

It is human attention that we convert into pretty much everything else. Work, research, art, love. Without attention we have nothing. I would not venture to suggest exactly what people should do with that attention. That is not a particularly new topic... What I would suggest though, is that scrolling through reels is not a good use of anyone's time, and that we are all poorer for it when any one of us is spending any time doing it.

Our collective attention is the commons, and it is being wasted by entities acting in self interest.

What can we do about it?

Well at an individual level, you can start by using your phone less.

Collectively? Adam Smith's invisible hand probably isn't going to sort this out.