Today’s most valuable commodity isn’t material—it’s the attention that fuels industries and shifts societies. Unsplash+
What is the most valuable commodity in the world today? It’s not oil, computing power for A.I. or Bitcoin. These are inert objects, meaningless without human attention to give them value. Attention, the most potent and sought-after resource, drives everything from demand for rare minerals to international trade policies. When you capture attention with something as simple as a well-placed iPhone ad, you convert a few flipped bits in a database into a cascade of physical labor, resource extraction and influence on geopolitical affairs. Mastery of the physical world is trivial once you can harness attention at scale.
The boundary between our minds and the attention economy is vanishing
Corporations, billionaires and (soon) artificial agents are…
