Our attention is finite, yet we spend it everywhere but where it matters. This is not a moral failure. It is a structural one. Attention economics is the idea that in a world overflowing with information, human attention becomes the scarce resource. Whoever captures it, holds power. Over time, this has reshaped not just markets, but inner lives. What we notice. What we ignore. What we can tolerate. What we can no longer sit with. For a long time, people warned that television would rot our brains. In hindsight, television looks almost generous. A show required you to stay for forty minutes. A film asked for two hours. A detective story invited you to notice details, to remember names, to hold multiple threads in your mind at once. You watched. You followed. You waited. Listening to music meant staying long enough to learn lyrics. Reading meant sitting with confusion until meaning arrived. Writing a poem meant wrestling with language, not skimming it. Even boredom had a purpose—it ...
In 1974, Marina Abramović performed Rhythm 0 — a haunting six-hour piece that would later be remembered as one of the most disturbing social experiments in the history of performance art. She placed herself in a gallery in Naples, Italy, standing still next to a table with 72 objects. Some were harmless (a rose, a feather, bread); others were violent (a whip, a knife, a loaded gun). She allowed the audience to use any object on her however they wished. She took full responsibility for whatever would happen. She would not resist. At first, the crowd was gentle. They posed her. Kissed her. Gave her flowers. But as time passed, they became bolder. They cut her clothes. Pricked her skin. Marked her with a knife. Someone loaded the gun and placed it in her hand, pointing it at her neck. The crowd, once made up of ordinary people, had slowly turned into something else. When the six hours ended, Marina began to walk toward the audience — no longer a passive object, but a human again. People ...