Our average attention span decreased from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8 seconds today. That’s less than a goldfish's 9-second attention span and presents a true economic crisis.

Economists estimate information overload costs the global economy approximately $1 trillion annually. On top of that, new businesses are being built to capture and monetize the attention we have left.

If 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are produced every day and Americans use 2.7 million gigabytes of internet data every minute, it would take an average user 200,000 years to read all information produced online daily.

What that means is that we've created an attention recession: too much information competing for too little human capacity to process it.

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Will’s Picks

A few things I’ve loved reading this week—

• 80% of Global Workers Experience Information Overload

• Attention Scarcity Drives $1 Trillion Global Cost

• How Social Media Fatigue Impacts Decision-Making

• Cognitive Lock-ins Reshape Business Models

The Attention Economy's Second Wave

The first wave of the attention economy focused on capturing eyeballs. Social media platforms optimized for time spent, clicks generated, content consumed. This created the foundation for today's $270 billion social media advertising market.

The second wave recognizes that capturing attention isn't enough—you need to capture the right kind of attention at the right cognitive moments.

Research shows 80% of global workers experience information overload, leading to poor decision-making, decreased productivity, and cognitive pressures. Companies building solutions for this problem are seeing explosive growth.

Information Pollution as Business Opportunity

Scientists are now advocating for the recognition of "information pollution" or "data smog" as environmental hazards equivalent to air and water pollution. This creates entirely new market categories:

Attention Brokers: Companies that filter and prioritize information flows for executives and teams.

Cognitive Load Balancers: Tools that manage when and how information reaches decision-makers.

Decision Support Systems: AI that doesn't generate more content but helps process existing information more efficiently.

Focus Enablement: Platforms that create distraction-free environments for deep work.

The filtering industry is exploding because we're drowning in information yet starving for insight.

The Cognitive Lock-In Economy

New research identifies "cognitive lock-ins"—arrangements that reconfigure cognition across users and technology in ways that make replication contingent on specific technology.

This goes beyond attention capture to actual thought process modification.

Three practices enable cognitive lock-ins:

Black-boxing conceals how systems make decisions, creating dependency on algorithmic judgment.

Distanced-probabilistic computation makes users rely on AI for analysis rather than developing internal capabilities.

And access-based consumption is a process of essentially renting cognitive capabilities rather than building them internally.

Economic Behaviors in the Attention Recession

The attention scarcity is creating predictable economic patterns:

Premium for Curation: People pay more for filtered, prioritized information rather than raw data access.

Cognitive Outsourcing: Companies increasingly rely on external systems for functions they previously handled internally.

Attention Arbitrage: Businesses that can operate effectively in high-noise environments gain competitive advantages over those that can't.

Focus as Service: New business models emerge around providing distraction-free environments and tools.

Micro-Decisions: Simple choices become valuable when cognitive load is high.

The companies capturing value are the ones that are reducing information complexity like executive briefing services, investment research platforms, compliance automation which helps remove regulatory complexity from decision-makers' workflows, and customer support AI to handle routine queries so humans focus on complex problems.

The winners understand that in an information-rich world, clarity is the ultimate differentiator.

Measuring the Recession

Key indicators show the attention recession's economic impact:

• 95% of higher education institutions list digital transformation as high priority due to information management challenges

• 76% of college leaders report students are overwhelmed by digital information

• Social media overload leads to 73% instructor retention rates in online education

• Information pollution drives reduced attention spans, affecting learning and decision-making

Strategic Implications

TLDR takeaways—

Subtract Before You Add: Remove complexity before introducing new features or information.

Context Over Volume: Provide relevant information at the right time rather than comprehensive data dumps.

Cognitive Efficiency: Design experiences that reduce mental load rather than maximize engagement time.

The attention recession isn't going anywhere and it’s only going to get worse. Use this opportunity to help build cognitive infrastructure for the knowledge economy.