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To achieve clarity about what it means to be human in this specific era, it's necessary at each moment to ask what's new and what's not, what's being driven by some novel technology or innovation and what's inherent in human society itself. For example, it's not a new phenomenon for masses of people to believe things that aren't true. People didn't need Facebook "disinformation" for witch trials and pogroms, but there's also no question that frictionless, instant global communication acts as an accelerant. Also not new: our desires to occupy our minds when idle. Look at pictures of streetcar commuters of the early twentieth century and you'll see cars packed with men in suits and hats, every last one reading the newspaper, their noses buried in them as surely as modern commuters are buried in their phones. But there's also no question that the relationship we have to our phones is fundamentally different in kind than the relationship those streetcar commuters had to their newspapers.

 

In his book on the attention economy, Stolen Focus, writer Johann Hari gets into a bit of this debate with Nir Eyal (author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products). Eyal makes the case that the freak-outs about social media are today's version of the mid-twentieth-century moral panic over comic books, which got so heated there were a series of high-profile Senate hearings into what comic books were doing to America's youth. All the grave warnings about phones and social media are, he contends, "literally verbatim, from the 1950s about the comic-book debate," when people "went to the Senate and told the senators that comic books are turning children into addicted, hijacked [zombies]—literally, it's the same stuff.... Today, we think of comic books as so innocuous."

In the end it turned out comic books weren't worth the worry, which is why the panic looks silly in retrospect. But that's another key question, isn't it? Along with the question of what is and is not new, there's also the deeper question of what is and is not harmful. It is easy to conflate the two. When tobacco use first exploded in Europe there were those who rang the alarm bells. As early as 1604, England's King James decried the new habit as "lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose, harmefull to the braine, daungerous to the Lungs, and in the blacke stinking fume thereof, neerest resembling the horrible Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomelesse." As hysterical and prudish as that must have sounded at that time, it was 100 percent correct. When I recently watched the incredible Peter Jackson documentary about the Beatles' Let It Be sessions, the sheer number of cigarettes being inhaled in every recording session was both distracting and unsettling. In 1969, when the Beatles were recording what would become their final released album, there was already substantial research demonstrating that cigarettes were dangerous. It would be another thirty years until culture and law and regulation turned decisively against smoking and the practice started to decline and disappear from most public spaces.

One wonders sometimes if fifty years from now, people will look at footage from our age, with everyone constantly thumbing through our phones, the way I look at Ringo Starr chain-smoking. Stop doing that! It's gonna kill you! In fact, the surgeon general of the United States has called for social media to come with a mandatory mental health warning label like the ones on cigarette packs. In response, researchers who study teen mental health have pushed back, saying the research just doesn't justify such a drastic step. The debate over our digital lives, at least as it's been reflected in the discourse, basically comes down to this: Is the development of a global, ubiquitous, chronically connected social media world more like comic books or cigarettes?

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What I want to argue here is that the scale of transformation we're experiencing is far more vast and more intimate than even the most panicked critics have understood. In other words: the problem with the main thrust of the current critiques of the attention economy and the scourge of social media is that (with some notable exceptions) they don't actually go far enough. The rhetoric of moral condemnation undersells the level of transformation we're experiencing. As tempting as it is to say the problem is the phones, they are as much symptom as cause, the natural conclusion of a set of forces transforming the texture of our lives. The attention economy isn't like a bad new drug being pushed onto the populace, an addictive intoxicant with massive negative effects, or even a disruptive new form of media with broad social implications. It's something more profound and different altogether. My contention is that the defining feature of this age is that the most important resource—our attention—is also the very thing that makes us human. Unlike land, coal, or capital, which exist outside of us, the chief resource of this age is embedded in our psyches. Extracting it requires cracking into our minds.

We all intuitively grasp the value of attention, as least internally, because what we pay attention to constitutes our inner lives. When it is taken from us, we feel the loss. But attention is also supremely valuable externally, out in the world. It is the foundation for nearly all we do, from the relationships we build to the way we act as workers, consumers, and citizens.