// The Intention Economy
We didn’t lose our attention. We lost the moment where we decided what to pay attention to.
First of five. This started as one post that tried to do too much. This one’s about ADHD, the attention economy, and the intention economy Doc Searls imagined in 2006, then what happened when the people running the attention economy noticed it.
Also: a misdiagnosed disorder, a search engine that built the answer then buried it, and researchers arguing over who gets to use a word.
Attention
Attention Deficit Disorder describes a person’s struggle to sustain focus. I have it. Executive dysfunction, one of the key symptoms, often gets mistaken for laziness. It’s not a lack of intent. Clinical psychologist Russell Barkley has been arguing ADHD was misnamed from the start. Not attention. The gap between knowing what you want to do and actually doing it. He recently called it Intention Deficit Disorder.
The Attention Economy describes an entire system built to capture our focus.
I’ve been thinking about what comes after.
Hyper Reality by Keiichi Matsuda 2016
The obvious story is attention capture. You know it. Your phone is designed to make it hard to stop looking at your phone. Notifications, infinite scroll, autoplay. These aren’t side effects. They’re the product.
But attention capture is the easy story. What comes after is the interesting bit.
The gap
There used to be a moment between wanting something and having it. Long enough to ask a question. Do I actually want this? Is this the right time? Why am I doing this?
That moment is friction. And we spent fifteen years engineering it out of everything.
One-click purchase. Swipe to match. Autoplay. Data-driven recommendations instead of searches you had to type. Every one of these decisions was made in the name of convenience. It’s been great for business of course (and my career) but what we removed, quietly and completely, was the point in the process where you had to know what you wanted.
Frictionless systems get compliance. Not choice.
I wrote about this in the post-optimal piece. The friction we’ve been buffing out was often load-bearing. Remove it and the whole thing gets lighter in the wrong way.
The short-term cost is fragmented attention. Everyone’s talking about that. The longer-term cost is something quieter.
Intent atrophy
If you outsource enough decisions, the muscle that makes decisions atrophies. I don’t have a study for that. I have my own evenings: the show that autoplayed into the next show, the restaurant an app picked for me, months of choices I never noticed I’d stopped making.
Part of why this crept up on us: forming intent is effortless. Marvin Minsky wrote that we’re least aware of what our minds do best. We’ve been inferring goals and setting intentions for millions of years. It barely feels like anything. Which is exactly why we didn’t notice when we started outsourcing it.
The system has been supplying purposes for so long. Here’s what to watch next. Here’s a template. Here’s a prompt. Here’s what people like you tend to want. Coming up with your own purpose starts to feel like unnecessary effort. You start mistaking what people want you to want for what you actually want.
That’s the second-order condition. I’m half-jokingly calling it Intention Deficit Homogenisation Disorder. Half-jokingly, because the parallel cuts the other way. ADHD is knowing what you want and failing to act on it. This is acting, fluently and fast, without ever forming the want. The problem isn’t focus. It’s having nothing in particular to focus on.
The intention economy
There’s a version of this that works differently. The intention economy. Doc Searls got there first, in 2006.
In the attention economy, everyone is shouting. Every market trader on the street trying to be louder than the last, finding new ways to get in front of you before you’ve decided what you’re looking for. The escalation is baked in. Everyone has to shout louder because everyone else is shouting louder.
The marketing term is eyeballs. Put something in enough people’s eyeballs and some of them are sure to comply.
In an intention economy, you’d state what you were looking for first. Only the traders who could actually help you would compete for your attention. The rest could direct their energy where it was more relevant. Less noise. More signal. Better for everyone, except possibly the people making money from the noise.
Google built this, more or less. Search ads only appear when you’ve already said what you want. The intent is there before the ad. It’s why they convert better than almost anything else in advertising. Then Google bolted an entire attention economy on top of it anyway. Display ads. Remarketing. The trainers that follow you around the internet for weeks. The LED TVs even though you just bought an LED TV. The intention economy works better for users. The attention economy works better for quarterly targets.
The inversion
Searls wrote that piece in 2006. He was right about the idea. He was optimistic about who’d run with it.
The same people making money from the noise noticed something. The most valuable data is stitched together from many sources. Your plans, your searches, your browsing history, your actions, your hesitations, your location, your previous locations. Your chat history or the casual message you sent a chatbot about changing jobs, or moving house, or what to make for dinner.
Every time you state a goal to a language model, you’re handing over signal about your intentions. Researchers are already warning about what this means for consumer behaviour and for democracy.
Searls imagined buyers declaring intent to the market. What’s emerging instead is the market extracting intent from you, via surveillance, before you’ve decided to act on it.
By December 2024, Cambridge researchers were using the same phrase as Searls for the opposite thing. He asked them to find a different name:
Our intention economy is an optimistic and potentially world-changing aspiration while theirs is a pessimistic world-worsening possibility.
Our intention economy has eighteen years of work behind it while theirs has this single study.
The attention economy wanted your eyes. This wants to know every detail about you so it can predict your intent.
Next: My Reconditioned iPod.
I'd love to tell you more.
// Rhythm Generator
I wanted a quick way to sketch percussion patterns without hand-programming every ghost note in Bitwig. Now covers Latin, Arabic, African and Indian traditions, with a polymetric mode where instruments drift in and out of phase with each other. Generate variations, tweak them by hand, export straight to MIDI.