Attention Tax

June 2026 ยท 4 minute read

While I was gathering attention to finish this article, an article by Kathleen DeLaney Thomas came out arguing for the same idea in much more detail, the link is in the References section.

I don’t need the feed

I was filling yet another buggy and slow hotel check-in form and then it hit me: why am I spending my time fighting the site, when it’s objectively faster to hand the passport to a receptionist and listen about amenities in the meantime? It makes no sense for me to fill this form. Then I started asking this question more and more:

I started asking this question more & more often and then deleted instagram & youtube from my phone as the worst offenders. Those are great pieces of technology and I love seeing my friends post pics from across the world, but I can not tolerate constant barrage of ads and influencers (which are disguised ads). I would happily pay for Instagram without algorithmic feed, reels and suggested tab, but they don’t sell that, instead we gamble…

Gambling with Time

In “Do Android Dream of Electric sheep?” there was a magical phone which could make you feel any shade of emotion you could and could not think of, you just had to enter the right “phone number”. 322 gives you this, 222 gives you that, sounds totally unrealistic it’s transfering not colors, not scents, but pure emotions. And I would argue we already have this technology.

You enter a favorite social media and there it is, at the tip of the finger everything you might ever want: from cute kittens to AI generated stock market predictions delivered to you 24/7, but there is a catch. You don’t get a phone book to dial an emotion, you get a one-armed bandit who takes 15 seconds of your time and in return once every 100 posts you hit a jackpot which you send to a friend. Great right?

I don’t know, some countries think that it’s not a great deal or at least for children, hence they ban phones in schools and/or impose age-based bans for social media use. I don’t think age-based solutions are good enough, because

and in the next section I would like to introduce an alternative approach which I call ATTENTION TAX.

Attention Tax

To put it simply attention economy works by serving you ads, the best way to increase revenue is by showing you more ads, the easiest way to do that is to increase time spent in the app. Every company with 100k+ monthly users has a very good idea of how much time people spend in the app, because that is very important to grow revenue. So, let’s introduce a tax based on the time spent in the application, for example,

The first hour on the plarform is free, for each next 15m interval company owes X$ to the government.

This way people could still use the social media and get their news / talk to the friend, but companies would be decentivized to increase time spent to infinity, because it would not make money. It has a chance to reduce negative effects of the social media, while preserving all things that made it great.

To enforce the tax companies would have to provide an anonymised report to the government with the stats on how much time people have spent on their platforms in any given month.

Counter arguments

Market should decide

Market does not decide if people under a certain age are allowed to drink or drive, or in recent cases have social media accounts. This tax is an attempt to fix social media with economic policies, which might be more fair to young people.

Forcing every company to report more data would create unnecessary bureaucratic burden

Yes, it would require writing a couple of scripts and integrating with government API, that’s not hard either. Yes, in some cases data would be noisy, but that’s not hard to fix.

Instead of focusing on supply, regulation should focus on demand

Yes, I don’t even have counter arguments to that, the only way to really bring the attention back is to change the vibe, so that “scrolling” would become un-cool same way smoking fell out of fashion.

References