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:

• is it faster to take a free brochure and find amenities there or to ask gemini?
• is it faster to find the source or to ask ai 3 times to give me the source for the stat?
• is it faster to generate this code or to write by hand?
• is it faster to do wireless CarPlay or just plug in the phone?
• is it faster to connect Sony headphones to a mac or just plug them in?

OR more broadly, is there a tech I could remove from my life to save time / improve quality of life? Yes, there is, social media, I like watching my friends traveling, but I hate content farms or ads and it’s impossible to escape them sadly. I could remove it and go about my day, but is there a way to make broader impact – I think there is, let me introduce to you ATTENTION TAX.

DISCLAIMER: opinion below is mine and does not represent my current or future employers.

Gambling with Time

We have a limited amount of time and some would argue that this is our most important resource.

Gambling is destructive. It’s neither good, nor bad, I guess it’s in the human nature and I would argue that scrolling is gambling with your time:

• sometimes you hit a jackpot (banger tweet);
• casino always wins (Meta is projected to surpass google in adrev);
• it’s literally a one-finger bandit; Most of the countries on earth if not all are trying to protect population from negative effects of gambling, but for some reason negative effects of social media are okay. I don’t believe that shutting everything down is possible or desirable, but I believe that there is value in returning back people’s attention ==find reference on attention decline==.

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: being able to connect to people across the globe and find like-minded people.

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.