Silicon Valley's Eyeball Problem: A Broken Market for Consumer Attention

Today, there is a digital culture where the incentives are all wrong. It has produced a marketplace for attention that fails to capture the social downsides created by the digital information industry's rapid growth.

In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, we discovered that Wall Street was broken. From the loan agents to the rating agencies to the banks, a short-sighted financial culture pursued short-term profits at the expense of social well-being. As Michael Lewis wrote in his best-seller, The Big Short, “The incentives on Wall Street were all wrong; they’re still all wrong.”

Today, there is a digital culture where the incentives are all wrong. It has produced a marketplace for attention that fails to capture the social downsides created by the digital information industry’s rapid growth.

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