The Attention Harvest

On the extraction economy of the mind, and the soil that may not grow back

I grew up on stories of the Dust Bowl—the ecological catastrophe that struck the American Great Plains in the 1930s. Farmers had broken the native prairie, planted wheat in soil that had never been cultivated, and harvested aggressively for years. When the drought came, there was nothing left to hold the earth together. The topsoil—built over millennia by the slow work of grasses and microbes—simply blew away. Millions of acres became desert. Families fled. A civilization that had seemed permanent was revealed to have been mining its own foundation.

I have come to believe we are living through a Dust Bowl of the mind.

The attention economy—that phrase we use so casually—is not a metaphor. It is a description of an extractive industry, one that harvests a resource produced by human consciousness the way industrial agriculture harvests resources produced by soil. And like industrial agriculture, it is degrading the capacity of the system to regenerate what is being taken.