I began recording people with wearable cameras for my research about a decade ago. One of my first participants spent an hour cooking dinner, plated it, sat down and reached for her phone. Fifteen minutes later she was still scrolling, and the food was cold. She hadn’t touched it. When we watched the footage back together, she said even though she was hungry, she still reached for her phone first. Later on, she said she had completely forgotten this episode. I ended up collecting over 200 hours of video, and they revealed something I hadn’t anticipated: 89 percent of smartphone interactions were started by the users themselves rather than by the ping of a notification. On average, these people reached for their phones once every five minutes. Almost everyone was surprised to learn how frequently they picked up their devices — and how often they did so without being fully aware of it. If smartphone use is driven by unconscious habits instead of notifications, telling people to try harder to stay off their devices using tactics like apps that suppress phone disruption makes very little sense. These habits are what moved my work toward the economics of attention. I also wanted to investigate how attention is becoming an increasingly important currency for economic exchange, one that social media platforms treat as a commodity. My Times Opinion essay on the phenomenon of “brain rot” picks up from here. The panic over brain rot assumes young people either don’t see what is happening to them or blame themselves for it without seeing a way out. One participant offered a different perspective: It’s “not our fault but top-down from Zuck and Elon, the ones that want you in it,” a sober take on who benefits from the arrangement. My colleague and I went into these interviews expecting teenagers who did not understand what was happening to them, but they understood it better than most adults I know. The real problem? They cannot seem to get out of this on their own.
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