No Such Thing as Free Brain Time: For a Pigouvian Tax on Attention Capture

TL;DR

The paper reframes digital attention as a scarce, tradable resource and advocates treating attention as a commons to combat over-exploitation by platforms. It analyzes negative externalities from screen time across individual autonomy, health, and societal harms, and proposes a policy toolkit (Inform, Restrict, Guide) with a central proposition: a Pigouvian tax on attention capture. The authors develop a theoretical tax design using a supply-demand framework and discuss calibration, scope, and measurement challenges, including an Attention Harvesting Scale and proxy-based harm metrics. They argue this tax would internalize social costs, shift platform incentives toward healthier designs, and generate revenue for mitigation and public awareness, while highlighting regulatory caveats and the need for multidisciplinary research. The work contributes a novel economic lens on digital regulation, bridging philosophy, law, and economics, and aims to safeguard attention as a crucial resource for autonomy, health, and democracy.

Abstract

In our age of digital platforms, human attention has become a scarce and highly valuable resource, rivalrous, tradable, and increasingly subject to market dynamics. This article explores the commodification of attention within the framework of the attention economy, arguing that attention should be understood as a common good threatened by over-exploitation. Drawing from philosophical, economic, and legal perspectives, we first conceptualize attention not only as an individual cognitive process but as a collective and infrastructural phenomenon susceptible to enclosure by digital intermediaries. We then identify and analyze negative externalities of the attention economy, particularly those stemming from excessive screen time: diminished individual agency, adverse health outcomes, and societal and political harms, including democratic erosion and inequality. These harms are largely unpriced by market actors and constitute a significant market failure. In response, among a spectrum of public policy tools ranging from informational campaigns to outright restrictions, we propose a Pigouvian tax on attention capture as a promising regulatory instrument to internalize the externalities and, in particular, the social cost of compulsive digital engagement. Such a tax would incentivize structural changes in platform design while preserving user autonomy. By reclaiming attention as a shared resource vital to human agency, health, and democracy, this article contributes a novel economic and policy lens to the debate on digital regulation. Ultimately, this article advocates for a paradigm shift: from treating attention as a private, monetizable asset to protecting it as a collective resource vital for humanity.

Figures (2)

• Figure 1: AI-Score: a Nutri-Score-inspired system for assessing AI applications' respectfulness of their users
• Figure 2: Supply and demand diagram of a Pigouvian tax on attention markets. On the supply side, the private marginal cost ($PMC$) is the cost incurred by platforms to harvest one additional unit of attention. On the demand side, the private marginal benefit ($PMB$) is the utility that advertisers obtain from one additional unit of attention. The social marginal cost ($SMC$) is the cost, for society, of harvesting one additional unit of attention, while the social marginal benefit ($SMB$) is the benefit, for society, generated by the consumption of one additional unit of attention. Without regulation, the equilibrium $E$ represents the quantity $Q$ of attention exchanged at price $P$. After introducing the Pigouvian tax $T$, the equilibrium $E^{*}$ is reached with a quantity $Q^{*}$ of attention exchanged at price $P^{*}$. The private marginal cost with the Pigouvian tax imposed on platforms is $PMC + T$.