A tax on harvested attention

Alaska's halibut season shrank from 122 days in 1979 to two or three days by 1991. Any fish one boat left, another would catch, so every boat raced. They called it the derby: crews fished in gales, and maydays swamped the Coast Guard.

Apps race for your attention the same way: any hour one app leaves, another takes. Netflix's CEO once said they were competing with sleep. Meta makes about a dollar per hour of American attention, and pays nothing for the catch. American teens give social media 4.8 hours a day. In 2012, 27% of 13-year-olds read for fun almost daily; by 2023, 14% did.

Students in one study wanted $55 to quit TikTok for a month on their own. If their whole campus quit too, they'd pay $24 to make it happen. It's a derby: nobody can slow down alone. Alaska ended its derby in 1995 by giving boat owners shares of a capped catch. With nothing left to race for, the season stretched to eight months.

I'd end the attention derby with a tax on every hour a platform catches. The economists behind that TikTok study say their results could justify a sizable one. The rate would climb with each hour of your day, faster for kids. Once your fifth hour costs more in tax than it earns in ads, apps stop racing for it. And the money would go to schools, to restock the readers the race fished out.