Somewhere in the past fifteen years, without a vote or a debate, we agreed to a remarkable arrangement: that the interior of the human mind would be treated as an unregulated market, open to any bidder with a notification to sell.
The results are in, and they are not subtle. The average person now checks a phone more than a hundred times a day. Attention spans, measured in the lab, have narrowed. And an entire industry has grown wealthy precisely in proportion to its ability to interrupt you.
We regulate other intrusions into shared life. You may not blare a speaker on a quiet street at 3 a.m.; you may not plaster a billboard across a protected view. We have decided, as a civilization, that some commons — silence, darkness, landscape — are worth defending. Attention is the commons of the inner life, and we have left it undefended.
So here is my modest proposal: an attention right. Not a ban, not a speech code — a simple, enforceable principle that the default settings of any product used by a hundred million people must be the settings that serve the user, not the settings that serve the seller. Alerts off, not on. Infinite scroll off, not on. The burden of interruption placed on the interrupter.
The technology industry will object that users can already change these settings themselves. They can. They don't — and the industry has spent billions of dollars ensuring they don't, because the defaults are the business model. That is not a market. It is an ambush.
Every generation draws a line around some part of life and declares it not for sale. We drew it around childhood, around the ballot, around the weekend. It is time to draw a new one, around the last scarce resource we all still hold in common: the quiet, unmonetized space between one thought and the next.
