Forget oil or data. Could attention actually be the most valuable commodity in modern life?

That question underlies MSNBC host Chris Hayes’ new book The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource. And it’s one you ought to remember the next time you feel your phone buzz in your pocket.

“Attention is the stuff of consciousness itself, where we choose to place our mind’s focus at any given moment,” Hayes writes. “And yet it can always be wrenched from us seemingly against our will by the wail of the siren, the bark of a dog, or the flash of a prurient image on our phone.”

He is among a rising number of observers who have become alarmed by the addictive “attention-fracking” tactics that social-media companies use to keep us glued to our phones—particularly how we seem to pick them up every minute because we’re hooked on the slow drip of every Instagram like, email, and text message. The companies have grown rich by surveilling the massive amounts of behavioral data to be mined in our every digital footstep.

Two Nobel Prize-winning economists recently presented a proposal that directly confronts the growing issue of fractured public attention, suggesting a potentially transformative solution.

Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, longtime collaborators at MIT, floated their idea in a 2024 article in Network Law Review, arguing for a 50% tax on digital advertising revenues for companies generating $500 million or more annually. The concept is modeled on highly successful taxes on cigarettes, introduced in the mid-20th century, which were one of a number of factors that led to curbing US smoking.

They argue that breaking up Big Tech, while a popular applause line for politicians, would do nothing to remove the underlying economic and psychological tactics companies use to hook users. But a well-designed tax might prevent companies from profiting from incendiary speech and algorithmic echo chambers.

Taxing advertising revenues in this way would remove the built-in incentive to keep us scrolling: The more time we spend addicted to cheap dopamine hits through an app, the more money the company makes from the ads we see. If that model became less profitable, it would motivate Meta (the parent company for Facebook and Instagram) or Alphabet (which has Google and YouTube in its portfolio) to move toward subscription business models.

If consumers paid for a subscription forsuch a service, there would be a greater likelihood that the overall social network’s algorithm would reward paying users by serving up more more thoughtful or meaningful posts. At the same time, the economic incentives would reward innovation and make it more possible for other newer or smaller companies to compete.

“We urgently need more pro-human AI ideas and products to come to market,” Acemoglu and Johnson wrote. “A major step in the right direction would involve imposing a high tax on digital ad revenues, with the explicit and transparent goal of strongly discouraging the current, massively damaging business model of ‘attention above all’ and ‘boundless data collection.’”

Cracking down on Big Tech has significant bipartisan support. When it comes to protecting children online, Congress has demonstrated willingness to act. In some cases, tech companies themselves have requested regulation. As support grew for the 2024 Kids Online Safety Act, Meta funded billboards at Washington, DC bus stops welcoming regulation of Instagram.

The data was clearly there. Mental health issues among teens have surged over the past decade, correlated with the now-ubiquitous presence of phones in their lives. Teens are spending up to 5 hours every day on social media, according to the American Psychological Association. That vast majority of that time is focused on three platforms: YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram.

There might be political capital for more action. On the right, Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) has pursued tech monopolies since the day he was elected. He’s called for banning addictive features like infinite scroll and autoplay, creating a minimum age to be allowed on social media, and allowing parents to sue social-media companies for compensation for harm and abuse their children experience online.

On the left, Rep. Jake Auchincloss (D-MA), a millennial graduate of Harvard and MIT, brings the tech cred that’s lacking in so many septuagenarian politicians. When he isn’t wrangling votes, the 37-year-old father of three is chasing after his own kids and plotting how to carve out family time from screen time.

Auchincloss proposes a value-added tax, or VAT, that would be levied on social-media companies, based on the amount of time a user spends scrolling. In essence, if we are “paying” attention, then the companies are taxed for “buying” it. Revenues from the proposed tax could then be stored separately from the government’s general fund. The revenues could be channeled to revitalize local journalism outlets.

Redirecting those funds toward journalism would shore up a sector that is vital to democratic societies, but whose business model has been superseded by technology. It would help underwrite overwhelmed fact-checking operations that Meta stopped funding in January. And it would go a long way toward reinvigorating our shared information space that has been fragmented into a million pieces.

It would empower social-media companies to live up to the idealistic promises they made back when Mark Zuckerberg was still living in a dorm at Harvard.

Ultimately, a tax on social-media companies gets to the heart of what makes a nation prosperous or a failed state, as explored by the same MIT economists who proposed the social media attention tax. In their book, Why Nations Fail, Acemoglu and Johnson argue that nations with extractive institutions can succeed in the short term. But in the long run, they’re stymied.

If we can begin to see our own attention as a resource like oil or minerals, that could open up an era of liberation.