Data was once described as the new oil by British mathematician Clive Humby – with Humby drawing parallels to argue that data was powering a new industrial revolution. While the supply of oil is finite and scarce, however, there has never been more data – and the volume of the information is surging year over year.
“In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”
Hard to focus
More than 50 years ago, the American economist Herbert A. Simon described his projection for the future of information circulation in a famous essay.
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Simon argued that data and information is a resource that’s consumed by the finite and limited attention of people, and that the more information is in circulation, the more strain that would place on people’s focus and approach to absorbing the information out there.
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These ideas laid the foundation for what has become the attention economy – a system in which human attention is traded as a valuable commodity that advertisers, platforms and websites compete to seize. Attention, in this way, can be seen as profitable, with the information being a lure to capture this.
Post-big data
The attention economy in 2026 and beyond is a far more mature space than in the early days of big data, where we reached an inflection point when organisations and people began creating data on an exponential scale over time.
For enterprises, this meant having more information from which to derive valuable and actionable insights – but this also demanded the technologies and expertise to rifle through plenty of garbage data to extract the highest-quality information.
LLMs add a new dimension to this dynamic. AI has accelerated the attention economy by lowering the barrier to content generation, which floods the internet with synthetic data, while also becoming a new gatekeeper to the way that people interact with the information that’s already out there.
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