By Back in 1971, long before anyone had a phone in their pocket, the economist Herbert Simon wrote something that now reads like a prophecy. A wealth of information, he said, creates a poverty of attention.
He was talking about offices drowning in memos. He had no idea.
Today attention is the thing everybody is fighting over. Brands, creators, news sites, politicians, the app that wants you to rate it five stars. And there’s a comforting idea in my industry that you can win it the way you’d win anything else. Spend enough, build an audience, and it’s yours. Bank it like a customer list.
You can’t. You rent it. The lease is short, and the landlord raises the rent right after you’ve moved all your stuff in.
Every platform goes through the same cycle. At the start, it’s cheap, sometimes free, because it needs you more than you need it. It wants brands, creators, content, anything that will make people show up. So it’s generous. You post something and people actually see it. The reach feels like a gift.
Then the platform fills up. Everyone arrives. The feed gets crowded, and the algorithm starts deciding who gets seen. The reach you used to get for nothing now comes with a price tag. And the price only goes one way.
Facebook pages are the classic case. In the early 2010s, a lot of brands built huge followings there. Hundreds of thousands of fans, sometimes millions. Then organic reach started to fall, and kept falling, until a normal post reached a small slice of the people who had chosen to follow it. The fix, brands were told, was to pay. To reach the audience they had already built.
The writer Cory Doctorow has a word for this cycle: enshittification. First a platform is good to its users. Then it squeezes its users to be good to its business customers. Then it squeezes the business customers to be good to itself. It’s less polite than what we say in meetings. It’s also more accurate.
The platform was never your audience. It was the road between you and them. And whoever owns the road can charge whatever the traffic will bear.
This isn’t only a brand problem. It’s the musician with a big following on one app. The small restaurant that lives or dies by its rating on one map. The writer whose readers only find them through one feed. When the algorithm changes, and it always changes, they find out overnight how much of their business they never owned.
If a single company can switch off your business by changing a setting, you were never the owner. You were a tenant.
It goes further than business, too. In a way, you’re a tenant as well. Your attention is the thing being rented out. Every free platform you use is selling slices of it to someone else, and the price of those slices depends on how long you stay. Which is why none of them want you to leave. The feed doesn’t end. The next video starts on its own. The notification arrives right when you were about to put the phone down.
Reed Hastings, when he was running Netflix, once said in an interview that the company’s biggest competitor wasn’t another streaming service. It was sleep. He meant it as a joke, mostly. But it tells you exactly how the people in charge of these platforms see the job. The competition isn’t other products. It’s every other thing you could be doing with your time, including nothing.
And the rent can go up on everyone at once. In January 2025, TikTok went dark in the United States for about half a day while its legal fight played out. Creators who had spent years building audiences of millions had no way to reach any of them. They didn’t lose their followers. They just found out, for a few hours, that they had never had them.
I’m not saying stay off platforms. For most businesses, and most people, that isn’t realistic. I use them. This site wouldn’t find many readers without them.
I’m saying treat rented reach as what it is. Temporary. Use it to build something you actually own. An email list. A community that knows where to find you without a feed telling them. A product people come back to because they want to, not because an algorithm reminded them.
In marketing we call that owned media, which is a boring name for a simple idea: the stuff nobody can take away from you by updating their terms of service. It’s also why there’s a newsletter box at the bottom of this page. I’m not above my own advice.
Spend the rented attention buying your way out of renting.
And if you read this far without checking your phone, thank you. I know what it cost.
