Tootfinder

No Such Thing as Free Brain Time: For a Pigouvian Tax on Attention Capture
Hamza Belgroun (Sciences Po, UniCA, CNRS, WIMMICS, Laboratoire I3S - SPARKS), Franck Michel (Laboratoire I3S - SPARKS, WIMMICS), Fabien Gandon (WIMMICS, Laboratoire I3S - SPARKS)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06453

No Such Thing as Free Brain Time: For a Pigouvian Tax on Attention Capture
In our age of digital platforms, human attention has become a scarce and highly valuable resource, rivalrous, tradable, and increasingly subject to market dynamics. This article explores the commodification of attention within the framework of the attention economy, arguing that attention should be understood as a common good threatened by over-exploitation. Drawing from philosophical, economic, and legal perspectives, we first conceptualize attention not only as an individual cognitive process…

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Traditional politics of assistance and the repression of unemployment were now called into question. The need for reform became urgent.
Poverty was gradually separated from the old moral confusions. Economic crises had shown that unemployment could not be confused with indolence, as indigence and enforced idleness spread throughout the countryside, to precisely the places that had previously been considered home to the purest and most immediate forms of moral life. This demonstrated that poverty did not solely fall under the order of the fault: ‘Begging is the fruit of poverty, which in turn is the consequence of accidents in the production of the earth or in the output of factories, of a rise in the price of basic foodstuffs, or of growth of the population, etc.’ Indigence became a matter of economics.
But it was not contingent, nor was it destined to be suppressed forever. There would always be a certain quantity of poverty that could never be effaced, a sort of fatal indigence that would accompany all forms of society until the end of time, even in places where all the idle were employed: ‘The only paupers in a well governed state must be those born in indigence, or those who fall into it by accident.’ This backdrop of poverty was somehow inalienable: whether by birth or accident, it formed an inevitable part of society. The state of lack was so firmly entrenched in the destiny of man and the structure of society that for a long time the idea of a state without paupers remained inconceivable: in the thought of philosophers, property, work and indigence were terms linked right up until the nineteenth century.
This portion of poverty was necessary because it could not be suppressed; but it was equally necessary in that it made wealth possible. Because they worked but consumed little, a class of people in need allowed a nation to become rich, to release the value of its fields, colonies and mines, making products that could be sold throughout the world. An impoverished people, in short, was a people that had no poor. Indigence became an indispensable element in the state. It hid the secret but most real life of society. The poor were the seat and the glory of nations. And their noble misery, for which there was no cure, was to be exalted:
«My intention is solely to invite the authorities to turn part of their vigilant attention to considering the portion of the People who suffer … the assistance that we owe them is linked to the honour and prosperity of the Empire, of which the Poor are the firmest bulwark, for no sovereign can maintain and extend his domain without favouring the population, and cultivating the Land, Commerce and the Arts; and the Poor are the necessary agents for the great powers that reveal the true force of a People.»
What we see here is a moral rehabilitation of the figure of the Pauper, bringing about the fundamental economic and social reintegration of his person. Paupers had no place in a mercantilist economy, as they were neither producers nor consumers, and they were idle, vagabond or unemployed, deserving nothing better than confinement, a measure that extracted and exiled them from society. But with the arrival of the industrial economy and its thirst for manpower, paupers were once again a part of the body of the nation.
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(Michel Foucault, History of Madness)

Q&A with Amy Lanzi, CEO of marketing and ad agency Digitas, on digital marketing, AI's impact on advertising, the creator economy, and more (Hank Green/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/decoder-podcast-w

How brands and creators are fighting for your attention — and your money
Guest host Hank Green sits down with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi to demystify digital marketing and explain why the fight for your attention has grown so fierce.

Q&A with Amy Lanzi, CEO of marketing and ad agency Digitas, on digital marketing, AI's impact on advertising, the creator economy, and more (Hank Green/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/decoder-podcast-w

How brands and creators are fighting for your attention — and your money
Guest host Hank Green sits down with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi to demystify digital marketing and explain why the fight for your attention has grown so fierce.

Economy and Geography Shape the Collective Attention of Cities
Ke-ke Shang, Jiangli Zhu, Junfan Yi, Liwen Zhang, Junjie Yang, Ge Guo, Zixuan Jin, Michael Small
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08907

Economy and Geography Shape the Collective Attention of Cities
Complex networks are commonly used to explore human behavior. However, previous studies largely overlooked the geographical and economic factors embedded in collective attention. To address this, we construct attention networks from time-series data for the United States and China, each a key economic power in the West and the East, respectively. We reveal a strong macroscale correlation between urban attention and Gross Domestic Product (GDP). At the mesoscale, community detection of attention…

Agentic AI Empowered Multi-UAV Trajectory Optimization in Low-Altitude Economy Networks
Feibo Jiang, Li Dong, Xitao Pan, Kezhi Wang, Cunhua Pan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.16379 …

Agentic AI Empowered Multi-UAV Trajectory Optimization in Low-Altitude Economy Networks
This paper proposes a novel Agentic Retrieval-augmented generation with Mamba-Attention Integrated Transformer (ARMAIT) framework for multi-Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) trajectory optimization. The framework is built upon Large Language Models (LLMs), incorporating Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) empowered by Agentic AI and integrated with a UAV-specific knowledge base. Through the Agentic RAG, the LLM autonomously interprets high-level task requirements and identifies the key components …

The Economics and Game Theory of OSINT Frontline Photography: Risk, Attention, and the Collective Dilemma
Jonathan Teagan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10548 https://

The Economics and Game Theory of OSINT Frontline Photography: Risk, Attention, and the Collective Dilemma
This paper develops an economic model of the Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) attention economy in contemporary armed conflict. We conceptualize attention (e.g. social media views, followers, likes) as revenue, and time and risk spent in analysis as costs. Using utility functions and simple game theoretic setups, we show how OSINT actors (amateurs, journalists, analysts, and state operatives) allocate effort to maximize net attention benefit. We incorporate strategic behaviors such as a first m…

Computational Economics in Large Language Models: Exploring Model Behavior and Incentive Design under Resource Constraints
Sandeep Reddy, Kabir Khan, Rohit Patil, Ananya Chakraborty, Faizan A. Khan, Swati Kulkarni, Arjun Verma, Neha Singh
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10426

Computational Economics in Large Language Models: Exploring Model Behavior and Incentive Design under Resource Constraints
Large language models (LLMs) are limited by substantial computational cost. We introduce a "computational economics" framework that treats an LLM as an internal economy of resource-constrained agents (attention heads and neuron blocks) that must allocate scarce computation to maximize task utility. First, we show empirically that when computation is scarce, standard LLMs reallocate attention toward high-value tokens while preserving accuracy. Building on this observation, we propose an incentiv…

blogging feels harder than it used to. Thanks attention economy and probably middle age

A lot of people making fun of the Environment Agency suggesting "deleting emails" to fight drought.
People also made fun of it when they put it in a press release two months ago. I don't know if it's a deliberate attempt to get attention, or just something their LLM keeps suggesting.

England faces 5 billion litre public water shortage by 2055 without urgent action
England faces 5 billion litre a day shortfall for public water supplies by 2055 – and a further 1 billion litre a day deficit for wider economy.

Multilayer GNN for Predictive Maintenance and Clustering in Power Grids
Muhammad Kazim, Harun Pirim, Chau Le, Trung Le, Om Prakash Yadav
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.07298

Multilayer GNN for Predictive Maintenance and Clustering in Power Grids
Unplanned power outages cost the US economy over $150 billion annually, partly due to predictive maintenance (PdM) models that overlook spatial, temporal, and causal dependencies in grid failures. This study introduces a multilayer Graph Neural Network (GNN) framework to enhance PdM and enable resilience-based substation clustering. Using seven years of incident data from Oklahoma Gas & Electric (292,830 records across 347 substations), the framework integrates Graph Attention Networks (spatial…

Signals in the Noise: Decoding Unexpected Engagement Patterns on Twitter
Yulin Yu, Houming Chen, Daniel Romero, Paramveer S. Dhillon
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08128 https://

Signals in the Noise: Decoding Unexpected Engagement Patterns on Twitter
Social media platforms offer users multiple ways to engage with content--likes, retweets, and comments--creating a complex signaling system within the attention economy. While previous research has examined factors driving overall engagement, less is known about why certain tweets receive unexpectedly high levels of one type of engagement relative to others. Drawing on Signaling Theory and Attention Economy Theory, we investigate these unexpected engagement patterns on Twitter (now known as "X"…