Scroll through any feed and it feels as if every human eye is already auctioned off to the highest bidder. Headlines scream that attention has become the oil of the digital age—finite, fiercely extracted, and burned up in seconds by algorithmic flamethrowers. The panic is real: Stephen Colbert’s Late Show bleeds forty million dollars a year while TikTok siphons 108 minutes a day from the average Gen-Z skull . Marketers speak of “brain-rot” tactics, neuro-dopamine loops, and content arms races that leave even the winners exhausted. If attention is the new currency, the mint caught fire long ago.Yet while we wrestle over the scraps on our glowing rectangles, a third of humanity still lives beyond the spotlight. Nearly 5.5 billion people are online—about two out of every three humans—but that leaves roughly 2.7 billion who have never tapped a hyperlink, never swiped a story, never felt the Pavlovian buzz of a like . In parts of the Central African Republic and Burundi, almost nine in ten citizens remain digitally invisible . Even where electricity flickers, connection can be theoretical: one in eight people worldwide still lacks reliable access to power, let alone 4G . The attention economy is starving for eyeballs it hasn’t even met.
Mobile phones race to close the gap—94 % of the world’s population now lives within reach of a cellular signal—but ownership lags far behind coverage . Pakistan holds 235 million souls yet only 73 million smartphones; Nigeria counts 218 million bodies and 83 million screens . These gaps matter because the first selfie, the first WhatsApp call, the first YouTube rabbit hole is a hinge moment: once it swings open, the minutes previously spent on market chatter, cousin gossip, or simply watching the horizon begin to migrate into the feed. Until that threshold is crossed, attention is not scarce; it is simply elsewhere—untallied, un-monetized, and blissfully unhurried.So the gold rush collides with a locked gate. Brands optimize fifteen-second spots for an audience that already checks its device every four minutes, while entire postal codes continue to organize life around sunrise, rainfall, and the rare day a cousin returns from the city with printed photos. The attention merchants feel the world is ending because their maps stop at the edge of broadband; beyond that border, stories still stretch across winter evenings without a single push notification.What looks like saturation from a San Francisco conference room is, from the ground in rural Myanmar or the Sahel, an unbuilt highway. The next billion first-time users will not arrive the way earlier waves did—through desktop modems and DSL cables. They will step straight into cheap Android chips and data plans priced by the hour, and when they do, their virgin hours will become the most coveted commodity on earth. Companies salivate over “the next frontier,” but frontier is a polite word for delay: the infrastructure is half built, the languages barely translated, the cultural codes uncracked.
Meanwhile, those of us already trapped in the turbine console ourselves with the mantra that attention is finite, that we must fight harder for every fragment of focus. We tweak thumbnails, compress hooks into three syllables, A/B test the color of a button that promises to rescue a viewer from the very overload we helped invent. We forget that scarcity is relative to the perimeter we draw. Expand the frame and the picture changes: there is still an ocean of time flowing outside the aquarium, waiting for its first splash of neon content.
The real race, then, is not between red apps and blue apps; it is between the exhaustion of the already-connected and the awakening of the still-offline. Whoever learns to speak the unwritten languages, to load on low-bandwidth towers, to tell stories that make sense after the sun goes down and the generator coughs quiet, will harvest attention so fresh it still carries the scent of soil. Until that happens, the loudest battle cries about dwindling focus are only the echo of half the globe shouting into a canyon the other half has not yet entered.
