CONCEPT
Attention Scarcity Migration
Andreessen's framework for how the binding constraint in information economies moved from distribution to attention as distribution costs collapsed — the pattern that now repeats with execution and judgment in the AI era.
Attention scarcity migration names the structural pattern by which binding constraints in information economies relocate to whichever resource remains scarce after a previous scarcity is technologically resolved. Andreessen observed this pattern across two successive transitions: when distribution costs collapsed through the internet, scarcity migrated from distribution to attention; when execution costs are collapsing through AI, scarcity is migrating from execution to judgment. The framework generalizes Herbert Simon's 1971 observation that a wealth of information produces a poverty of attention, and provides the specific economic mechanism through which each phase of the information and AI revolutions has restructured industries, labor markets, and the locations of captured value.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The attention economy's empirical emergence traces to the late 1990s and early 2000s. As internet distribution costs approached zero, the economic question shifted from who can reach the audience (distribution) to who can hold the audience (attention). The companies that captured the largest