You Bought an Attention Economy

A mother in Wichita checks her seventh grader's screen time. Thirteen thousand YouTube videos in three months. During school hours.In Episode 20 of The Dark Side of the Moon, the conversation starts with the headline and keeps moving past it. Schools are furious at YouTube. Schools are also using YouTube. Khan Academy. Tutorials. Substitute lessons. The platform everyone is blaming is the one quietly carrying half the load.Somewhere in the middle, a harder claim surfaces. Education is not in the information transfer business. It is in the arts and entertainment business. And the institutions still pretending otherwise are losing students to the ones that figured it out years ago.Schools thought they were buying laptops. They bought something else.