  Over the last 70 years, we, humans, have created an economic market where
attention is being captured and turned into money thanks to advertising. During
the last two decades, leveraging research in psychology, sociology,
neuroscience and other domains, Web platforms have brought the process of
capturing attention to an unprecedented scale. With the initial commonplace
goal of making targeted advertising more effective, the generalization of
attention-capturing techniques and their use of cognitive biases and emotions
have multiple detrimental side effects such as polarizing opinions, spreading
false information and threatening public health, economies and democracies.
This is clearly a case where the Web is not used for the common good and where,
in fact, all its users become a vulnerable population. This paper brings
together contributions from a wide range of disciplines to analyze current
practices and consequences thereof. Through a set of propositions and
principles that could be used do drive further works, it calls for actions
against these practices competing to capture our attention on the Web, as it
would be unsustainable for a civilization to allow attention to be wasted with
impunity on a world-wide scale.
