Dark GDP: The Economics of Entangled Time

Your screen time produces trillions in economic value that GDP doesn't measure

Dark GDP: The Economics of Entangled Time Your screen time produces trillions in economic value that GDP doesn't measure Nav Vaidhyanathan Apr 12, 2026 15 1 1 Share 🎧 Listen to podcast version of this article below: 0:00 -1:05:34 Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. I. The Screen My iPhone tells me I spent six hours and forty-seven minutes on it yesterday. The notification arrives every Sunday morning — Apple’s Screen Time report, unbidden, mildly accusatory. I have never once looked at it and felt anything other than a quiet unease. Thanks for reading Nav’s Substa

saved by

• Alexey Guzey

related reading

• Economics and Transformative AI | Tom Cunningham – Tom Cunninghamtecunningham.github.io
• Stratechery by Ben Thompson – On the business, strategy, and impact of technology.stratechery.com
• AI Dark Output: The Visible Cost of Invisible Outputnewsletter.semianalysis.com
• Alex Imas and Phil Trammell – What remains scarce after AGI?dwarkesh.com
• The AI Industrial Explosion — Part 1: Maximum growth rates with current production methodsdefensesindepth.bio
• Life after work | Mechanize, Inc.mechanize.work
• A Stargate for Data - by willdepue - Will DePuewilldepue.substack.com
• Dario Amodei — "We are near the end of the exponential"dwarkesh.com
• The Addiction Economyevery.to
• Peter B. McCrorypeter-mccrory.github.io
• will depue on X: "A Stargate for Data Labs are on a trajectory towards >$100B/year of data spend by 2030. As we begin the trillion-dollar compute project, we need to think about the equivalent civilizational-scale effort for the other core x.com
• How Should We Measure the Digital Economy?hbr.org