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You ever notice how society has been consistently optimizing around the prerequisite of people having a normal attention span? If someone wants to have a popular social media account they have to be on a consistent schedule and have a consistent brand in order to qualify for what's essentially a lottery ticket. There's even more parallels to be drawn with the lottery like data collection being another form of taxing the otherwise inelligible but this post isn't really so much about that. 

Back when we lived in environments where having low attention spans was preferable to survival those people would often be the most industrious and important members of a small collective. There wasn't so much focus on rigidity or quantifiable metrics that demand careful and consistent attention to detail across the board since most of what mattered was the collective not starving to death. Nowadays it seems like the realms of cultural niches have become the modern parallel to the industrious attention deficit's tribes of the past. In keeping a niche fed and plump with active culture the modern attention deficit is in their element and I'm certain it is no accident that the trait is so commonly found in people operating in creative fields.

One thing to note however is that often the most successful cultural touchstones with attention deficit were not operating alone for the majority of their careers. These would be the musicians with backing from labels or artists with managers, all filtering out all of the beaurocratic busywork that's a natural prerequisite to success while leaving the attention deficit to do what they do best. Essentially this means that these individuals are taxed for a service in order to have a chance to be in their element. In a society optimized around the lack of their trait it's incredibly unlikely for them to acquire the funds necessary to get the ball rolling by fighting their very nature so often they are relegated to being on hamster wheels for data collection nowadays. At least that's a little bit better than being used as drug guinea pigs like just a few generations ago.