Attention Firewall.
Pay before you interrupt me.
A reverse-subscription protocol for the internet.
01 Context
The internet makes it cheap to send a message, but expensive to give it attention. Advertising and low-value interruptions push that cost onto the recipient.
02 Idea
Reverse the subscription: a sender pays before interrupting someone. Explore whether a payment requirement can make access to attention more intentional.
03 Constraints
A useful filter must still let important messages through. Payment alone does not establish trust, and the experience should not turn every conversation into a checkout.
04 Exploration
Questions to test: who sets the price, when is a sender charged, and what happens to a rejected message? AI classification and x402 are directions for exploration, not proof that the product works.
05 Architecture
Proposed flow: incoming message → recipient policy → payment requirement → payment verification → delivery. Keep classification separate from payment authorization.
06 Decisions
The product hypothesis is about protecting attention. A first prototype should test that interaction before expanding into a general messaging protocol.
07 AI Workflow
A potential role for AI is to help classify intent and prototype policy interactions. Actual tools, prompts and review practices will be documented when the experiment has been run.
08 Result
Concept stage. There are no verified launch results or usage metrics to report yet.
09 What I’d change
The first experiment should be narrow enough to answer one question: does a small cost improve the quality of incoming messages?