What if every click you made online cost just a fraction of a penny? What if your favorite news site, your go-to streaming service, or even your daily email usage could be paid for at tiny increments, rather than one big chunk at the end of the month? This vision—where nearly every digital interaction could be monetized by “micropayments”—has hovered over the internet economy since its earliest days. But as Nick Szabo’s seminal 1999 paper, Micropayments and Mental Transaction Costs, pointed out, there’s a lot more than technology standing in the way.

Twenty-five years on, Szabo’s warnings about mental transaction costs—the cognitive overhead of deciding whether something…

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