Reader Political / Cultural

The attention economy and its extraction

The condition of living within platforms designed to capture and monetize attention, producing exhaustion, amnesia, and a degraded capacity for meaning.

Appears in 6 texts

2026-01-17 Revisiting Brat Summer "The green squares spread across my feed with an eerie familiarity... another minimal square carrying maximum symbolic weight."2025-11-24 Lost in the sauce "We're all welded into 'town squares' that are better suited for noise than rhythm."2025-10-02 On Sora "When the feed becomes an infinite scroll of never-events optimized for maximum attention capture, what happens to our ability to perceive actual events?"2025-05-24 LifeBook.day "The scar tissue that forms in the mind off these surface interactions is sculpting a new subjectivity in the attention economy."2025-05-20 Thinking is Hard "Content to crank out ChatGPT'd essays so they can get back to their other interests (in one case, viewing short form videos until her eyes hurt)."2024-09-08 The Network is the Territory "flows of attention in these networks"