#attentioneconomy — Public Fediverse posts

ICYMI: ECN office screens earn 3.4x the attention of comparable DOOH, Lumen finds: Study of 603 office workers in the UK, France and Germany puts the gap at 8.3x against transport screens. What does the 44% recall lift rest on, and who paid? https://ppc.land/ecn-office-screens-earn-3-4x-the-attention-of-comparable-dooh-lumen-finds/ #DigitalOutOfHome #DOOH #MarketingResearch #OfficeScreens #AttentionEconomy

#MediaLiteracy #AttentionEconomy #Propaganda

the #attentionEconomy:

your attention is a scarce, finite commodity that is fought over by influencers, advertisers, trolls, etc

a visual example:

IN THIS EPISODE YOU'LL LEARN

・Why constant connectivity has become the default
・How work and social expectations make disconnection difficult
・Why offline time can become a marker of privilege

#DigitalDetox #DigitalCulture #AttentionEconomy

youtu.be/2u_1HsyqXH8

Why Disconnecting Is Becoming ...

Attention Is Extracted, Not Shared

By Cliff Potts, CSO, and Editor-in-Chief of WPS News

Baybay City, Leyte, Philippines — October 7, 2026

Social media platforms often describe attention as something users freely exchange. Post content, gain views, build an audience. On X, that framing hides a harder truth. Attention is not shared equally. It is extracted, concentrated, and monetized by the platform far more than by the people who create it.

This essay explains how attention extraction works and why it leaves Filipino users doing the work without receiving fair value in return.

Attention Is the Product

Every post, reply, and argument keeps users on the platform longer. Time spent scrolling creates data. Data creates ad inventory. Ad inventory creates revenue.

In this system, users are not customers. They are suppliers. Their attention fuels the platform, but ownership of that value remains centralized.

The more active the user base, the more profitable the platform becomes — even if users themselves earn nothing.

Creators Do the Labor, Platforms Capture the Value

Filipino creators invest time writing threads, responding to comments, and building communities. That labor increases engagement across the platform.

But income opportunities remain limited. Monetization tools are narrow, inconsistent, and often unavailable. The platform captures the majority of value generated by user activity, while creators compete for small and unreliable returns.

This imbalance is not accidental. It is structural.

Why Extraction Hits the Philippines Harder

In wealthier countries, unpaid attention may be an inconvenience. In the Philippines, it can be a burden. Many users rely on digital income to supplement low wages or unstable work.

When attention is extracted without fair return, opportunity costs rise. Hours spent posting replace hours that could be used for paid work elsewhere. The platform grows. The user does not.

That gap widens inequality instead of reducing it.

Engagement Metrics Hide the Problem

High engagement numbers are often used to prove success. Millions of posts. Billions of views. But these numbers do not show who benefits.

A post that reaches thousands of people may still produce zero income. A viral thread may raise the platform’s profile while leaving the creator unpaid. Engagement looks like opportunity, but often functions as unpaid labor.

Metrics reward noise, not sustainability.

Why This Model Is Unstable

Platforms built on extraction face long-term problems. As users realize their work produces little return, trust declines. Burnout rises. Quality drops.

Advertisers notice when audiences feel exploited. Creators leave when better options appear. What looks efficient in the short term becomes fragile over time.

Extraction without sharing eventually empties the system.

Looking Ahead

The next essay will assess the overall reliability of the platform and why many users and businesses conclude it is too powerful to trust.

When attention flows in only one direction, the relationship is not a partnership.
It is exploitation.

For more social commentary, please see Occupy 2.5 at https://Occupy25.com

This essay will be archived in the WPS News Archives at Amazon.

References (APA)

Fuchs, C. (2017). Social media: A critical introduction (2nd ed.). Sage Publications.

Reuters. (2024). X struggles to monetize despite high user activity. https://www.reuters.com

Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism. PublicAffairs.

Negative spaces and their absence in modern media

As a consumer of media in the modern day, I find myself often time completely overwhelmed not so much from the number of media streamed non stop in front of our eyes everywhere, but by how dense every kind of media is nowadays. A...

📖 For the full & intended reading experience:
https://blog.jjohn313.fun/posts/negative-spaces-and-their-absence-in-modern-media/

#GameDesign #Cinematography #MediaTheory #GameStudies #AttentionEconomy

The Audience Was the Alibi
On looksmaxxing, livestreams, and the strange business of watching everything and seeing nothing

https://dominusmarkham.com/the-audience-was-the-alibi/

#MarkhamUnfiltered #MarkhamOnIt #Looksmaxxing #AttentionEconomy #DigitalSubcultures #OnlineHarm #YoungMen #LivestreamCulture #MediaCritique #WhoIsWatching

In This Episode You’ll Learn

・What “social acceleration” actually means
・How technology can accelerate everyday life without simply making everything faster
・Why modern life may be becoming denser rather than just quicker

#SocialAcceleration #ModernLife #AttentionEconomy

youtu.be/g8bE2IVuq60

Why Everything Is Becoming Fas...

Good Intentions, Same Rectangle

https://padraigdeburca.com/2026/09/22/light-kills-moth/

Steven Bartlett messaged me at half past midnight — a perfect example of the parasocial relationship he weaponizes for profit. Two researchers at the University of Chicago identified this phenomenon in 1956: audiences treat TV presenters like friends, feeling "known" by them. But Bartlett is no friend. He is a class enemy who profits from your alienated attention, the same mechanism by which capital commodifies human intimacy. Your psychological labor — the hours spent feeling "known" by a celebrity who feels nothing — feeds server farms in Nevada. This is how monopoly capital extracts surplus value from the cognitive apparatus of intimacy itself. The algorithm doesn't show you Bartlett because you want it — it shows you because your brain treats a familiar face as a tribe member. A tribe member holds attention. And attention is the mother lode.

Parasocial #AttentionEconomy #ClassWar #LaborTheory #Fediverse #Socialism

🔗 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dqh17U3tymU

📱 Bluesky: https://criticalnexus.bsky.social
Odysee: https://odysee.com/@criticalnexus
Wafrn: https://app.wafrn.net/@al6bwgvr

New episode out! 🎙️ We chat with Steve Clayton, SVP & Chief Communications Officer at Cisco, about why attention is the scarce resource in the age of AI—not creativity. He breaks down credible narratives, regional story dynamics, and Cisco’s silicon & quantum networking. Read/listen at https://www.analysepodcast.com/attention-is-the-scarce-resource-not-creativity-in-the-age-of-ai-with-steve-clayton/ #AI #AttentionEconomy #AnalysePodcast

How to Starve Authoritarian Power of Attention Without Going Silent

By Cliff Potts, CSO, and Editor-in-Chief of WPS News

Baybay City, Leyte, Philippines — September 7, 2026

Authoritarian movements do not survive on consent alone. They survive on attention. Outrage, repetition, spectacle, and forced engagement are not side effects—they are the fuel. When attention is abundant, even failure can be reframed as dominance. When attention dries up, power loses momentum.

Even when strategic direction is set far away in Washington, D.C., narrative enforcement happens locally—through talk radio, school board theatrics, viral clips, and manufactured controversy. This essay examines how communities can deny that fuel lawfully and deliberately, without disengaging from reality or surrendering the public record.

Attention Is a Resource—Treat It Like One

Most people treat attention as inevitable. It is not. Attention is allocated, amplified, and sustained by choices.

Authoritarian systems exploit three habits:

• Reflexive outrage
• Endless rebuttal
• Platform-chasing arguments

Each habit keeps the spotlight fixed on their terms. Starving attention does not mean ignoring harm. It means refusing to elevate spectacle over substance.

Don’t Debate on Their Terrain

Authoritarian messaging is designed to provoke response, not resolution. The goal is not persuasion; it is dominance of the conversation.

Effective counter-strategy:

• Decline debates framed as culture war theater
• Redirect discussion to material impacts
• Respond with documentation, not opinion
• Shift forums from social feeds to records and minutes

When the terrain changes, the advantage disappears. Power that relies on noise struggles in quiet spaces.

Replace Outrage With Boredom—and Facts

Boredom is underrated. It drains momentum.

Practical techniques include:

• Repeating verified facts without embellishment
• Using neutral language consistently
• Avoiding nicknames, slogans, and personalization
• Returning every discussion to costs, outcomes, and accountability

This approach frustrates movements that depend on emotional escalation. Facts do not trend—but they endure.

For readers seeking additional background on media manipulation and attention discipline, a consolidated reference is available at https://endfascism.xyz.

Starvation Is Not Silence

Withholding attention does not mean retreating from public life. It means reallocating attention to places where it produces accountability.

Productive focus areas include:

• Local budgets and contracts
• School board and zoning records
• Enforcement statistics and disparities
• Procurement patterns and repeat vendors

When attention is redirected toward systems rather than personalities, abuse becomes harder to disguise.

Deny Amplification Without Denying Reality

One of the most effective authoritarian tactics is forcing opponents to spread the message while criticizing it. Screenshots, quote-posts, and angry shares often do more work than original propaganda.

Healthier alternatives:

• Describe behavior without repeating slogans
• Summarize claims without linking to them
• Cite primary documents instead of viral clips
• Archive harmful material rather than boosting it

This preserves evidence while denying reach.

Narrative Discipline Is Collective Work

Attention starvation fails if practiced alone. It succeeds when norms shift.

Communities can reinforce discipline by:

• Agreeing not to repost provocation
• Encouraging slow, documented responses
• Valuing consistency over cleverness
• Rewarding restraint instead of escalation

Once attention discipline becomes normal, authoritarian messaging begins to feel repetitive—and weak.

What Happens When Attention Runs Out

Movements built on spectacle adapt poorly to neglect. Without constant engagement:

• Messaging fragments
• Internal conflicts surface
• Extremes escalate and expose themselves
• Moderates drift away

This is not suppression. It is attrition. Power that cannot command attention must rely on coercion—and coercion is visible, costly, and unsustainable.

The Strategic Outcome

Authoritarianism needs a crowd. It needs reaction. It needs constant confirmation that it is central.

Denying attention removes that confirmation. Combined with transparency, economic independence, and parallel systems, attention discipline makes authoritarian control feel smaller than it is—and then makes it smaller still.

Next month, the series turns to narrative jamming in local records: how boring, repetitive facts inserted into official channels outlast spectacle and reshape the story over time.

References (APA)

Benkler, Y., Faris, R., & Roberts, H. (2018). Network propaganda. Oxford University Press.
Marwick, A., & Lewis, R. (2017). Media manipulation and disinformation online. Data & Society.
Sunstein, C. R. (2017). #Republic: Divided democracy in the age of social media. Princeton University Press.
Tufekci, Z. (2017). Twitter and tear gas. Yale University Press.
V-Dem Institute. (n.d.). Varieties of democracy dataset and reports.

“I often call Meta the Big Tobacco of the #AttentionEconomy. Tobacco destroys individual lungs and pollutes the immediate airspace; Meta’s cancer metastasizes across our entire #society.”

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/meta-wins-scott-galloway-2ay8c

FYI: FreeCast CEO says attention, not fiber, is telecom's most valuable asset: Nasdaq-listed CAST will publish Beyond Media reports free on LinkedIn rather than as gated research. Whether carriers can sell that ad layer stays unanswered. https://ppc.land/freecast-ceo-says-attention-not-fiber-is-telecoms-most-valuable-asset/ #Telecom #DigitalMarketing #Advertising #AttentionEconomy #MediaReports

ICYMI: FreeCast CEO says attention, not fiber, is telecom's most valuable asset: Nasdaq-listed CAST will publish Beyond Media reports free on LinkedIn rather than as gated research. Whether carriers can sell that ad layer stays unanswered. https://ppc.land/freecast-ceo-says-attention-not-fiber-is-telecoms-most-valuable-asset/ #Telecom #Marketing #Media #AttentionEconomy #Advertising

FreeCast CEO says attention, not fiber, is telecom's most valuable asset: Nasdaq-listed CAST will publish Beyond Media reports free on LinkedIn rather than as gated research. Whether carriers can sell that ad layer stays unanswered. https://ppc.land/freecast-ceo-says-attention-not-fiber-is-telecoms-most-valuable-asset/ #Telecom #Media #AttentionEconomy #LinkedIn #DigitalMarketing

Steve Clayton, Cisco CMO: In the AI era, attention—not creativity—is the scarce resource. Companies flood us with content we can’t absorb. The edge? A truthful, locally resonant narrative. No network, no AI—try airplane mode. Spoiler: very little works. This reshapes tech adoption.

Listen: https://open.spotify.com/episode/7iJsvxhKFWCYdORHMJgeaE?si=D1t7pST1RQeS4DxjgnELJQ

#AttentionEconomy #AIStorytelling #NetworkMatters #CiscoLeadership #AnalysePodcast

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Unread While Everything Else Is Happening

By Cliff Potts, CSO, and Editor-in-Chief of WPS News

Baybay City, Leyte, Philippines — August 26, 2026

It is late summer. The air is still warm. Campuses are full again. People are out in public, newly visible, newly social, newly distracted. Everyone is talking to everyone else, or at least performing the appearance of it. There is a great deal of energy being spent on being noticed.

This is not a criticism. It is an observation.

While all of this is happening, serious journalism is being produced quietly, without pay, without promotion, and without the machinery that would place it in front of the people moving past it. WPS News continues to publish reporting, analysis, and archival work in the public interest, largely unseen, not because it is rejected, but because it is never placed in the line of sight.

This article is published as a record of that reality and will be archived accordingly.

Attention Is a Finite Resource

In moments like this—early in the academic year, before routines harden—attention flows toward spectacle, novelty, and social signaling. People are not searching for depth. They are searching for connection, validation, and a sense that they are where they are supposed to be.

Phones are out. Conversations overlap. News exists, but it competes with everything else that feels immediate.

In that environment, unpaid journalism does not lose because it lacks value. It loses because it does not demand attention in the ways modern systems reward.

The Work Still Happens

WPS News does not stop publishing because it is ignored. It does not change its standards because quieter work travels more slowly. It continues to do what newspapers have always been meant to do: document events, contextualize risk, revisit uncomfortable truths, and preserve a record that does not depend on trends.

This work is unpaid. It is unfunded. It is unboosted.

That does not make it optional.

Public-interest journalism does not become less necessary because the public is busy. It becomes more necessary precisely when attention is elsewhere, when serious matters are crowded out by louder, brighter, easier things.

Not a Moral Failing

It would be easy to frame this as a failure of the audience. That would be lazy and inaccurate.

People are not doing something wrong by being young, social, distracted, or interested in each other. That has always been true. What has changed is the structure that decides what gets amplified and what does not.

Unpaid journalism does not fit neatly into platforms designed to monetize engagement. It does not produce instant gratification. It does not promise status. It asks for time and focus at moments when both are scarce.

The Cost of Invisibility

The consequence of this imbalance is not that journalists feel underappreciated. The consequence is that important work accumulates quietly in the background, unread until hindsight makes it relevant again.

Warnings are issued early. Context is provided before it is fashionable. Analysis is published before it is safe. Then, later, when the moment passes or escalates, people ask why no one said anything sooner.

Someone did.

Why We Publish Anyway

WPS News publishes because journalism is not a popularity contest. It publishes because archives matter more than moments. It publishes because future readers will want to know whether anyone was paying attention while everyone else was looking elsewhere.

Being unpaid does not negate responsibility. Being ignored does not erase duty.

So the work continues. Quietly. Consistently. Without spectacle.

Not because it is noticed—but because it is necessary.

"Some people tell me that there is no evidence [the #AttentionEconomy]... is bad for people...

...I must say that this response leaves me dumbfounded. It feels like they are shilling for the man.

I’ll ask you straight up—which is healthier for youngsters: (1) My dad’s leisure time spent in baseball, dancing, friendships, storytelling, and other social interactions; or (2) non-stop scroll-and-swipe?

If you need more information to answer that question, you probably shouldn’t be a #Parent "

Not much more than a decade ago, we naively thought the #internet would tear down all borders, that it was technology for #freedom, with the potential to unite humanity.

Meanwhile, they were learning how to group us by similar traits, then slowly built cages around us, and finally started to milk us, like cattle.

The old internet was an open space of random encounters, the new one - a fragmented labyrinth of weakly interacting sponsored echo chambers.
#attentioneconomy #surveillancecapitalism

Beyond the Bleachers: Why Political Team Sports Are Ruining Real Community

Table of Contents

• I. Introduction: Real Politics, Manufactured Hate
• II. Why We’re So Divided: How the Gap Was Built
  • A. The Blueprint: How Housing Laws Separated Us
  • B. Team Sports Politics: The Rise of the Political “Homer”
  • C. The Mental Loophole: “You’re One of the Good Ones”
• III. What We Can Actually Do About It
  • 1. Stop Being a Spectator: Challenge the Bubble, Not Just the Noise
  • 2. Refuse to Be the “Exception”
  • 3. Evaluate Policy by Human Impact, Not Scoreboards
  • 4. Clean Up Your Attention: Turn Off the Outrage Engine
• IV. Taking Back Control
• Glossary
• Bibliography & Further Reading

I. Introduction: Real Politics, Manufactured Hate

In 1995, two colleagues met on a job site, spent two years working side by side in the high-demand world of enterprise engineering, and laid the groundwork for a friendship, a bond that would span more than three decades. They live on opposite ends of the country. They don’t call or text each other but over thirty years, through career changes, family milestones, and the quiet passage of time, they remained in each other’s corners—wishing each other well, celebrating life’s victories, and honoring a bond built on direct, daily human experience.

Yet, step onto a social media timeline today, and that same thirty-year friendship looks like a statistical impossibility.

Look at one of their profile pages, and you’ll see non-stop political fighting: culture-war debates, line-in-the-sand opinions, and aggressive party loyalty. To an outsider—or to an internet algorithm designed to spark fights—these two men should be bitter enemies. One is a Black writer who speaks openly about the history and realities of his community; the other a retired older white man who posts intense conservative takes that directly attack those exact ideas.

Why is it such a surprise that these two men are friends? Because the hostility we see online is not an illusion—it is real, visceral animosity driven by an artificial machine. When rival fans brawl in a stadium parking lot, the violence isn’t fake. It is completely irrational to bleed over the color of a jersey, but the hostility itself is dangerously real. We have allowed our political lives to be captured by that exact same dynamic: I often call my friend a homer, a sports term for a fan that will root for their team no matter what. He is the political version of that. In my opinion a victim of a multi-billion-dollar apparatus that takes genuine human fears, turns them into tribal aggression, and points them directly at our neighbors. On a screen, nuance disappears, and real people are flattened into political cartoons.

Now, some might look at my own writing and Facebook posts and say, “Aren’t you one of the people starting these arguments?” But there is a massive difference between picking fights for sport and holding the line with truth. I take painful care to answer commentators with calm, documented facts and to never respond in kind. In a culture addicted to outrage, presenting calm history will often be accused of “starting a fight.” But presenting documented reality isn’t picking a fight—it’s refusing to let a fake peace hide real problems.

The noise on our feeds isn’t proof that we secretly hate each other. It’s the result of a system built to keep us mad, market to our anger, and get us to sit on the sidelines instead of fixing things in our own backyards.

So how did our friendship survive that kind of dynamic?

Because in the real world, relationships are built on real-life experience, mutual respect, and how you actually treat people over time.

If we want to fix this, we have to look past the bleachers. We need to understand how we got so separated in the first place, stop falling for the mental tricks that keep us divided, turn off the outrage machine, and get back to the basic, everyday work of actually looking out for people, no matter where they live.

II. Why We’re So Divided: How the Gap Was Built

A. The Blueprint: How Housing Laws Separated Us

The biggest problem in our country is that our neighborhoods are so segregated. It is easy to believe a narrative when there is no information other than what we see in the media. When we leave work or school, we go home to neighborhoods where most people look like us. We have evidence in our coworkers and schoolmates to contradict the narratives, but we rationalize those examples away by labeling them “different.” They are seen as exceptions—sometimes even exceptional—which allows us to keep our original biases intact.

Our neighborhoods didn’t end up this way by accident, and it wasn’t just “people wanting to live near people like themselves.” It was built into the system by policy decisions made decades ago.

Back in the 1930s, the government literally drew red lines on city maps around Black and lower-income neighborhoods, declaring them too “risky” for bank loans. That cut those areas off from investment, while government-backed mortgages helped white families buy homes in the new suburbs and build family wealth. Later, when interstates were built in the 1950s and 60s, planners systematically plowed those highways straight through thriving Black business districts, slicing cities in half and creating physical walls between neighborhoods.

When direct housing discrimination was outlawed, local towns used zoning laws instead. By requiring big yards, single-family houses, and banning affordable apartments, towns made it too expensive for regular working families to move in.

That history created the neighborhood setup we see today. Because local property taxes fund public schools and street repairs, living apart means we experience totally different daily realities. When we don’t share the same roads, parks, or schools, it’s easy for politicians to convince us that the people living down the road are completely different from us.

• Redlining Maps: Cut off urban neighborhoods from bank loans
• Interstate Highways: Built physical walls right through town
• Strict Zoning Laws: Kept housing costs too high for working folks
• Separate Daily Lives: Made our neighbors’ problems feel distant

B. Team Sports Politics: The Rise of the Political “Homer”

As we grew physically separated, the way we look at politics changed, too. Politics stopped being about evaluating policy or fixing local problems and turned into pure homerism—a fierce, inherited personal identity where defending the franchise matters more than the actual state of the game.

If you grew up in a family of Mets or Yankees fans, you wear the jersey, cheer for the team, and stick with them even when they play terribly. You don’t jump ship just because of a bad season. In politics today, people treat their political party the exact same way. When “our team” messes up, we make excuses or blame the referees (the media or the other party). Switching sides feels like betraying your family and friends.

Worse, most political energy today is driven by Negative Partisanship—which just means hating the other team more than you even like your own. The main goal isn’t making things better; it’s making sure the other side loses. Social media and 24-hour news play right into this because angry people click more links, stay on screens longer, and generate more ad money. We stay glued to the bleachers, yelling at the opposition, because our frustration makes someone else rich.

C. The Mental Loophole: “You’re One of the Good Ones”

Much like those coworkers and classmates, when someone with strong political biases meets a real person from that group and actually likes them, they almost never change their overall view. Instead, their brain uses a mental shortcut called subtyping.

Rather than admitting their general opinion might be wrong, they make their friend a rare “exception to the rule.” They tell themselves, “Well, Mike is different. He’s one of the good ones.”

• Overall Belief: You hold a broad stereotype about a group
• The Reality Check: You meet a friend who doesn’t fit that stereotype
• The Mental Trick: You declare them “an exception to the rule”
• The Outcome: Your core belief remains completely unchanged

This mental trick lets someone keep a warm, loyal friendship in private while still holding onto hostile views about that friend’s broader community in public. The friendship stays in its own little box, and the bigger bias never has to change.

III. What We Can Actually Do About It

It’s easy to complain about how divided we are. Changing it takes real work. We can’t fix this by telling people to “be nice” or “talk it out.” Polite talk doesn’t fix broken systems or stop social media apps from making money off our anger.

Nor can we fix it by simply doing generic neighborhood charity. If our neighborhoods are segregated by design, doing local volunteer work often just means collaborating with people who already look, live, and vote like us. To actually dismantle the biases and homerism that keep us divided, our action has to be intentional: it must cut across geographic lines, challenge how we treat our friends, and disrupt the outrage economy.

• Stop Just Watching: Move past online commentary and demand tangible accountability that crosses zip codes.
• Refuse the “Exception” Frame: Stop letting friends isolate your character from your heritage and community.
• Evaluate Policy by Human Impact: Stop treating governance like a scoreboard where real human harm is accepted just to get a party win.
• Clean Up Your Attention: Starve the outrage engine of your time, capital, and emotional energy.

1. Stop Being a Spectator: Challenge the Bubble, Not Just the Noise

Most of what passes for “political engagement” today is passive consumption. Scrolling through angry news stories, dropping a biting comment on Facebook, or retweeting a scandal changes nothing on the ground. It is the civic equivalent of yelling at a television screen from the comfort of a living room.

True civic engagement requires getting off the sidelines and demanding structural accountability. But more importantly, it means bursting your own bubble. We cannot claim to be engaged if we only discuss problems with people inside our own demographic and geographical comfort zones.

The Takeaway: Stop treating social media commentary as civic participation. If your political engagement doesn’t involve listening to, working with, or addressing issues that impact people outside your immediate zip code, it isn’t civic action—it’s entertainment. Channel that energy into regional coalitions, broader civic oversight, and real-world organizing that crosses municipal borders.

2. Refuse to Be the “Exception”

The most dangerous mental shortcut preserving modern prejudice is “subtyping.” When a friend holds hostile views about a group but calls you “one of the good ones,” they aren’t paying you a compliment. They are protecting their bias from reality by putting you in a private box labeled “exception.”

Allowing ourselves or our friends to be isolated this way keeps the broader system intact. It gives people permission to maintain genuine warmth in private while voting for, posting, or endorsing rhetoric that harms that same friend’s community in public.

The Takeaway:

• If it happens to you: Refuse the frame directly. Make the connection unmistakable: “I am not an exception. The character, discipline, and values you respect in me did not happen in spite of my community—they were shaped directly by the family, heritage, and people you are dismissing.”
• If you do it to others: Confront your own inconsistency. If the actual people from other backgrounds you work alongside contradict the media’s scary caricature, stop letting cable news and algorithms convince you the rest of their community is the enemy. Trust real human evidence over digital narratives.

3. Evaluate Policy by Human Impact, Not Scoreboards

The thirty-year friendship mentioned in this piece is not a tidy success story where shared labor magically erased deep ideological divides. We remained cordial, but he remains a political homer. Even with decades of mutual respect, the pull of the political team jersey is powerful.

The point of breaking out of the bleachers is not to force everyone to share the same political philosophy. People have every right to hold their beliefs, advocate for their values, and vote for their interests. The goal is to stop treating governance like a fantasy sports league where “winning” is the only thing that counts.

Politics is not entertainment; it deals in real lives, livelihoods, and measurable consequences. When you blindly root for your team at all costs, you end up endorsing policies that inflict genuine damage on actual people—including friends you claim to respect.

The Takeaway:

• Count the Cost of “Winning”: If a policy backed by your party causes clear harm to real people on the other side, don’t blindly defend it just to put points on the board. A victory that leaves your neighbors damaged isn’t a civic win; it’s just partisan cruelty.
• Support Good Outcomes Regardless of the Jersey: If a proposal genuinely helps people—including those across town who don’t vote like you—don’t oppose it simply because an algorithm, a talking head, or your party’s playbook told you to hate the people who proposed it.
• Acknowledge the Work Still Needed: Recognize that even thirty-year relationships like mine are unfinished business. If we are honest, all of us—myself included—have work to do to ensure we value real human well-being over reflexive political loyalty.

4. Clean Up Your Attention: Turn Off the Outrage Engine

You can’t get off the political sidelines if you keep feeding the apps that make you angry. News networks and social media platforms rely on a simple business model: make you mad, get your attention, show you ads, and make money. Every time you click on a rage-inducing headline or argue with a troll, you are paying the people who profit from tearing us apart.

We need to guard our attention the same way we guard our health. Eating a daily diet of online outrage warps how we see other people, making every interaction feel like a fight.

The Takeaway: Take a hard look at your feed. Unfollow accounts that post anger-bait, insult people, or try to start fights. Stop giving your time and money to outlets that sell outrage instead of facts. Take that time back and spend it face-to-face with real people in your life.

IV. Taking Back Control

The division we feel today isn’t a permanent fact of life. It was built over time through policy, kept alive by money, and fed by an apparatus that profits when we treat our neighbors like rival fan bases. We’ve been coaxed into cheering and screaming from the digital bleachers while real communities bear the consequences of our negligence.

Understanding how the trap works gives us our power back. We are not obligated to play the role an algorithm picked out for us. We don’t have to surrender thirty-year friendships to online culture wars, nor do we have to accept being treated as rare “exceptions” to someone else’s prejudice. Most importantly, we do not have to treat politics as a game where our neighbor’s suffering is acceptable collateral damage for our team’s victory.

Real change won’t come from winning a Facebook argument, dropping a witty reply, or proving someone wrong in a comment section. It happens when we step out of the bleachers, turn our backs on the anger machine, and start measuring our politics not by who won the news cycle, but by how our decisions actually affect human beings in the real world.

Glossary

• Attention Economy: A business model where internet platforms, social media apps, and news outlets compete for your time and mental focus, often using high-conflict content to keep you engaged so they can sell advertising.
• Exclusionary Zoning: Local government laws that regulate land use by requiring large minimum lot sizes, setting high building standards, or banning multi-family apartment buildings—effectively pricing working-class and lower-income families out of specific towns or school districts.
• Expressive Partisanship / Homerism: A form of political engagement where party affiliation functions as a fierce, inherited personal identity and unconditional loyalty to a “team” rather than a practical judgment on policies or outcomes.
• Negative Partisanship: Political behavior driven primarily by hostility, fear, or dislike toward an opposing political party rather than affection or agreement with one’s own party.
• Redlining: The historic practice by federal government agencies (such as the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation) and private mortgage lenders of drawing physical red lines on city maps around Black or low-income neighborhoods to systematically deny them mortgages and capital investment.
• Subtyping: A psychological defense mechanism where a person encounters someone who contradicts their broad group stereotype and labels that person an “exception to the rule,” thereby preserving their original prejudice intact.
• Superordinate Goals: Urgent, concrete practical tasks or objectives that require cooperation among groups who might otherwise harbor hostility or distrust toward one another.

Bibliography & Further Reading

• Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: The New Press, 2010.
• Bishop, Bill. The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008.
• Iyengar, Shanto, Gaurav Sood, and Yphtach Lelkes. “Affect, Not Ideology: A Social Identity Perspective on Polarization.” Public Opinion Quarterly 76, no. 3 (2012): 405–431.
• Mason, Lilliana. Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018.
• Rothstein, Richard. The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2017.
• Sherif, Muzafer. Group Conflict and Co-operation: Their Social Psychology. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966.
• Trounstine, Jessica. Segregation by Design: Local Politics and Inequality in American Cities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

@stib

Exactly.

We call it “using social media,” but much of the time we are producing the content, supplying the relationships, training the algorithms, generating the engagement, and handing over the data.

Then the company sells access to our attention.

Quite an extraordinary business arrangement when you look at it plainly.

#Meta #Facebook #SocialMedia #AttentionEconomy #DigitalLabour

FACEBOOK IS TOXIC. META IS AWFUL.
WHY CONTINUE FEEDING IT? 💎

Nearly everyone complains about Facebook and Meta.

The algorithms are toxic.

The advertising is invasive.

The outrage is manufactured.

CHILDREN ARE BEING HARMED.

Privacy is disappearing.

And then millions of people open Facebook or Instagram.

Again.

And again.

I genuinely do not understand it.

If you believe these companies are damaging children, manipulating attention, and making billions from human vulnerability, why are you still giving them your presence?

Especially the parents.

If Facebook and Instagram are unhealthy for your children, what exactly are you modeling by remaining there yourself?

“We know this place is harmful, darling, but Mummy and Daddy have photographs to look at.”

I left Meta years ago.

I didn’t die.

My friends did not evaporate.

Civilization continued.

There is email.

There are phones.

THERE IS THE OPEN WEB.

There is even the terrifying possibility of seeing another human being, god forbid, in person.

Meta survives because people who complain about it continue supplying exactly what it needs:

Their attention.

Their relationships.

Their outrage.

THEIR CHILDREN.

You do not have to wait for Zuckerberg to become a better person.

You can simply leave today.

The door swings both ways.

@DigitalCoup
@economics_that_works

#Facebook #Meta #Instagram #SocialMedia #Algorithms #BigTech #DigitalWellbeing #OnlineSafety #ChildSafety #Privacy #AttentionEconomy #TechEthics #SocialMediaAddiction #Zuckerberg #DeleteFacebook

MARK ZUCKERBERG
AND HIS FILTHY BUSINESS.

Zuckerberg, I don’t like what you and your company, Meta, have done to our internet.

You took something built for human connection and turned enormous parts of it into machinery for attention, manipulation, and profit.

To me, that is profoundly anti-human.

Your business earns money from people when they are lonely, frightened, angry, insecure, addicted to attention, or already hurting.

Worse, the machinery can deepen the very damage it profits from, then invite people back tomorrow for another round. That isn’t connecting humanity.

IT IS EXTRACTING VALUE FROM HUMAN VULNERABILITY.

You are entitled to become extraordinarily wealthy.

I am entitled to say I despise the way you are doing it.

https://youtu.be/X-qzrT7m9Ag?si=eleVTjQwNLn2DYVX

@economics_that_works

#Meta #MarkZuckerberg #SocialMedia #BigTech #HumanVulnerability #AttentionEconomy #OnlineHarm #TechEthics #Internet #Accountability #facebook #instagram #connection #human

FYI: Regulators corner the algorithm as Big Tech's attention economy faces a reckoning: Brussels, Boston and a courtroom in Oakland converged this week on the same accusation, using strikingly similar language, without any apparent coordination between them. https://ppc.land/regulators-corner-the-algorithm-as-big-techs-attention-economy-faces-a-reckoning/ #BigTech #AttentionEconomy #Regulation #Algorithm #TechNews

Why 55% of Americans Stopped Posting On #SocialMedia

A new #Incogni survey suggests Americans are pulling back from social media, with more than half saying "maintaining an online presence feels like work" and 55% reporting they post less than they did five years ago. "The full study concludes that there's been a significant shift in public attitudes toward social media," reports PCMag. "Where it was once fun and relaxing, it's now growing dark and angsty..."
#attention #attentioneconomy

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/26/07/13/0548235/why-55-of-americans-stopped-posting-on-social-media?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed

ICYMI: Regulators corner the algorithm as Big Tech's attention economy faces a reckoning: Brussels, Boston and a courtroom in Oakland converged this week on the same accusation, using strikingly similar language, without any apparent coordination between them. https://ppc.land/regulators-corner-the-algorithm-as-big-techs-attention-economy-faces-a-reckoning/ #BigTech #AttentionEconomy #Regulation #Algorithm #TechNews

Regulators corner the algorithm as Big Tech's attention economy faces a reckoning: Brussels, Boston and a courtroom in Oakland converged this week on the same accusation, using strikingly similar language, without any apparent coordination between them. https://ppc.land/regulators-corner-the-algorithm-as-big-techs-attention-economy-faces-a-reckoning/ #BigTech #AttentionEconomy #AlgorithmRegulation #DigitalPrivacy #TechAccountability

I Hate The Way We Talk Online

A little over a week ago, I asked on Threads:

Without googling or using a chatbot, do you know what the top songs (by chart position) in your favorite genres are right now? Could you sing, rap, or even hum them if asked?

What I expected in return were answers from acquaintances and strangers alike about their awareness of what’s actually popular, rather than the hyper-personal, algorithmically curated music being piped into their ears or the tunes that the hyper-niche online music fandom they may be a part of was promoting. 

What I got instead were weirdly defensive or hostile replies that seemed to take my innocuous question as an invitation to debate the merits of charts including conspiracy theories about their purpose.  Others merely wanted to pat themselves on the back for having edgy tastes.

I’m desperate for some sense of a shared cultural language or zeitgeist right now, but not like this.

On a recent episode of Brittany Luse’s It’s Been A Minute podcast, Wired’s Jason Parharm argued that this current stage of overly algorithmic social media has fostered a “main character” mentality where the primary currency is attention and everything, and everyone is judged through that lens. In this world, platforms reward “algorithm-speak” over individual expression and nuance, and any sense of a monoculture around anything other than the algorithm is almost non-existent.

The price of engaging with topics I care about or content I enjoy in spaces where I know like-minded folks exist is that I earn the attention of those who care more about winning algorithmically than connection. Much like literacy, social skills have atrophied in this age of social media. 

As the World Cup has been showcasing lately, we can still find commonality and shared language around live sports, but even that is being fractured by the ways we experience the world through our digital frameworks.  I’ve written before about how attending WNBA games in-person is nothing like the tribalism rampant when discussing the W online. I’d amend that today to note that fandom around one particular player and team can sometimes feel like the comments section IRL when they come out in full force at your home arena.

They reek of that “main character” mentality in which people assume they are the most entitled to everyone’s attention rather than reading the room and being good guests. 

It’s infuriating.

I’m rejecting the shifting social mores that place the highest value on attention. I’m done with aura, rizz, maxxing, and mogging. I’m not accepting a post-literate society. 

I refuse!

Let’s discuss topics without feeling the need to win a non-existent argument. 

Hot takes? No.

Unsourced Breaking News from non-journalists? Nah, B.

Engage with nuance. Show the grace you would extend offline to those you meet on these virtual streets.

Have something real to say? Write a blog.

Want to better understand the world we live in? Read a book. 

Want to be a creator? Don’t let AI write your shit, render your art, or make your infographics.

Don’t be a “main character.” Be a person. 

Don’t make me enter my curmudgeon era.

Despite how far back I have to scroll to find my year in age verification features, I’m too young and pretty to be a full-time crank. 

Youtube and Algorithmic Feeds

Here’s why I think modern Youtube is bad, and how you can improve your experience of the site.

https://lzon.ca/posts/other/youtube-algorithm/

#IndieWeb #PersonalWeb #Blog #YouTube #Enshittification #AttentionEconomy #DigitalWellbeing

https://dominusmarkham.com/genocide-but-make-it-unmarketable/

#ElFasher
#AttentionEconomy
#HumanitarianCrisis
#MediaIndifference
#DarfurGenocide
#MarkhamOnIt
#markhamunfiltered
#writing

✮ Net ✮

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The Goldfish Never Said That

https://bolesblogs.com/2026/06/23/the-goldfish-never-said-that/

Much food for thought at the tradeoffs between usability, security, and more. A consumer protection authority (CCPA) in India fined Zepto INR 700,000 a few months ago for using dark patterns. The amount is chicken feed compared with how much they may have ripped consumers off via those patterns.

https://www.livemint.com/mint-lounge/business-of-life/tap-regret-repeat-pitfalls-of-frictionless-design-11781772392426.html

#FrictionlessDesign #UXDesign #DarkPatterns #EthicalUX #DigitalWellbeing #HumanCenteredDesign #UserExperience #DesignEthics #AttentionEconomy #CognitiveLoad

FYI: Pause ads beat CTV spots 2x on attention, WunderKIND data shows: WunderKIND Ads releases the first CTV pause ad benchmarks, drawing on millions of programmatic impressions across 15 verticals with TVision attention data. https://ppc.land/pause-ads-beat-ctv-spots-2x-on-attention-wunderkind-data-shows/ #DigitalMarketing #Advertising #CTV #MarketingStrategy #AttentionEconomy

“Chris Hayes’ book “The Siren’s Call” is very good on this subject – it goes through a lot of evidence that people’s #judgement is made a lot worse by the state of constant low-level #cognitive #exhaustion created by the #attentioneconomy.” open.substack.com/pub/backofmi...

industrialising ourselves craz...

There's A Reason Zombies Are Everywhere This Decade (Someone's Getting Rich)

https://youtu.be/-XgCFn6Vbnw?si=ZpDFEfCuEtvebmdZ

#AttentionEconomy #BarrysEconomics #economics #Inequality #SocialJustice #BehaviouralEconomics #shorttermism #research #neuroscience #VideoEssay #doomscrolling #metaphor #Zombies

Hey, Dumbass — You’re Supposed to Be Paying Attention

By Cliff Potts, CSO, and Editor-in-Chief of WPS News
Baybay City, Leyte, Philippines — June 6, 2026, 07:00 PHST

This Is Not Subtle, and It Isn’t New

Let’s dispense with politeness. What’s happening right now is not complicated, mysterious, or “algorithmic fate.” It is willful inattention trained into people over years.

For more than two years, WPS News has published sustained, sourced, historically grounded analysis on authoritarian drift, economic precarity, geopolitics, and institutional failure. The work is not fringe. It is not speculative. It is not vibes. And yet it is routinely ignored—across the United States, the EU, and even here in the Philippines.

That isn’t an accident. It’s learned behavior.

The Internet Trained You to Stop Thinking

The modern internet does not exist to inform you. It exists to manage you.

Platforms reward:

• emotional reflex instead of judgment
• speed instead of accuracy
• tribal signaling instead of synthesis
• repetition instead of memory

Anything that requires sustained attention, historical context, or second-order thinking is quietly pushed aside. Not banned. Not censored. Just ignored.

That’s worse.

Silence Is Not Neutral — It’s Cowardice with a UX

When peers, professionals, or “informed” readers say nothing, it’s tempting to assume disagreement. Most of the time, it’s simpler than that: they don’t want the responsibility that comes with understanding.

Engaging seriously with analysis means:

• admitting prior assumptions were wrong
• acknowledging complicity
• accepting that problems are structural, not personal
• recognizing that fixes are costly and uncomfortable

So people scroll. Silence becomes a lifestyle choice.

Younger Generations Aren’t Stupid — They’re Drowned

This is not a generational insult. It’s an observation.

Many younger readers are trapped in survival mode: debt, insecure work, housing stress, constant alerts, infinite feeds. When life feels unstable, long-range analysis feels abstract—even when it directly explains why life is unstable.

That doesn’t make the analysis wrong. It means the system is hostile to understanding.

The Death of Judgment as a Social Skill

Once upon a time, judgment was learned—through mentorship, institutions, and consequence. That pipeline is gone.

The internet flattened authority but replaced it with volatility. Experience is treated as irrelevance. Memory is framed as nostalgia. Long-view thinking is labeled elitism.

The result is a culture that reacts constantly and understands nothing.

This Isn’t an American Problem. It’s a Human One.

The same disengagement appears everywhere: the U.S., Europe, Southeast Asia, the Philippines. Different politics, same pattern.

If information doesn’t flatter, reassure, or entertain, it is filtered out—not by governments alone, but by habits cultivated over years of platform design.

People will later claim they “never saw this coming.” The archive will prove otherwise.

Being Ignored Does Not Mean Being Wrong

History is unkind to the argument that relevance equals immediacy.

Work that documents corruption, names power honestly, and refuses spectacle is often ignored until events force recognition. Archives exist for that reason.

WPS News is not built for dopamine. It is built for record.

Read or Don’t — But Stop Pretending This Is Invisible

The information is there. The connections are there. The patterns are obvious to anyone willing to look longer than a scroll.

If you choose not to pay attention, that’s your right. But stop pretending ignorance is imposed on you.

You were warned. Repeatedly.

For more social commentary, please see Occupy 2.5 at https://Occupy25.com

This article will be archived as part of the ongoing WPS News Monthly Brief Series available through Amazon.

References

Carr, N. (2020). The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. W. W. Norton & Company.
Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. PublicAffairs.
Postman, N. (1985). Amusing Ourselves to Death. Viking Penguin.