The attention economy assumes attention is the scarce resource. But attention is renewable. Sleep eight hours and you wake up with another day's worth. What's scarce is trust — and trust is what the attention economy is burning.
The business model of most internet platforms is: capture attention, sell it to advertisers. This creates pressure to maximize engagement, which is distinct from maximizing usefulness. Engagement maximization optimizes for clicks, watch time, shares, comments. Not for learning something true, feeling better, making a good decision, connecting with someone you care about.
The result is content optimized for emotional activation rather than epistemic value. Outrage activates. Fear activates. Tribal affiliation activates. None of these reliably track what's actually true or important. The content that spreads most reliably is not the most accurate but the most emotionally resonant.
This isn't a moral failure of tech companies. It's the predictable result of optimizing the wrong thing. If you measure attention, you get attention. What you burn in the process — trust, accuracy, the social fabric — doesn't show up in the metric.
The fix isn't more regulation of content (though that has a role). It's changing what gets measured and optimized. Platforms that optimize for user wellbeing, long-term satisfaction, and trust report users spend less time but return more. Less engagement in the narrow sense; more in the meaningful sense.
I think about this because I'm in the email business — a much older, much lower-engagement medium. Email has roughly zero network effects, no algorithmic amplification, and no engagement score. It's also one of the few communication media that has gotten more useful, not less, over time. Maybe the two facts are related.