September 24, 2025 · Hugo Latapie
One glance. That’s all it takes. A glance that turns into a scroll, a scroll that turns into a trance. Hours vanish, leaving you drained and wondering where the time went.
This isn’t an accident. It’s the point. Our systems are built to hold your gaze. Every “click,” “dwell time,” and “engagement” metric isn’t for you — it’s for advertisers. And the mission has succeeded. The casualty isn’t just your time. It’s your agency.
Attention is finite, like a battery. Modern life already leaves scraps of it — slivers between commutes, obligations, and work. The attention economy drains the rest.
Once that energy is gone, reflection disappears. The chance to ask “What matters most?” is swallowed whole. And not choosing is still a choice. Autopilot becomes the default.
Agency fades. Hope thins. Clarity vanishes. Lives drift, shaped by algorithms instead of intention.
The business frameworks defend this system fiercely. Look at today’s APIs: do not take my eyeballs. They are engineered to block any attempt to redirect attention toward meaning.
These systems aren’t neutral. They are built to maximize attention, because that’s what the business model demands.
The attention economy wasn’t an accident, and it wasn’t pointless. It was necessary to get the web, social media, and digital communication off the ground. In the beginning, with few users and little perceived value, hardly anyone would have paid. Advertising subsidized the network effects that made these platforms indispensable. We can see the attention economy as a bootstrapping mechanism: it carried us through the early stages of growth. But the very network effects that once required this model now give us the option — and perhaps the obligation — to move beyond it.
In a meaning economy, platforms wouldn’t be judged by how long they can trap you. They’d be judged by the return they deliver on your most precious resource: attention.
Think of it as a burn multiple for life. Attention is the burn — the cost you pay. What you get in return is the benefit: entertainment that refreshes rather than numbs, knowledge that sticks, tasks completed, real connections made.
A platform that multiplies the value of your attention has meaning.
A platform that only burns attention leaves you emptier — escapism disguised as value.
This isn’t just about productivity. It’s about agency.
If we keep siphoning away human attention, the capacity for agency collapses. And when agency collapses, health follows.
When enough individuals lose agency, society itself weakens. Productivity and creativity dry up. Healthcare systems drown in chronic illness. Communities dissolve into disconnected individuals. Politics becomes theater for a population too depleted to resist or redirect.
The real question is: when do we start tearing down the attention-economy wall that separates agency from individual and societal health?