An Economy That Runs on Attention

A few weeks ago, I watched a fragment of a documentary featuring one of the most popular influencers in Poland. The format was light, almost entertaining — a mix of talent-show aesthetics and casual commentary about how content is made. At one point, the protagonist began explaining, with calm confidence and visible satisfaction, how he deliberately shaped narratives, emotions, and conflicts in order to keep people engaged — how he tested reactions, escalated tension, learned to hold attention and not let it slip.

Listening to him, I had a strange, almost disorienting impression that I was watching someone openly describe predatory behavior, but doing so in a tone usually reserved for technical expertise. There was no hesitation in his voice, no trace of doubt. He spoke as if he were explaining a craft — something learned, practiced, and mastered.

What he was describing, stripped of euphemisms, was manipulation. The intentional steering of emotions. The deliberate construction of dependency. The conscious extraction of time and attention from other people’s lives. And yet no one reacted as if that were the case.

The audience applauded. The comments celebrated his intelligence, his cleverness, his ability to “break the system.” The more clearly he described how he controlled people’s reactions, the more admiration he received. Watching it unfold, it was difficult not to feel a sharp kind of cognitive dissonance.

But at some point, my discomfort shifted. It stopped being directed at him and began to encompass the entire scene. What I was witnessing no longer felt like individual wrongdoing, but like a collective phenomenon — something disturbingly close to a mild form of Stockholm syndrome. A person explains, quite openly, how he manipulates you, exploits your attention, and profits from your emotional investment, and the response is applause. Not despite the manipulation, but because of it.

That reversal only starts to make sense when you look at the broader — and quite dark — structure surrounding it.

See, this behavior is not rewarded accidentally. It is functional. We live inside an economic system that increasingly struggles to produce real, tangible value for the majority of people within it. Stable work, meaningful production, and clearly defined social roles have been eroding for decades, replaced by precarious service labor, financial abstraction, and debt-driven consumption. Fewer and fewer people are involved in creating things that directly sustain life or provide necessary public services. The rest are left to compete inside a post-industrial economy that has detached itself from material production.

In such an environment, attention becomes one of the few remaining resources that can still be extracted at scale. And big tech platforms do not merely host this competition, but organize it. They turn visibility into opportunity, engagement into income, and narrative dominance into survival. When large parts of society are pushed out of productive roles and into symbolic ones, the struggle shifts from making things to making oneself visible. People begin to fight over scraps of attention the way earlier societies fought over land or wages.

This is why the system rewards predatory behavior. It needs escalation. It needs conflict. It needs constant stimulation to keep the machinery moving. Calm presence does not circulate value. Quiet competence does not generate clicks. What circulates is tension, outrage, drama, and narrative warfare — modern gladiator games where participants do not produce goods, but exchange stories, identities, and emotions in an endless loop.

At the same time, this arena does not fill itself with participants by accident. It draws in those for whom other paths have quietly closed. For many young people, the old promises no longer hold. They study, graduate, follow the prescribed steps, and still find themselves unable to secure stable work, independence, or even the possibility of leaving their parents’ homes. In a landscape where traditional forms of labor no longer provide entry or dignity, it is hardly surprising that they gravitate toward the one market that still appears open — fluid, visible, and seemingly accessible to anyone willing to try.

From that perspective, the admiration directed toward figures who master this economy begins to look less like moral failure and more like identification. These are not heroes because they exploit others, but because they appear to have escaped precarity by learning how to survive inside the only system that seems to reward initiative at all. That this system rewards the extraction of attention rather than the production of anything real is tragic, but blaming those who play with the cards they were dealt misses the deeper betrayal that left them with so few alternatives to begin with.

And this is precisely where the deeper contradiction emerges.

See, the fundamental problem is that very little, almost none, of this produces anything real. What is exchanged is largely emptiness, dressed up as meaning. The one who wins is not the one who creates something necessary or enduring, but the one who is most effective at selling that emptiness back to others — at convincing them that this exchange matters, that it is worth their time, their attention, their emotional energy.

Seen from this angle, the applause makes grim sense. People are not cheering manipulation because they love being deceived. They are cheering success inside a system that offers very few other paths to achieve security, status, or recognition. In a way, identifying with the winner becomes a way of coping with a game they cannot leave, a way of resolving the discomfort of being exploited by siding with the exploiter.

This is the tragedy of late capitalism in its post-industrial phase. When production collapses into abstraction, when labor detaches from tangible outcomes, meaning itself becomes a commodity. Narratives replace goods. Performance replaces contribution. And manipulation becomes indistinguishable from competence, because there is so little else left to reward.

From here, the constant performance, the inability to leave the stage, the exhaustion of always having to narrate one’s life begin to look less like individual pathology and more like adaptation to an environment that no longer knows what to do with human beings except keep them competing for attention.

Nothing about this requires conscious cruelty. The system does not need villains. It only needs participants willing to play, and audiences too exhausted or too entangled to refuse. The predator does not need to hide, because the economy itself depends on his methods.

And so the spectacle continues, applauded not because it is healthy or just, but because it reflects the only remaining logic the system has left.

However, it’s difficult to imagine that this arrangement could sustain itself for very long. A system that depends almost entirely on performance, stimulation, and the constant production of empty meaning has no natural point of rest and no mechanism for stopping itself. Each new platform, format, or technological promise is introduced as if it might finally compensate for what was lost before, as if another layer of narrative or optimization could somehow replace what was quietly eroded along the way.

And no one involved seems willing to pause the spectacle, because pausing would mean facing the possibility that there is very little underneath it.

What we are left with is something closer to an ongoing experiment than a stable way of living. A generation raised almost entirely inside mediated attention, continuous comparison, and psychological pressure, with little memory of a world structured differently, is absorbing the consequences in real time — all while carrying nervous systems shaped over hundreds of thousands of years for conditions that bear little resemblance to this one. From the evolutionary perspective, the pace, density, and abstraction of the environment have changed almost overnight, while the biological machinery tasked with regulating meaning, safety, and connection has not.

Rising anxiety, depression, emotional instability, and more severe breakdowns don’t appear here as isolated failures or personal shortcomings, but as predictable responses to a mismatch that no amount of narrative, optimization, or technological promise can resolve. In that sense, the applause no longer looks like approval so much as momentum — a collective insistence on continuing the performance, even as the ground beneath it grows increasingly unstable.