Your Mind Is the Product — Part 5 of 9

The attention economy, the algorithmic manufacture of outrage, and why you cannot look away.

The internet was, in its early years, imagined as a commons — a shared public space for communication, learning, and the free exchange of ideas. This vision persisted for perhaps a decade. Then the market arrived, and the commons was enclosed.

The mechanism was elegant. Rather than charging users directly — which would exclude too many and invite resistance — the platforms offered their services for free. The payment was attention. Users’ time, their clicks, their emotional responses, their browsing habits, their social relationships — all of this was harvested and sold to advertisers. The product was not the platform. The product was the user.

Photo by Sivani Bandaru on Unsplash

But this was only the beginning. The platforms discovered that attention could be manufactured and that interfaces could be designed to maximise the time users spent on them, to trigger compulsive return visits, to generate emotional arousal that would keep eyes on screens. The entire engineering genius of the most sophisticated technology companies in history was pointed, ultimately, at making human beings less capable of diverting their gaze.

We speak of “spending” time, as if it were currency. We speak of being “productive” or “wasting” the day. The language of the economy has so thoroughly colonised our relationship with time that we feel guilty for rest, for pleasure, for any hour not exchanged for something measurable. This is not natural. It is cultivated.

The consequences are not only commercial. They are psychological and political. When attention becomes a commodity, it is optimised for engagement, not for truth or depth or meaning. Outrage, fear, and tribal identification are algorithmically amplified because they generate more engagement than nuance, evidence, or complexity. The political culture produced by the attention economy is one of permanent crisis, performative conflict, and epistemological collapse — because this is what is most profitable.

The philosopher Bernard Stiegler spent decades arguing that the technologies of memory — writing, recording, now the algorithm — shape not only what we remember but what we are capable of thinking. An attention economy optimised for engagement does not merely distract us. It degrades the cognitive and emotional capacities on which democracy, solidarity, and genuine self-knowledge depend. We are not simply spending more time online. We are becoming different kinds of minds.

The commodification of attention is, in this sense, the deepest form of the commodification of the person. It does not take your labour. It takes your capacity to think.

This is part 5 of a 9-part series on capitalism and the commodification of human life. Next: Part VI — “There Is No Alternative.”