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Attention Economy

Your attention is the product. And outrage is the cheapest way to harvest it.

In the attention economy, media companies don't sell information. They sell your eyeballs to advertisers. The longer you stay, the more you click, the more money they make. This means the incentive is not to inform you — it's to engage you. And nothing engages like fear, anger, and tribal conflict.

This is not a conspiracy. It's a business model. A headline that makes you curious earns one click. A headline that makes you furious earns a click, a share, a comment thread, and a return visit. Multiply that across billions of users and the math is obvious. Outrage is more profitable than nuance. Conflict is more profitable than context. Being right is less important than being engaging.

The result is a media environment structurally misaligned with truth. Not because journalists are dishonest, but because the system rewards the wrong things. Stories get simplified, polarized, and emotionally charged — not because that's accurate, but because that's what the algorithm promotes.

Neil Postman warned in 1985 that we'd amuse ourselves to death. He was close. We're actually outraging ourselves to death. Every time you feel a surge of righteous anger from a headline, remember: that emotion is not a side effect. It's the product.

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