#attention-economy

#attention-economy

How do you make a child never put down the phone? That's called the engineering of addiction. They engineered it, they put these features on the phones. These are Trojan horses: they look wonderful and great ... but you invite them in and they take over.

Why do I have to bring a mini computer that tries to drive engagement 24/7? Why do I take it into bed? Wake up with it, eat my dinner with friends with it? We don't stop. The problem lies partly in the addictive business model of digital platforms, which prioritise engagement and time spent on devices.

Mastering digital marketing and social media is essential for business growth in today's media landscape. Building a brand in the current attention economy requires understanding what it means to be authentic and how to nurture a loyal following through genuine connection and strategic engagement.

For years, gambling lived on the outer edges of the video game business. It was boxed in by geography, hemmed in by regulation, and treated as culturally separate from mainstream gaming. However, the wall has now largely come down. The State of Video Gaming in 2026 by Epyllion's CEO Matthew Ball argues that gambling, especially iGaming, online sports betting, and prediction markets, has become one of the biggest forces redirecting how players use their time and money.

Notice that Google doesn't refute the allegations. The exact details of the EU investigation haven't been reported, but Google is no doubt still feeling burned after evidence surfaced in the DOJ's 2023 search antitrust trial about its opaque search ad pricing. Jerry Dischler, then GM and VP of Google Ads, testified that Google would increase ad prices by up to 10% when it needed to meet investor revenue expectations. He jokingly referred to the practice as "shaking the couch cushions."

For years, Irish radio was defined by stability. The voices were familiar, the schedules were predictable, the territory was clearly marked. But, as February 2026 gets underway, the war for Ireland's airwaves is very much on, with RTÉ and Newstalk ready to face off across the chessboard.

I spent years believing that being reasonable was a virtue. I thought that if someone I cared about - a partner, a colleague, a close friend - kept pushing after I said no, the burden was on me to be clearer. I believed that if I could find the right metaphor, stay calm enough or strike the perfect emotional note, they would finally understand. I wanted them to see my no as human, valid and final. But they never did. They were not listening.

For those who are in desperate need of stimulation, this zine delivers - its visual language is razor-sharp and packed with colour, each page feels like a porno magazine that has vomited everywhere. Hattie calls it a "frenetic deluge", a collection of themes that circle the drain of "online fatigue", a way to process an excessive amount of information in order to create meaning and seek comfort.

The internet you experience daily-endless scrolling, algorithmic feeds serving content you didn't ask for, AI-generated slop clogging search results-isn't the only internet available. It's just the one that's easiest to stumble into. You're not stuck with the internet that has evolved alongside the rise of hegemonic platforms. We're 20-plus years into the social internet, and the winners of the last round of audience capture have made clear they're shifting to optimize for social broadcasting instead of networking, to maximize market share and market cap.

"You can have as much money as you want to pour into the algorithm and buy ads," Kaplan told Business Insider. "But if you don't have the right founder who's able to build a community and the attention that you need to build a real product that people want, all of that money ... is meaningless."

Memes have become the clearest and most direct language of digital culture: condensed fragments of reality that synthesize the complexity of the present and circulate at the same speed as a society surrendered to hyperstimulation. From the Dancing Baby of the 1990s to the endless templates of X, Instagram, or TikTok, memes have evolved from simple ephemeral jokes to veritable systems for decoding the world, semiotic capsules that allow us to process the political, the social, and the intimate.

But walking the floors this year, one thing is unmistakable: The industry is no longer dazzled by what's possible. It's demanding proof of what works. As technology accelerates, consumer expectations fragment, and financial scrutiny intensifies, 2026 is shaping up to be a reckoning year for brands. According to Havas' Meaningful Brands research, 78% of brands could disappear tomorrow and consumers wouldn't care. Loyalty has become conditional. Attention is scarce. And relevance must be earned daily.

A few years ago, the art of the brand collab most often involved bringing together two brands that already had overlapping design styles, fanbases, or product categories. Recall partnerships like Nike and Apple's successful 2016 Series 2 Watch launch, for example; or Dolce & Gabbana's elevated designs for Smeg in 2019; or even Lego's 2020 collection with Ikea. All of these pairings make some measure of intuitive sense. But over the past couple of years, something has clearly changed.

Microlearning solutions are reshaping corporate training by delivering focused, actionable learning experiences that fit seamlessly into the modern workday. Instead of long, content-heavy modules, employees receive concise, purpose-built bursts of learning that strengthen retention, accelerate upskilling, and support real-time performance. As organizations look ahead to 2026, microlearning solutions are emerging as one of the most effective ways to build adaptable, high-performing teams.

In this episode of Galaxy Brain, Charlie Warzel explores the burgeoning industry of prediction markets. These platforms let people wager on everything from elections and award shows to the most trivial internet ephemera, framing bets as tradable "shares" that rise and fall like stocks. With billions in weekly trading volume, massive new funding rounds, and even a CNN partnership with the prediction-betting platform, Kalshi, prediction markets are quickly moving from niche curiosity to mainstream-media fixture-openly touting ambitions to financialize everything.

Today the foundations of truth, and trust, are systematically eroded by a hybrid hurricane: artificial intelligence sophisticated enough to mimic reality, with human minds increasingly unable to discern the difference. Beyond the challenge of technology advancing faster than regulation, this is about dangerous synchronicity. AI's explosive capabilities collide with our own cognitive deterioration. We're navigating a hybrid tipping zone, where micro (agency decay), meso (AI mainstreaming), macro (race toward AI supremacy), and meta (planetary deterioration) forces mutually accelerate each other into an unprecedented crisis of trust.

Anti-media ideologues like Elon Musk love to deploy disempowering language like " you are the media now " to assist in their long-term project of eroding the media's institutional authority. But thinking about the media that broke through in 2025, it really was the weird and non-traditional stuff that triumphed, from the work of Lane Kiffin obsessive Ben Garrett to white nationalist Nick Fuentes lamenting the " low IQ antisemitism" of podcaster Candace Owens, thus kicking off his " generational run."

Part of attention is sometimes conflict, provocation. We're lonely and depressed, getting more polarized every day. We're endlessly doomscrolling, bombarded by rage bait. And it's because our experience on the internet is being overrun by these attention-based algorithms controlled by tech companies that don't have our best interests at heart. I'm tired of what social media is doing to our brains. It has to be possible to have a better experience on the internet, grounded in creativity and human connection, a more human algorithm.

Remember when the internet felt like finding a secret, sprawling attic full of weird treasures? Back when you could actually stumble upon a deeply niche fan site for a forgotten TV show, or read a friend's real, unfiltered feelings on their messy personal blog? It was messy, it was personal, and honestly, it felt like freedom. Now? Now the internet feels less like a space for genuine connection

Like many, I have definitely experienced symptoms of chronic Instagram Story fatigue. I regularly open the app, take a 30-minute swipe through pictures of dogs and babies and nice dinners and influencer events and political statements and then shut the app down feeling like I've gained nothing. Then I open it back up to share a story or a column as if my post is somehow a particularly interesting one compared to everyone else's and therefore an exception to the rule... but I digress.

From almost the beginning of his rise, Zohran Mamdani positioned himself as an anti-Trump democratic socialist who would use the bully pulpit of Gracie Mansion to battle Maga attacks on the city. Trump, sensing an opportunity to create yet another punching bag, called Mamdani a communist and questioned his American citizenship. He even went to the trouble of endorsing Mamdani's opponent, Andrew Cuomo, in the mayoral election.

The Information Age has birthed the attention economy, an industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars anchored in keeping eyeballs firmly glued to screens, thus generating ad revenue. Every second spent clicking and scrolling through the trivial and/or sordid details of other people's lives, people that you will most likely never meet- celebrities, politicians, influencers- is another dollar in some already obscenely wealthy tech bro's wallet.

"Now where we're moving is actually a blend of creativity, because now it's a creator economy of authenticity that's coming out," she said on an Inc. panel for National Entrepreneurship Month (watch the session below). "Being able to tell stories like we did previously in the broadcast generation of ads, and then layering in the ability to actually measure that with data."

Open the YouTube app today, and a Short starts playing before you've even tapped anything. Your subscriptions and recommendations are pushed a layer deeper. This is the hostile takeover of your user experience. For most of its life, YouTube was a place you visited with a purpose. You searched for tutorials, watched creators you followed, or looked up something specific.

The most potent form of social today is basically in group chats, which is obviously not new technology, but what it's highlighting is the fact that that's a trusted group of people who you actually know, who are verifiably human

The first browser wars were about speed and simplicity, the next one is about control. Every click, search and purchase is being absorbed into a closed ecosystem where algorithms decide what people see and how it is framed. Whoever owns that mediation layer owns the flow of information and the attention economy that depends on it. The goal this time is not faster browsing or better design, it's total dependency.