"The Monetisation of Attention"

"Those who warned of 'filter bubbles' and 'echo chambers' were right, but right in an unexpected way. Both phrases misleadingly suggest spending our digital days in a warm bath of mutual agreement, when what really happens is that social media shows us our enemies behaving at their most outrageous (and thus compelling) worst. And we're rewarded, with shares and likes, for condemning them in hyperbolic terms–and so our tribal allegiances harden, until those who we once viewed merely as opponents come to seem like another species. Rather than democratising the public sphere, social media replaces it with a global Freudian id, in which everyone's darkest impulses collide, and sane debate becomes impossible. A healthy democracy, it turns out, requires people to keep certain emotions to themselves, and mull their views before expressing them; but online the attention accrues to those who do the opposite."

In a 2019 Guardian article, Oliver Burkeman laments the "attention economy."