Our daily twenty-four hours? A hell of distraction. We spend whole hours in front of screens, with constant notifications, endless messages, requests, information, unverifiable news, photos, videos. The devices we hold call to us, pursue us, possess us. Have we transformed into goldfish, deprived of any ability to live differently, unable to think or hope, prisoners of absolute transparency, submerged in the ocean of the Internet and social media, subject to the control of algorithms?

This evolution was not exactly anticipated. However, with unwavering determination, the new empires have built a model of digital servitude, without protective measures and without preventive strategies. At the core of this evolution is not some technological determinism but a program that marks the transition to a new form of capitalism. This is the attention economy, the nine-second economy, which seeks to increase the productivity of time in order to extract even more value from it.

Time, therefore, is elongated through its compression; it has become an endless now. Acceleration has replaced habit with attention and satisfaction with addiction. It is time to reflect outside our fishbowl. The attention economy gradually dismantles all our reference points: our relationship with the media, with the public space, with knowledge, with truth, with information. There is nothing that escapes it...

The deregulation of information, “fake news,” the hysteria of public discussion, and widespread suspicion do not constitute products of technological determinism nor do they stem from the loss of cultural reference points of human communities. The collapse of information is the main consequence of the economic regime chosen by the Internet magnates. The attention economy forges a society of informational and democratic atony. It extinguishes the philosophical lights in favor of digital signals.

However, this is an economic order, and like any order, it is open to confrontation and improvement. It is neither synonymous with the digital society nor with the development of the data economy. The time for struggle has come, not for the rejection of digital culture but for its transformation and for the rediscovery of the humanistic ideal that inspired the early utopians of digital incubation.

M. P.