Never heard of ‘the Attention Economy?’
Nothing could be more crucial for synodality – the Catholic Church’s attempt to make itself ‘missionary’ at all levels – than to get to grips – immediately – with this understanding of the impact of Internet culture upon younger generations and the harm it is wreaking.
Threatened by AI (computerised artificial intelligence) with total disruption of the once-reliable path to prosperity – the university degree – those aged 15-28 in 2025 – Generation Z – have tumbled to the possibility of making money simply by exploiting the currency of mere ‘clicks’.
Fearful when even young computer scientists and lawyers are replaced by AI, Gen Z is acutely aware of the rise and fall of ‘memes’, teams, celebrities and even farcical conspiracy theories – and how all of this can be ‘monetised’ simply by somehow triggering an attention frenzy on the Internet – because anyone with anything to sell will pay to have their advertisements placed wherever the clicks – the attention – goes.
So the thing to do is now – it seems – is to become some kind of online attention magnet – an influencer.
Moreover, as political power also obviously rises and falls with the level of media attention paid to any aspirant, the boundaries separating capitalism, power and entertainment are fast disappearing – as illustrated especially by one Donald J Trump.
Pioneer of the Attention Economy
Favoured by a real estate legacy in the 1970s Trump nearly lost everything in a venture into gambling casinos in the 1980s – but then evolved into a media personality via the catch phrase ‘you’re fired’ – and latterly into a politician who survives by attracting and maintaining attention and even hero status on the Internet (chiefly by triggering the once dominant US coastal liberal establishment). Hillary Clinton’s description of his supporters as ‘deplorables’ probably cost her the 2016 presidential campaign, while Joe Biden’s inability to retire when he should have gave Trump an even better chance to wreak havoc in 2024-25.
As US President Trump is now busy surfing the global attention wave via his own social media App – ‘Truth Social’ – on which he frequently introduces new policy – while he monetises his office by selling access to himself, by exploiting the digital currency craze and even by selling Trump perfume.
Gen Z Sees Through Trump
Trump can survive only as long as too many people remain fascinated by him – and this makes him the human embodiment of the attention-seeking algorithm that Mark Zuckerberg invented for Facebook. From the point of view of good governance, however, a problem arises:
“I think the difficulty with Trump is that he really is like the algorithm — he lives for the moment. It’s all about the current thing. And when the current thing moves on, so does he.”
This is the Generation Z commentator Kyla Scanlon in a conversation with Ezra Klein in the New York Times 1See How the Attention Economy is devouring Generation Z – and the Rest of Us – interview by Ezra Klein in New York Times, July 8, 2025. Trump’s weekly yoyoing on tariffs on imported goods – the bane of all those wanting to know where next to invest – illustrates this perfectly. Superficially glamorous, Trump’s tariffs led to the acronym TACO – for ‘Trump Always Chickens Out’ – because sooner rather than later Trump will reverse draconian tariffs on Canada, the EU or wherever – when they cause a deluge of complaints from US farmers or motor manufacturers or cell phone Titans – all dependent in some way upon the irreversible globalisation of even the US economy in the pre-Trump era.
Meanwhile of course Trump can vary the attention spectacle by bombing Iran, by uttering merited but unexpected profanities about Vladimir Putin or the once-favoured Elon Musk or saying (yet again) that he is going to make peace in the Middle East – but the upshot of all of his ‘volatility’ – and his Big Beautiful ‘Tax Breaks for the Wealthy’ – is to imperil the Republican party in upcoming mid-term elections in 2026 – and even to alert Generation Z – including Kyla Scanlon – to the meaninglessness of it all.
Humans Who Behave Like Algorithms
“Trump is the first human-algorithm hybrid president — governing via Truth Social truths, bond market reactions and direct market signals. A feedback loop in a suit.”
If Kyla Scanlon (b. 1997) can see this, so can her generation and the ones after that. The gift for attracting attention that Trump undoubtedly has is not at all the same thing as wisdom – because human beings are inherently distractible by sensation while government today is uniquely beset by a complex of major problems that themselves demand acute and persistent attention. And Trump’s own attention span is notoriously minimal.
“In the first Trump term, somebody who worked for him told me that to try to brief Donald Trump on policy is like chasing squirrels around a garden. They just keep running in different directions.”
Any society that elects and lauds someone like this – while climate change devastates children’s summer camps in Texas – is obviously in trouble – but this is the world that the attention economy threatens us all with.
Attending to the Truth
For all Christians, however, the best diagnosis is to hand:
“How can you believe, when you look to one another for glory?”
‘Glory’ was always the Zenith of attention. Uttered almost twenty-centuries earlier by someone just a few years older than Kyla Scanlon (see John 5:44) this question pierces the ether still, pinning all would-be attention-hogs – all glory-seekers – to the wall.
Given our universal uncertainty about our own value – the root of both ambition and evil – why should any of us glorify – i.e. award infallible celebrity status to – anyone – and wind up buying their name-brand perfume? Is this truly the end of human history – the destination of the secular bid for Utopia – and equality, liberty and fraternity?
If the US today can end up under the misgovernance of the most monumental grifter in US history – solely via his gift for gaining and holding media attention – the cult of media celebrity itself must obviously now be overthrown.
Politics was Always about Attention-Seeking
Predating the Internet by over two millennia Julius Caesar was another such attention-seeker – eventually elected a God by the Senate (mainly for his gift for mass-murdering those who resented Roman imperialism). Arising out of this success the Roman Empire did establish an always uneasy peace, the Pax Romana – but always via crucifixion of anyone who opposed it – and the Kingdom of God is obviously something else. To understand it we need to believe that we are all indeed equal – in frailty – and that a refusal to believe in the snake-oil salesmen of any era must follow.
Trump also relies upon crucifixion – the ICE raid upon any immigrant community anywhere – and deportation to concentration camps in Guantanamo Bay or El Salvador – while he ignores Israeli war crimes in Gaza – and even US Catholic bishops who once overlooked everything (because of Trump’s opportunism on abortion) are now belatedly seeing through him.
It is time to believe that truth always transcends the sensations, and the conmen – of any era – and that glory – celebrity – belongs to God alone. We Christians above all need to say this – to free rising generations from the grip – and the meaninglessness – of the digital attention economy.
What is it that underlies mass addiction and depression – and acute youth mental suffering – if not the mistake of believing that if no one is paying any attention to you – and everyone is staring into cell phones instead – that you don’t matter?
It is to the world’s most obvious problems – and the saddest people we are too often ignoring – not the human-algorithm hybrids – we must now unremittingly attend. This surely is the task that synodality – i.e. all of us – need, to restore meaning and hope to human history.
Notes
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