By 2025, the attention economy had been running its experiment on humanity for a full decade, and the results were in. Across the developed world, measures of focus, of patience with long texts, of the ability to sit with a single thought, were declining, while the platforms designed to harvest attention had become the most profitable companies on Earth.
The costs were not only personal. A public that could not hold attention could not follow an argument, could not read a long document, could not distinguish the substantial from the sensational, and politics adapted accordingly. The atomisation of attention produced a politics of the fragment, of the outrage and the meme, of positions reduced to slogans because slogans were all a distracted electorate could absorb.
Reclaiming attention is presented, usually, as a matter of personal discipline, of screen time and digital fasting. It is that, but it is also more: it is the precondition of any serious public life. A society that cannot attend cannot deliberate, and a society that cannot deliberate cannot govern itself. The first political act of the coming decade may simply be the decision to look up.