In recent weeks, it has been announced that centibillionaire Larry Ellison is set to lead a takeover of TikTok in America. -- AFP
THE "attention economy" is a term I first heard about some time ago, probably in a talk about how in the future, the resource corporations will be fighting each other over is your attention.
If they control your attention, and the information you are receiving, it can be argued that they control everything.
I have been thinking about this, as I watch coverage of the genocide in Palestine, the illegal detention of activists from the Global Sumud Flotilla, and youth-led protests that seem to be spreading like wildfire around the world.
The ownership of mass media and social media platforms may be one of the biggest pieces of the puzzle, when it comes to the era we are finding ourselves in.
Not that very long ago, America's mass media aspired to at least give the impression of objectivity and neutrality.
Nowadays, the major networks all exist to either push a Democratic agenda, or a Republican one - no one even bothers to hide it at all.
Yes, we live in an era where everyone carries a smartphone, and anyone can produce content.
But producing the type of news content that the majority of people are more accustomed to consuming is still a very capital-intensive operation.
Over the last few decades, the business models of media empires have been completely upturned.
News media used to need to be objective, to reach the most number of people, to sell the most ads.
Nowadays, using ads as a revenue base is grossly insufficient, even if you reach millions upon millions of people.
Most media outlets have not discovered a formula to be both objective and self-sustaining. It's possible such a formula simply does not exist at present.
This means that increasingly, the only people who can afford to own, run and dictate the editorial slants of media empires are those who are already incredibly rich.
One case in point is Jeff Bezos' ownership of The Washington Post, and the controversies surrounding The Post and the 2024 American presidential elections.
When it comes to social media, the same problems abound.
With Elon Musk buying over Twitter, one of the world's biggest social media platforms was now subject to the whims and fancies of the richest man in the world.
I think it's clear that we will see more and more media platforms being bought over by the megarich, to prosecute the agendas of the mega rich.
Some might see the polarisation of legacy media as a result and by-product of the polarisation of society.
What if it's the other way around?
What if legacy media has been appropriated precisely to wedge a bigger and bigger divide in society through the creation of endless, highly instigative culture wars - making divided nations so much easier to control, because as we're busy fighting each other, we aren't fighting the true enemies that are exploiting us to within an inch of our lives.
Some have argued, correctly I believe, that it has never been about the political left versus the political right. It has always been about the megarich top, versus the rest of us at the bottom.
This trend will also extend to other areas where the rich and powerful are willing to crush the poor and the weak however they want to.
In recent weeks, it has been announced that centibillionaire Larry Ellison is set to lead a takeover of TikTok in America.
Ellison is known to be the biggest private donor to the Israeli Defence Forces.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself recently said in a Washington meeting with American influencers, that the battles of today are not fought with swords, but with TikTok.
This to me is one of the only ways to understand the relative lack of global outrage over the genocide in Palestine.
Some have called this genocide the moral test of our time.
Instead of just a moral test, I would argue it is also a gauge of just how much power the rich have over our attention.
All over the world, even in established Western democracies (perhaps especially in key Western democracies), the politicians are the slowest to turn against Israel - despite overwhelming public support for Palestine.
The reason is simple: these politicians are all bought and paid for by Israel.
And now the Zionists are trying to buy the ability to sway the opinions of the masses.
Even with visible outrage about the genocide in Palestine visible all over the world, it is fair to say that this outrage has not been widespread enough to truly tip the scales towards meaningful global action.
There have been gestures and developments, but there is no way they match the urgency of a genocide unfolding before our very eyes.
I think of this as an engineered apathy.
Another way in which the attention economy, and the regular global economy with its ever heavier and heavier pressures on normal working people, is designed precisely to make people too busy, too apathetic, or both, to rise up and fight for things that are right - not just in Palestine, but in their own countries as well.
I am proud of the global wave of protests against the genocide; I am proud of the global flotilla.
A boat that is part of the Global Sumud Flotilla sailing off Koufonisi islet, Greece on Sept 26. -- Reuters
Himpunan Sumud in Kuala Lumpur on Oct 4. -- CHAN TAK KONG/The Star
But I worry about whether we, in the long run, are thinking smartly enough about how we are going to counter what will only become more and more disinformation and propaganda.
We cannot see, hear, or touch what is going on in other parts of the world with our own eyes, ears, or hands.
Everything we observe, we observe through a screen. How long more will it be, before the megarich control everything that appears on those screens?
It is certainly not difficult to achieve at all - the technology to do so has existed for a long time.
My concern is that bit by bit, the megarich will control all the real estate in the attention economy. Some would say this is already the case.
Perhaps by then, almost everyone will believe and think whatever the megarich want us to believe and think.
I believe that this is part and parcel of the effort of the megarich to extract as much value as humanly possible from the masses.
Will there be any effective resistance?
It's possible that some answers to that question lie in what we saw starting in countries like Indonesia, Nepal, and the Philippines; and then started spreading to countries like Peru, Morocco, and Madagascar.
News and coverage of these youth-led protests and revolutions in these places seem crowded out by the endless number of other global crises.
But it is possible that these protests and revolutions are what happens when people are held down and squeezed too hard for too long.
Maybe that's exactly why they are so underreported.
I don't have all the answers right now, but I do know I'll be thinking about these questions for a long time to come.