A small case against the attention economy

The attention economy used to be exciting. Free services, infinite content, a global town square, all paid for by ads. The deal felt new. The platforms felt like they were going somewhere.

Twenty years in, the deal is no longer new and the platforms are no longer going anywhere. The feed is fine. The ads are heavier. The content is more or less the same six categories, slightly reshuffled. Nobody talks about any of these products with the kind of excitement they used to.

The interesting thing about the attention economy in 2026 is not how powerful it is. It's how boring it is. Boring is the precondition for replacement. Things that bore you eventually lose to things that don't.

The replacement isn't going to be one giant new platform. It's going to be a quiet drift back toward small things, paid things, hand-curated things, things that don't need to harvest your attention to survive. That drift is already underway. You can find it on any indie web search engine, any newsletter platform, any directory of personal sites.

The most underrated form of internet activism right now is just spending a little more of your time on the small web and a little less of it on the feed. The attention economy is bored of you. Returning the favor is a real political act.