The attention economy isn’t just stealing our focus; it’s reshaping our reality. Drawing on Simone Weil, philosopher Kathryn Lawson argues that social media algorithms don’t just distract us but commit a deeper form of violence, reshaping our minds and stripping away genuine human connection. Each scroll surrenders our thinking to machines designed solely to keep us engaged, replacing what Weil saw as true attention—essential for ethics and truth—with a hollow substitute. Now, as a California jury holds Meta and Google liable for fuelling a young woman’s childhood addiction to their platforms, the solution isn't simply logging off, but relearning how to genuinely attend to others and reclaim our mental autonomy.

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”

—Simone Weil

A theorist of radical social justice, Simone Weil’s philosophy can offer a startling look at the ontological violence inherent in the human being’s contemporary relationship to technology. The monetization of our internal world through what has been labelled the “attention economy” has no end of Orwellian consequences, but Weil’s philosophy can help us to understand the impact of these issues on our very being. At this point, most of us know the situation well: as of the early 2000s, social media websites shifted to maximize time spent on the platforms and created profit by selling access to their users’ attention rather than through subscriptions or one-time purchases. We no longer pay for a product; lending out our internal world to the whims of an algorithm is the product. Across the hours, days, and months, these whims become systems increasingly bespoke and fine-tuned to our own preferences and desires. In an attention economy, the key objective of the algorithms guiding us is to manufacture the necessity to keep scrolling, to hold our attention on the next meme, reel, picture, or song just beyond our grasp.

This careful manufacturing of a surface-level attention to the next thing creates an ersatz attention, the German word for “substitute,” popularized during the Second World War. A cup of roasted chicory root, barley, acorns, rye, or dandelion root would stand in as an ersatz coffee when coffee bean rations were unavailable. While these substitutes could in some ways stand in, they were ultimately what Nabokov would call a pale fire comparison to the true article. Writing on his imprisonment in Auschwitz, Primo Levi makes note of the ersatz coffee, which adds yet another layer of the surreal simulacra of existence in the camps. This is precisely the type of attention produced by the attention economy. This ersatz attention is the shadow-self of true attention. It appears as if we are attending to our screens, but, in fact, it is the mirror-darkly of attention.

In contradistinction to the ersatz attention economy, true attention is the keystone of Simone Weil’s philosophy. It is through attention that one can experience the highest possible level of truth in reality. Weil equates attention to prayer, to genius, and argues that it is the only avenue to living ethically. She offers her reader a pathway to reality and divine love through genuine attention, a path that has become less and less travelled and at times even barred altogether by the violent domination of the attention economy.

The cost of the attention economy is not merely the minutes and hours of a person’s life; it is the violent transformation of reality. There are two levels upon which the complex algorithms we follow inflict ontological violence or violence to the very being of ourselves and our world.

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The autonomy of our minds is the collateral damage of the attention economy.

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