In today’s hyper-connected world, the most valuable currency is not money — it’s attention. You only have so much of it. And every second of it is being bought, sold, and optimized for. Welcome to the attention economy, where your focus is the product, and everyone — from politicians to algorithms — is in the business of hijacking it.

Attention as a Commodity

The internet promised infinite information. But your brain didn’t scale with it. So, platforms didn’t compete to inform you — they competed to hold you. From infinite scroll to algorithmic feeds, the digital world isn’t designed for exploration; it’s designed for retention.

Elections in the Attention Economy

In a democratic system, informed decision-making requires deliberate thinking. But in the attention economy, elections become performative battles for virality:

• Soundbites outperform substance.
• Outrage spreads faster than nuance.
• Clickbait headlines influence more than policy platforms.

Campaigns now operate more like marketing blitzes than civic discussions. Attention — not truth — is the metric. And as political messaging is tuned to hack the feed, what wins elections isn’t always what builds democracies.

AI: The New Arms Dealer

Artificial Intelligence didn’t invent the attention economy. But it is supercharging it.

Recommendation engines on YouTube, TikTok, and news platforms use AI to optimize what content gets surfaced to you — not based on what’s good for you, but what keeps you watching. AI doesn’t care if it’s cat videos, conspiracy theories, or climate denial. It just tracks what holds your attention and feeds you more.

When AI models are trained on human engagement signals, they learn not what’s true — but what works.

And now with generative AI, we face a new era of synthetic attention weapons: deepfakes, automated troll farms, hyper-personalized disinformation. The scale and speed are unprecedented.

Capitalism: Optimized for Distraction

Capitalism rewards what makes money. And in the attention economy, that’s what captures and holds attention, not what nurtures minds or communities.

Social media platforms monetize engagement, not enlightenment. News outlets depend on clicks, not comprehension. The economic incentives are misaligned with long-term public good — and they know it.

Attention is extracted like oil: drilled, refined, and commodified.

And just like with oil, there’s a spillover. The pollution here is cognitive:

• Shorter attention spans.
• Polarized societies.
• An epidemic of misinformation.

In a capitalist attention economy, distraction is profitable, and depth is a liability.

Reclaiming Attention: A Civic Imperative

If democracy, sanity, and critical thought are to survive, we need to stop treating attention as infinite and start treating it as sacred.

• Educators must teach media literacy and digital hygiene.
• Technologists must design for well-being, not just retention.
• Policymakers must consider attention rights and algorithmic accountability.
• Citizens must remember: what you give your attention to shapes not only your worldview — it shapes the world.

Final Thought

In a world where attention drives elections, trains AI, and fuels capitalism, choosing where you focus is not just a personal act — it’s a political one.

So next time you scroll, pause.

Your attention is not just being spent. It’s being shaped. And in the attention economy, that might just be the most powerful decision you make all day.

If you asked me in the recent two years what i think about AI and the future of humanity, I routinely asked back – have you read Manna?

When Marshall Brain penned Manna in 2003, it read like a speculative fable—half warning, half dream. Two decades later, this short novel reads less like science fiction and more like a mirror held up to our present. In the age of generative AI, ubiquitous automation, and a deepening conversation about universal basic income (UBI), Manna has become unsettlingly prescient. Its core questions—What happens when machines take over work? Who benefits? Who decides?—are now the questions of our time.

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The Premise: Dystopia or Utopia?

Manna presents two divergent futures springing from the same source: automation. In the first, American society embraces algorithmic management systems like “Manna,” designed to optimize labor in fast food and retail. These systems strip workers of autonomy, reducing humans to programmable labor nodes. Eventually, displaced workers are warehoused in government facilities with minimal rights and maximum surveillance.

The second vision—dubbed the “Australia Project”—offers a counterpoint: a post-work society where automation liberates rather than subjugates. Here, humans live in abundance, guided by brain-computer interfaces, pursuing meaning, community, and creativity. In both cases, the robots are the same. The outcomes are not.

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Technology: From Manna to Modern AI

In Manna, the namesake system automates management by giving employees minute instructions: “Take two steps forward. Pick up the trash. Turn left.” It’s a crude but plausible stand-in for early workplace AI.

Fast forward to today. We now have machine vision, voice recognition, and AI scheduling systems actively managing logistics, retail, warehousing, customer service, and even hiring. The leap from “Manna” to real-world tools like Amazon’s warehouse algorithms or AI-powered hiring software is not conceptual—it’s chronological.

But today’s generative AI adds a new dimension. Large language models don’t just manage human work—they can replace it. They can write, code, design, and even make judgments, blurring the line between assistant and actor. This is no longer about optimizing physical labor; it’s about redefining knowledge work, creativity, and decision-making. In Manna, workers lost control of their bodies. In our era, we risk losing control of our voices, thoughts, and choices.

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Societal Implications: Surveillance, Control, and Choice

Marshall Brain’s dystopia emerges not from the technology itself, but from who controls it and to what end. The core mechanism of control in the book is not violence, but data-driven predictability. People are kept compliant not through force, but through optimization.

This insight feels eerily familiar. Today, workplace surveillance software can track eye movements, keystrokes, and productivity metrics. Gig economy platforms use opaque algorithms to assign tasks, suspend workers, or cut pay. The managerial logic of Manna—atomizing labor, maximizing efficiency, removing agency—is increasingly embedded in our systems.

And yet, we still have a choice.

The Australia Project, Manna’s utopia, is not magic—it’s policy. It’s a society that chooses to distribute the fruits of automation broadly, instead of concentrating them. It’s a place where AI augments human flourishing rather than optimizing it out of existence. The implication is profound: the same AI that can surveil and suppress can also support and empower.

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How It Maps to Today’s AI Debate

We’re currently living through the early moments of a global debate: What kind of future are we building with AI?

• If AI replaces jobs, do we build social systems like UBI to ensure dignity and meaning?
• If AI amplifies productivity, do we let a handful of tech owners capture all the surplus?
• If AI becomes a decision-maker, who governs the governance?

In many ways, the world is caught between Manna’s two futures. Some nations experiment with basic income pilots. Others double down on productivity surveillance. AI policy frameworks are emerging, but few are bold enough to ask what kind of society we want—only how to mitigate risk. But perhaps the greater risk is to automate our way into the future without choosing where we want to go.

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The Deeper Lesson: Technology Is Never Neutral

Manna is not a story about robots. It’s a story about values. The same tools can lead to oppression or liberation depending on how they are deployed. In a time when technology often feels inevitable and ungovernable, Brain reminds us: inevitability is a narrative, not a law. The future is programmable, not just by code, but by collective will.

If Manna offers any enduring wisdom, it is this: The systems we build are reflections of the intentions we encode into them. Machines will optimize—but only for what we ask them to. The question is not whether AI will change society. It is whether we will change society alongside it.

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Final Thought

In the race to adopt AI, we must not forget to ask: For whom is this future being built? We stand on the threshold of either a digital dictatorship or a renaissance of human possibility. Manna showed us both. It’s now up to us to choose which chapter we write next.