For the past few years, writers and reformers have issued siren warnings about how platforms like X/Twitter have become a toxic sludge of hate speech and disinformation giving a bully pulpit to extreme voices such Advance UK, a political party that now includes Tommy Robinson and that vows to ban indefinite leave to remain, ban the foreign -born from becoming British citizens and encourage all settled migrants to leave. That its candidate polled less than the Monster Raving Looney Party candidate in last week’s Gorton and Denton by-election and that it is competing with other micro outfits like Reclaim UK and Restore UK to leech support away from, in the words of Elon Musk, the “weak sauce” of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK does not detract from its contribution to the, as the late E.L. Doctorow put it, the steady “enshittification” of the internet. But it is the role of the attention economy in facilitating surveillance capitalism and its colonisation of humanity’s cognitive and deliberative capacities and one very real human casualty of it – the death by suicide of 14-year-old Molly Russell that is the overarching concern of this article.
In 1971, the economist Herbert Simon, when pondering the problem of information overload, opined that “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention”. Since his primary interest was in organisations, Simon saw this as a problem to be solved. In the 1990s, the moguls of Silicon Valley seized upon this opportunity. For if attention had become the scarce commodity in a newly networked economy, if it was possible to capture it, sell access to it to advertisers and monitor what it revealed, the world could be your oyster. It was the beginning of what the writer Michael Goldhaber called the “attention economy.” First out of the traps was Google with its user friendly, all things to all people search engine – the Universal Library of Things. It monitored what the users searched for and used the resulting data to improve the search engine. However this did not satisfy the company’s venture capital investors who demanded a business model. The Google bros then realised that they could use their monitoring data as raw material for a machine learning algorithm that provided outputted information about users whom advertisers might be interested in.[2]
Thus was born what the Harvard academic Shoshana Zuboff has labelled “surveillance capitalism.” In its Manifesto for Attention Liberation, The Friends of Attention describes how both surveillance capitalism and the attention economy have created a business model for us. Over the past three decades, the explosive growth of the internet and the global proliferation of data devices have meshed with a series of shortsighted political decisions: along the way, the entrepreneurial savviness of the Tech Bros has produced, in effect, an ostensibly “free” digital universe – whose hidden operating cost is the depletion and pollution of the minds and sense of its users.[3]
For attention activists, the business model of the “attention economy” is a globe-spanning industrial farm that extracts money from a billion vegetative humans suspended in an infinite web, eyes glazed. In this dystopia, humanity devotes almost the entirety of its waking hours in digital spaces substantially financed by extractive profit models that systematically tap human beings for the monetary value of our eyeballs. This twelve-trillion-dollar operation motors a global-scale, computationally intensive, and commercially lucrative system for the sourcing, aggregation, and nonstop auction-market of human attention. The fundamental immorality of analysing this business model in cost-benefit terms is that our dehumanisation cannot be quantified. In the words of Burnett et al, this is not a conversation about trade-offs. It is a conversation about coercion, theft, and the instrumentalization of human life.[4]
The global behemoth that is the attention economy is comprised of the world’s largest five companies who are all technology providers (Apple, Nvidia, Microsoft, Alphabet or Google, and Amazon) and who are each valued at more than two trillion. Four of the five have billions of customers who use their products more or less continuously, and whose data-commodification constitutes a central business operation. The fifth makes the chips that power the processing and manipulation of that data by means of algorithmic AI. The Big Tech empire exploits the invisible iron cage ubiquity of its digital platforms to garner information about us – our clicks and keystrokes, our blinks and grimaces, our typos, and our personality types – and then input these data into giant predictive technologies. In turn our profiles, preferences, foibles, and projected future personalities are sold off to the highest bidder.[5]
The harms of this new economy are conceptualised by the Attention Liberation Movement as “human fracking.” For just as petroleum fracking is wreaking irreversible damage to our external environment (our woods and fields, our water and sky), while the human frackers are inflicting possibly permanent damage to our interior environment (our minds and hearts, our thinking and deliberative abilities, and our ability to be and to suit with ourselves and the people we love.[6]
The advent of the app ChatGPT in November 2022 which rapidly became the fastest-growing app in the world has raised for some commentators the prospect of the demise of the attention economy. For why not type that search which one would have automatically inputted into Google into ChatGPT instead. Surely the innovation of chatbots and LLMs (large language models) would sound the death knell of the attention economy. This conundrum is addressed by the Cambridge researchers, Yaqub Chaudhary and Jonnie Penn, in the Harvard Data Science Review where they develop their thesis on the “intention economy” a prospect which they view as a “lucrative yet troubling new marketplace for digital signals of intent,” from buying cinema tickets to voting for political candidates. This model is one of a marketplace for behavioural and psychological data that signals human intent and operates through natural language interfaces powered by LLMs. In the view of John Naughton, this differs from the attention economy in that it trades on users’ limited attention spans through advertising whereas the difference in the beast that is the intention economy trades on signals that predict, shape and game human intention before actions occur and so facilitates much deeper psychological manipulation through personalised AI interactions. This MO enables “conversation” with chatbots in free and unguarded ways heightening the risk of signposting to dangerous forums such as pro-anorexia and suicide websites. The plausibility and false authenticity is powered by the ability of LLMs to infer private attributes from conversations (while, incidentally, bypassing the cookie restrictions which so aggravate the advertisers and hucksters of the supposedly ancient attention economy).[7]
Regardless of any such academic or structural differentials within the new information economy, the human casualties of the aforementioned models and the deleterious effects on public life are stark. Be it the harvesting of the data of unsuspecting Facebook users by the rogue research company Cambridge Analytica in order to facilitate the victory of Leave in the 2016 EU Referendum in the UK; the flooding of the zone by shit (in Steve Bannon’s words) generated by the bot factories in St Petersburg to cause maximum disruption of US Presidential election and to bolster Putin’s illegal war in Ukraine and the coarsening of public discourse by the rage machine that is Twitter; social media networks appear to have lost their emancipatory lure and potential since the heady days of the Arab Spring. The foremost critic of the erosion of democracy is Shoshana Zuboff who in her 2019 seminal work The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power documents the conditions of online surveillance we all live under, the covert harvesting of private data that enables targeted advertising and allows for our emotional manipulation. This week will see on both cinematic and television screen the fruits of her collaboration with the British film maker film-maker Marc Silver the documentary Molly vs the Machines which was due to be shown at the Glasgow film festival on 1 March, having its simultaneous UK premiere, before being broadcast on Channel 4 on 5 March.[8]
The shift in the global economic paradigm that Zuboff so meticulously and coruscatingly documents in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is heartbreakingly humanised the destructive effects of Big Tech’s business model on the most interpersonal level. Molly was recorded and monitored for most of her adolescence, particularly after she downloaded Instagram and Pininterest. These apps function by tracking their “users” (drugs and social media – those are the only times they become “users” [“customers,” anybody?] and supplying them with the content that will keep them using. Though clearly struggling and negotiating with the ordinary pressures and unhappiness of adolescence, the algorithms Molly encountered online were tailored by an inhumane mechanism, supplying her content that reflected her unhappiness until it became unbearable.[9]
The coroner at Molly’s inquest ruled that she died “from an act of self-harm while suffering from depression and the negative effects of online content.” The most poignant and powerful testimony in the film comes from Molly’s schoolfriends who concur with the coroner’s verdict. They saw they were shocked to learn after her death how she had been persistently measuring her stomach and looking at so much negative self-imagery. Guiltily, most of them confess they still look at Instagram on their own phones. For Zuboff, they are all victims of the tech monopolies’ strategy: “Where the algorithm senses high levels of engagement, it gives that material pride of place,” she says. “It will amplify it and it will send it out, as happened to Molly in the last months of her young life. She received hundreds of grotesque messages and images depicting suicide and self-harm.” Thus Molly Russell has yet another example of how, in Zuboff’s trenchant words, of how society has sent its precious young “like canaries in the coalmine” into a “death march with the all-seeing algorithm.”[10]
So the short span of Molly’s life parallels the trajectory of the development of the social media platforms, as they first learned to harvest and monetise our private information, then to predict our habits and eventually to shape them. Her story is the haunting backdrop to, and shadow of the “breakthrough idea that human behaviour should be treated as a commodity” [11]the genealogy of which Zuboff has so diligently and starkly chronicled.
The addictive nature of much social media output and their role in fuelling not just the global Triple P virus of Populism, Polarisation and Post-Truth but their assault on privacy and the developmental health of young people has led to a growing national and international clamour for the prohibition of access to social media to young people under the age of sixteen. Just such a ban has been instituted in Australia. Similar restrictions are coming down the track in France and Spain, and at least 15 European governments are looking at comparative measures. Last month, Keir Starmer gave full backing to establishing a consultation for a British minimum age for social media age.
In 1971, the economist Herbert Simon, when pondering the problem of information overload, opined that “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention”. Since his primary interest was in organisations, Simon saw this as a problem to be solved. In the 1990s, the moguls of Silicon Valley seized upon this opportunity. For if attention had become the scarce commodity in a newly networked economy, if it was possible to capture it, sell access to it to advertisers and monitor what it revealed, the world could be your oyster. It was the beginning of what the writer Michael Goldhaber called the “attention economy.” First out of the traps was Google with its user friendly, all things to all people search engine – the Universal Library of Things. It monitored what the users searched for and used the resulting data to improve the search engine. However this did not satisfy the company’s venture capital investors who demanded a business model. The Google bros then realised that they could use their monitoring data as raw material for a machine learning algorithm that provided outputted information about users whom advertisers might be interested in.[2]
Thus was born what the Harvard academic Shoshana Zuboff has labelled “surveillance capitalism.” In its Manifesto for Attention Liberation, The Friends of Attention describes how both surveillance capitalism and the attention economy have created a business model for us. Over the past three decades, the explosive growth of the internet and the global proliferation of data devices have meshed with a series of shortsighted political decisions: along the way, the entrepreneurial savviness of the Tech Bros has produced, in effect, an ostensibly “free” digital universe – whose hidden operating cost is the depletion and pollution of the minds and sense of its users.[3]
For attention activists, the business model of the “attention economy” is a globe-spanning industrial farm that extracts money from a billion vegetative humans suspended in an infinite web, eyes glazed. In this dystopia, humanity devotes almost the entirety of its waking hours in digital spaces substantially financed by extractive profit models that systematically tap human beings for the monetary value of our eyeballs. This twelve-trillion-dollar operation motors a global-scale, computationally intensive, and commercially lucrative system for the sourcing, aggregation, and nonstop auction-market of human attention. The fundamental immorality of analysing this business model in cost-benefit terms is that our dehumanisation cannot be quantified. In the words of Burnett et al, this is not a conversation about trade-offs. It is a conversation about coercion, theft, and the instrumentalization of human life.[4]
The global behemoth that is the attention economy is comprised of the world’s largest five companies who are all technology providers (Apple, Nvidia, Microsoft, Alphabet or Google, and Amazon) and who are each valued at more than two trillion. Four of the five have billions of customers who use their products more or less continuously, and whose data-commodification constitutes a central business operation. The fifth makes the chips that power the processing and manipulation of that data by means of algorithmic AI. The Big Tech empire exploits the invisible iron cage ubiquity of its digital platforms to garner information about us – our clicks and keystrokes, our blinks and grimaces, our typos, and our personality types – and then input these data into giant predictive technologies. In turn our profiles, preferences, foibles, and projected future personalities are sold off to the highest bidder.[5]
The harms of this new economy are conceptualised by the Attention Liberation Movement as “human fracking.” For just as petroleum fracking is wreaking irreversible damage to our external environment (our woods and fields, our water and sky), while the human frackers are inflicting possibly permanent damage to our interior environment (our minds and hearts, our thinking and deliberative abilities, and our ability to be and to suit with ourselves and the people we love.[6]
The advent of the app ChatGPT in November 2022 which rapidly became the fastest-growing app in the world has raised for some commentators the prospect of the demise of the attention economy. For why not type that search which one would have automatically inputted into Google into ChatGPT instead. Surely the innovation of chatbots and LLMs (large language models) would sound the death knell of the attention economy. This conundrum is addressed by the Cambridge researchers, Yaqub Chaudhary and Jonnie Penn, in the Harvard Data Science Review where they develop their thesis on the “intention economy” a prospect which they view as a “lucrative yet troubling new marketplace for digital signals of intent,” from buying cinema tickets to voting for political candidates. This model is one of a marketplace for behavioural and psychological data that signals human intent and operates through natural language interfaces powered by LLMs. In the view of John Naughton, this differs from the attention economy in that it trades on users’ limited attention spans through advertising whereas the difference in the beast that is the intention economy trades on signals that predict, shape and game human intention before actions occur and so facilitates much deeper psychological manipulation through personalised AI interactions. This MO enables “conversation” with chatbots in free and unguarded ways heightening the risk of signposting to dangerous forums such as pro-anorexia and suicide websites. The plausibility and false authenticity is powered by the ability of LLMs to infer private attributes from conversations (while, incidentally, bypassing the cookie restrictions which so aggravate the advertisers and hucksters of the supposedly ancient attention economy).[7]
Regardless of any such academic or structural differentials within the new information economy, the human casualties of the aforementioned models and the deleterious effects on public life are stark. Be it the harvesting of the data of unsuspecting Facebook users by the rogue research company Cambridge Analytica in order to facilitate the victory of Leave in the 2016 EU Referendum in the UK; the flooding of the zone by shit (in Steve Bannon’s words) generated by the bot factories in St Petersburg to cause maximum disruption of US Presidential election and to bolster Putin’s illegal war in Ukraine and the coarsening of public discourse by the rage machine that is Twitter; social media networks appear to have lost their emancipatory lure and potential since the heady days of the Arab Spring. The foremost critic of the erosion of democracy is Shoshana Zuboff who in her 2019 seminal work The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power documents the conditions of online surveillance we all live under, the covert harvesting of private data that enables targeted advertising and allows for our emotional manipulation. This week will see on both cinematic and television screen the fruits of her collaboration with the British film maker film-maker Marc Silver the documentary Molly vs the Machines which was due to be shown at the Glasgow film festival on 1 March, having its simultaneous UK premiere, before being broadcast on Channel 4 on 5 March.[8]
The shift in the global economic paradigm that Zuboff so meticulously and coruscatingly documents in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is heartbreakingly humanised the destructive effects of Big Tech’s business model on the most interpersonal level. Molly was recorded and monitored for most of her adolescence, particularly after she downloaded Instagram and Pininterest. These apps function by tracking their “users” (drugs and social media – those are the only times they become “users” [“customers,” anybody?] and supplying them with the content that will keep them using. Though clearly struggling and negotiating with the ordinary pressures and unhappiness of adolescence, the algorithms Molly encountered online were tailored by an inhumane mechanism, supplying her content that reflected her unhappiness until it became unbearable.[9]
The coroner at Molly’s inquest ruled that she died “from an act of self-harm while suffering from depression and the negative effects of online content.” The most poignant and powerful testimony in the film comes from Molly’s schoolfriends who concur with the coroner’s verdict. They saw they were shocked to learn after her death how she had been persistently measuring her stomach and looking at so much negative self-imagery. Guiltily, most of them confess they still look at Instagram on their own phones. For Zuboff, they are all victims of the tech monopolies’ strategy: “Where the algorithm senses high levels of engagement, it gives that material pride of place,” she says. “It will amplify it and it will send it out, as happened to Molly in the last months of her young life. She received hundreds of grotesque messages and images depicting suicide and self-harm.” Thus Molly Russell has yet another example of how, in Zuboff’s trenchant words, of how society has sent its precious young “like canaries in the coalmine” into a “death march with the all-seeing algorithm.”[10]
So the short span of Molly’s life parallels the trajectory of the development of the social media platforms, as they first learned to harvest and monetise our private information, then to predict our habits and eventually to shape them. Her story is the haunting backdrop to, and shadow of the “breakthrough idea that human behaviour should be treated as a commodity” [11]the genealogy of which Zuboff has so diligently and starkly chronicled.
The addictive nature of much social media output and their role in fuelling not just the global Triple P virus of Populism, Polarisation and Post-Truth but their assault on privacy and the developmental health of young people has led to a growing national and international clamour for the prohibition of access to social media to young people under the age of sixteen. Just such a ban has been instituted in Australia. Similar restrictions are coming down the track in France and Spain, and at least 15 European governments are looking at comparative measures. Last month, Keir Starmer gave full backing to establishing a consultation for a British minimum age for social media age.
For Shoshana Zuboff, the iniquity of Big Tech’s attacks on privacy and the democracy of the public square is a moral crusade of our time, comparable to the abolition of slavery and child labour. For her the abolition of the business model behind the MO of the sites that Big Tech runs is essential rather than a mere prohibition for children. A social media ban for children is opposed by Ian Russell, father of Molly, who now chairs the Molly Rose Foundation and has, through grief, become an advocate to the accountability of social media platforms.
The toxic effects on the developing minds and brains of children and young people of bad actors on social media are undeniable. But should the baby of the totality of digital media be thrown out with the bathwater of the effluent of the sites like the algorithm ones that drove a 14-year-old girl with all her life and potential in front of her to her death? How would such a ban be practically enforced? Human nature being what it is, prohibition always creates the allure of the forbidden fruit for those predisposed to testing boundaries. Is there universal consensus as to the inherent dangers to health of social media sites as there is in relation to tobacco and certain controlled drugs? While child protection must always be an overriding public duty and societal value, can some latitude be afforded to children’s natural curiosity and desire for experimentation? Debate around an under 16 ban still leaves unaddressed the wider harms of the monetised and behaviour altering model of the digital information economy whether in its attention or intention formats. The reclamation of our futures from the empire builders of Silicon Valley has to be an animating cause, even crusade, for our times.
References
[1] Jonathan Freedland. Here are the powerful men making racists feel great again. Guardian Journal. 14 February 2026 pp.1-2
[2] John Naughton, Big tach profited from our attention – now AI wants to monetise intentions. The Observer - Science & Tech 22 February 2026 p.19
[3] D. Graham Burnett, Alyssa Loh, and Peter Schmidt, eds. (2026). The Friends of Attention Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement. London: Particular Books p.25
[4] Ibid, pp.25-26
[5] Ibid, p.26
[6] Ibid, pp.33-35
[7] Naughton, op cit.
[8] Abolition is the correct response to a moral catastrophe. The Observer - Interview 22 February 2026 pp.17-18
[9] Nicholas Harris. The cost of an online childhood. New Statesman -Television 27 February – 5 March 2026 pp. 60-61
[10] Observer - Interview, p.18
[11] Ibid
⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.
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