the engagement economy

how we replaced attention with its own metric

You’re in a grocery store, and there are so many things to look at.

Usually, of course, you’re looking for the thing you need—whatever’s on your shopping list or your recipe for tonight. Other times, you’re distracted. Your gaze is drawn to the thing you suddenly want—the flashy bag of chips placed at eye level.

These are only the most obvious options. I like to play a little game in the grocery store where I pretend to be someone else entirely. As soon as I stop looking at things as a “customer,” I see a completely different world.

If I’m looking as an “employee,” for instance, I notice the items that are low on stock; the other customer trying to find help; the fallen cereal boxes in aisle five. Or if I’m looking as a “health inspector,” I notice the defibrillator on the wall; the thermometer on the refrigerator; the mouse droppings on the floor.

The point is that “looking” isn’t arbitrary: it’s conditioned by what we’re trained to look for. You can’t ever take in the entire grocery store at once, because there are too many competing stimuli. Instead, we focus on expected objects—but you can also teach yourself to focus on new things by changing your expectations.

Things you can look at (depending on your worldview)

The marketing world is well aware of this, because the job of an advertisement is to become the thing you look at. This means hijacking your expectations to outcompete other stimuli—directing your perception toward that bag of chips.

Traditionally, the idea of your gaze being a resource has been described as the “attention economy,” and this framework has come to define internet marketing. Attention is so important that social media platforms have designed the way they distribute content around metrics of sustained attention, like watch time, shares, and number of likes. Collectively, we call these metrics “engagement.”

Importantly, engagement is not actually attention. The former measures interaction as a proxy for the latter. Real “attention” is a weird, ineffable, vibes-based thing, but “engagement” is a quantifiable proxy that’s better for building algorithms and selling brand deals to advertisers.

When we move from the weird vibes-based thing to the metric, important aspects of “attention” are lost. For example, “attention” in the past included implicit evaluations of social prestige. A television broadcaster would have to command respect in order to win your attention, or you would change the channel. Now, an influencer just needs to get engagement, regardless of whether they are behaving responsibly or degrading themselves. This could mean playing into ragebait or clickbait or cringe comedy that you would rather not see.

Ultimately, the thing that generates comments and shares might not be the thing which would naturally generate the most attention—it’s just the best at generating the measurement of attention. Since you can’t measure social trust, for instance, that’s accidentally lost along the way.

As a metric of sustained attention (how much you maintain a behavioral response), “engagement” also ignores other types of perception, like selective attention (the ability to ignore competing stimuli) and focused attention (the ability to concentrate deeply on something). For me, it takes active work to not look at groceries in a grocery store—but by focusing on different objects, I can learn more about my environment than if I just let myself get drawn to the bag of chips.

Switching between interpretive gazes like that isn’t an option on the algorithm. TikTok is only showing you the flashy junk food (which, bear in mind, is not even why you came to the grocery store). Now you have blinders on, preventing you from accessing all the other ways of looking. You are epistemically handicapped.

On the marketing side of things, this means we’re no longer in an “attention economy”—we’re in an engagement economy where the metric of attention has become more important than attention itself. If you want to go viral, you have to play into what the algorithm wants, and that means abandoning traditional hang-ups like institutional prestige or nuanced understandings of perception.

Only the numbers matter, and the most viral communicators are the ones who optimize for the numbers. MrBeast and Jubilee Media and the racist AI slop creators are all farming their own ability to appear on your social media feed. The bag of chips is no longer competing against everything else; everyone is competing to be the bag of chips. When consumers are cut off from everything else in the grocery store, all that matters is what is placed in front of them.

This is different from normal attention.

As a citizen of the internet, it’s easy to find this depressing. But I think it’s our political duty to remain vigilant online, rather than abandoning social media entirely. It is possible to subversively harness these tools. Once we recognize the engagement economy for what it is, it affects us less; we can even use it to our advantage. But step one is training ourselves to look differently—recognizing how we’re being manipulated and broadening our understanding of reality.

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Recent media

• Really enjoyed recording this CNN podcast with Audie Cornish.

• I was profiled in the Harvard Gazette here.

• Chatted with TIME Magazine about dead internet theory here.

Upcoming events

• September 22 at 7 pm (NYC): I’m chatting with Justin Gregg about his new book Humanish. Get your tickets here.

• September 27 at 12 pm (NYC): I’ll be doing a book signing at the Strand Bookstore! Feel free to swing by if you’re in the area.

• October 25 at 1:30 pm (Boston, MA): Conversation with Steven Pinker and Alison Wood Brooks at the Boston Book Festival.

Also don’t forget to buy my book Algospeak if you haven’t already!!