After US courts found Meta and YouTube liable for deliberately addicting young users, attention is increasingly being recognised not as a private commodity, but as a strategic resource shaping democracy, public debate and social stability.

In the 21st century, power no longer lies only in territory, capital, or technology. It lies in something far more elusive and finite: human attention. The jury verdict in a US civil suit which found Meta and YouTube liable for deliberately addicting young users, leading to numerous mental health problems, is probably just an early skirmish in what promises to be a long war.

Attention is not merely a psychological convenience; it is a biological function. Neuroscience defines it as the process by which the brain selects, prioritises, and sustains focus on a fraction of the information available to it. At every moment, we are immersed in a storm of signals, yet only a few reach conscious awareness.

This filtering is governed by two systems: a fast, reflexive, ‘bottom-up’ attention driven by novelty, fear, and emotion; and a slower, deliberate, ’top-down’ attention that enables reasoning and strategic thought. The imbalance between these two systems is now the fault line of modern civilisation.

For millennia, societies have sought to capture attention. Orators mastered rhetoric to move crowds. Religious institutions created rituals and edifices designed to command awe. Political regimes deployed spectacle – from Roman games to revolutionary propaganda – to shape collective focus.

The printing press, radio, and television expanded the scale of influence, but they did not fundamentally alter the........

© Pearls and Irritations