Commodity vs. Premium Attention
Social media platforms have consolidated our news, culture, and conversation into an immensely addictive, endlessly-scrollable virtual environment that we call “the Simulation.” Their revenue model is simple: swallow up our attention so they can further monetize time spent on-platform.
That reality will not change soon, so the urgent question for civic actors and practitioners of democracy isn’t merely “How do we escape the Simulation?” but “What kind of attention must we cultivate in today’s digital world?”
In the Simulation, “Free” Isn’t Free
The Simulation feels free only because we don’t pay cash to scroll. But the real price is our attention: a finite, valuable resource that social media giants capture, package, and auction to advertisers.
Attention can be understood as our brains’ limited capacity to process and act upon information. To paraphrase the legal scholar Tim Wu, our attention is a highly valuable resource for a few key reasons:
We are always paying attention to something.
Our attention is scarce, limited by the processing power of the brain and by time.
We make “attentional decisions,” deciding to pay attention to some things while simultaneously ignoring others.
Attention is a prerequisite for a healthy democracy. In order to make informed personal and social decisions, citizens must have the freedom to direct and spend their attention constructively.
As we will see, by commodifying and extracting our attention for the benefit of advertisers, the Simulation has effectively stratified contemporary attention into at least two distinct asset classes — with significant implications for civic engagement in our modern era.
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Commodity Attention
On one hand, there’s the kind of attention we call “commodity attention.” It is the staple of the Simulation’s attention economy: cheap and abundant, easily accrued and sold in the form of ad placements on all manner of platforms.
Think of Commodity Attention as the bulk grain of the digital economy. It is:
Abundant and fungible: Think of a 15-second pre-roll on YouTube, a sponsored story on Instagram, or a programmatic display ad buried on a website or in a mobile game. Despite small differences in format, all are relatively interchangeable and none are meaningfully different from the next.
Easy to acquire: Open an advertising dashboard, upload your creative, set a budget of even a few dollars, press “launch,” and you’re live. Standardized rates of exchange (“CPM”/“Cost Per Mille” – cost per thousand views) give you predictable, factory-floor pricing.
Ephemeral: The moment the ad spend dries up, the impressions disappear and the audience is often quick to forget. You’ve rented space in the mind for a heartbeat, no longer.
Low-trust: Most users recognize and discount it as “just advertising,” so the impact value of the material is relatively modest and short-lived.
Commodity attention buys are the digital equivalent of yard signs or billboards: cheap, easy, and useful for quick visibility but incapable on their own of sustaining a genuine conversation or community.
Premium Attention
Premium Attention, on the other hand, is cultivated from the voluntary, repeat engagement that forms around creators, podcasts, and communal epicenters where people actively choose to spend their time. It is the kind of attention that is built on talent, time, and trust — and it grows and compounds organically.
Unlike Commodity Attention, Premium Attention is:
Relationship-based: It accrues around creators, podcasts, newsletters, livestream communities, or other loci (e.g. local newsrooms) that people choose to spend their precious time with.
High-trust: Ideas, arguments, and endorsements swim or sink based on the credibility of a known and trusted voice; messages arrive through an existing parasocial bond.
Durable: Audiences return day after day, week after week; watch-time and comment threads stretch into hours, not seconds. Even if you pause promotion, the community often sustains itself.
Costly and risky up front, cheaper over time: Premium attention requires steep, slow-burn investments — production, talent, promotion, revenue shares, etc. — but as the audience compounds, the cost of each engaged minute falls precipitously.
The civic value of Premium Attention rests on three core pillars:
Trust: Messages delivered by familiar voices enjoy exponentially higher credibility than those delivered from some advertiser on high. This level of trust is a critical asset when institutional confidence is at historic lows.
Depth: Video-based content, threaded chat, and regular newsletters allow better for the nuance, context, and constructive disagreement required for self‑government.
Community: Interactive spaces (Discord servers, comment sections, live streams, etc.) forge not only vertical but horizontal ties among participants, turning otherwise passive spectators into co‑owners of their own public square.
It is important to note that Premium Attention isn’t inherently virtuous. In the wrong hands, the same deep engagement can power cults, conspiracies, and the influence of exploitative and ethically-dubious “Attention Aristocrats.” Still, democracy cannot survive without it: durable, trust-based engagement is the indispensable foundation of constructive civic life, even as we must stay vigilant against its abuse.
An AI-generated hallucination of commodity vs. premium attention. Credit: DALL-E.
Why Premium Attention Matters for Democracy
The architects of the Simulation have fortified their empires by making the quick-hit purchase of Commodity Attention virtually effortless. With just a few clicks and a handful of dollars, anyone can place razor-targeted ads on Meta or TikTok — but that convenience comes at a hidden cost. These companies first hook users, then charge every brand, nonprofit, or civic group rent to reach them, turning mission-critical communication into a pay-to-play game controlled by the platform gatekeepers.
Commodity buys can still serve tactical or commercial needs, yet healthy civic discourse depends on Premium Attention — the durable, trust-rich relationships that form in well-moderated communities both online and off. When the practice of democracy becomes dependent on fleeting impressions, it lurches from crisis to crisis, hoping superficial exposure will suffice as a replacement for the deeper communal ties that have historically sustained it. Directing resources toward Premium Attention instead builds lasting civic muscle: networks capable of deliberation, organizing, and action long after any single campaign or project concludes.
The sooner civic actors and practitioners of democracy pivot from counting clicks to cultivating conversations, the sooner and more effectively we will be able to shift from being passive products in someone else’s feed to active co-authors of our shared future.