Attention Economy, Dependent Meaning, and the Capture of Perception

Most of what commands attention now is not meaningful in any substantive sense. It is dependent meaning: signals that borrow significance from circulation, outrage, novelty, or proximity to power rather than from coherence, consequence, or truth. This hollowness is not accidental. It is structurally central to contemporary dissatisfaction, corruption, volatility, and political disorder. These conditions persist because human attention is tightly coupled to technological systems that reward frequency over depth and reaction over understanding. Meaning becomes something displayed rather than held, consumed rather than integrated. The instability that follows is not a malfunction but a predictable outcome of how the attention economy influences perception, value, and action.

Within this field, attention appears active yet is largely reactive. Agency and decision-making emerge downstream of patterns already in motion, producing the sensation of choice while behaviour is conditionally shaped in advance by proto-linguistic structures that translate signal into language and circulate meaning across a semantically non-orientable field. Under these conditions even recognition is captured. Insight is permitted only insofar as it can be converted into another signal, returned to circulation, and used to stabilise the dynamics it explicitly seeks to name.