What began as digital connection has become a marketplace of distraction. Every notification, every scroll, every algorithmic “suggestion” is designed to keep us inside the feed — feeding it in return. The business model is simple: capture attention, convert emotion, and sell both to the highest bidder. Our presence has become a product.
Behind the feed, invisible power moves quietly. The same financial giants who fund weapons manufacturers, surveillance tech, and fossil fuel corporations BlackRock, Vanguard, and their peers also own vast shares of the platforms shaping our digital lives. The pipelines of profit run from our timelines to global systems of extraction and exploitation.
When we post, teach, or protest online, we’re forced into contradiction. We use the tools of the very structures we resist. We depend on platforms that surveil, censor, and profit from our pain — even as we try to build something better. Digital resistance, then, is not only about what we say online. It’s about how we exist online. It is the act of reclaiming the terrain of our attention.
The Attention Economy Is Not Neutral
The “attention economy” sounds harmless, even efficient as if our focus were simply another resource to be organized. But attention is not a commodity. It is a form of consciousness, a finite capacity to care. When it’s harvested and sold, the cost is spiritual as much as social.
Every time we scroll through outrage or grief, a profit mechanism clicks quietly into motion. Our emotions are quantified; our curiosity is redirected. We are nudged into cycles of comparison, urgency, and fatigue patterns that make genuine reflection almost impossible.
The result is a kind of slow violence. Not the visible kind that makes headlines, but a daily erosion of empathy and focus. The constant flood of content leaves us overstimulated yet underinformed, connected yet profoundly alone. And when we begin to internalize this disorientation as normal, the system has already won.
From Extraction to Awareness
To resist within this landscape is to remember that attention is not passive. It is political.
Where we place it, what we amplify, what we ignore shapes the moral architecture of our era.
Resistance can begin in small, radical gestures: choosing not to share for visibility’s sake; pausing before posting; turning off the endless scroll. These are not acts of withdrawal. They are acts of refusal refusals to let corporations dictate the rhythm of our minds.
Digital resistance is not about purity or perfection. It’s about awareness. It’s recognizing that our feeds are not mirrors of reality, but curated ecosystems of profit. It’s asking who benefits from our outrage, and what we lose when everything becomes content.
When we begin to see attention as power — not data — we open the door to something different: digital spaces that serve care over clicks, community over consumption.
Imagining Another Internet
But awareness alone isn’t enough. If our digital commons are broken, they must also be rebuilt.
That means asking harder questions: What would online connection look like without extraction? How might a platform honor curiosity instead of hijacking it? How can communities thrive without being commodified?
The answers to these questions won’t come from Silicon Valley. They will come from us from designers, educators, organizers, and everyday users who believe that our digital lives can still belong to us. The future of the internet depends on how bravely we imagine it, and how collectively we build it.
Our resistance begins where our attention returns to us — not in silence, but in awareness.Not in escape, but in reconstruction. Because every scroll, every pause, every conscious moment online is a small act of reclamation, a vote for the kind of world we want to inhabit, both digital and real.
A Call to Reclaim
Every year, the digital world hits a fever pitch of sales, ads, notifications, and endless scrolling designed to keep us consuming. Black Friday has become the perfect metaphor for that noise: a moment when attention itself becomes a commodity.
This year, imagine doing the opposite. Instead of diving into the feed, step back. Log out for a while. Notice what remains when the noise fades what it feels like to think, to breathe, to be online without being sold something. That stillness isn’t withdrawal. It's a renewal of the pause before rebuilding begins.
Because reclaiming the internet isn’t only about what we refuse. It’s about what we choose to create together in a digital world built on curiosity, care, and connection. And that’s where our next story begins with the people and platforms reimagining what belonging can look like online.
Platforms like Jaywalk and Upscrolled are already exploring that possibility — rebuilding online spaces around shared values instead of algorithms,and turning digital connection into genuine community.And that’s where our next story begins with the people and platforms reimagining what belonging can look like online.
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