The Attention Economy -  When Our Emotions Are Turned Into Profit

How many of our digital choices were born from the Weichö?

Let us imagine a familiar scene.

You pick up your phone to reply to a message. A notification leads you to a video. The video ends, but the next one begins automatically. A headline provokes outrage. A comment seems too absurd to ignore. Then an image appears of someone who seems more beautiful, wealthier, happier, or more successful.

By the time you notice, the original message has still not been answered.

We could say that all these choices were yours. After all, it was your hand that touched the screen. But perhaps we can ask a more demanding question:

Did the choice arise from the Weichö, or was it encouraged by an architecture designed to anticipate, stimulate, and prolong certain responses?

This blog is not merely about “phone addiction.” Nor does it intend to claim that all digital technology is harmful. The UNICEF report Childhood in a Digital World, published in 2025, found no clear evidence that screen time alone directly harms children’s mental health. The effects depend on content, lived experiences, individual vulnerabilities, and what digital use replaces or adds to life. (UNICEF)

The problem we will investigate together is another one:

What happens when time spent, repetition, fear, desire, and outrage become economic resources?

The platform does not need to know you completely

Perhaps a platform does not know who you are.

It does not fully know your memories, family history, territory, contradictions, or what you wish to build in the future. But it may know enough patterns to predict which content is most likely to interrupt your movement.

It can observe, for example:

• which image made you stop;

• which video you watched until the end;

• what you shared;

• how long you remained;

• which advertisement you opened;

• whose profile you visited;

• at what time you usually return;

• which emotion produces your fastest reaction.

The attention economy transforms these regularities into data. The data feed systems of prediction and classification. Those predictions, in turn, guide advertisements, recommendations, and new attempts to capture your next movement.

Brazilian sociologist Sérgio Amadeu da Silveira describes this process as part of data colonialism: information produced by populations and institutions becomes raw material concentrated within large corporate infrastructures, generally controlled by the Global North. In his 2025 analysis, he draws attention to the transfer of Brazilian educational, legal, and social data to foreign companies, often presented merely as technological efficiency. (Conexões)

We can therefore reformulate the question:

Does the platform need to know our Weichö, or only discover which stimuli can make it repeat a behavior?

When clicking does not mean desiring

Perhaps this is one of the most important points for us to consider together.

Platforms frequently interpret clicks, likes, shares, and time spent as signs of what we desire. These are sometimes called revealed preferences: what behavior appears to demonstrate.

But our immediate behavior does not always correspond to what we value when we have the opportunity to pause and reflect.

In an algorithmic audit published in 2025, Smitha Milli and her colleagues compared content selected by an engagement-based system with what people themselves reported wanting to see. The algorithm amplified content that was more partisan, hostile, and emotionally charged, even though participants did not report preferring it when asked directly. (PubMed)

Perhaps you have experienced something similar.

You do not enjoy the argument, but you continue reading.
You do not want to feel afraid, but you open the news story.
You do not approve of the humiliation, but you watch the video until the end.
You did not intend to buy, but you return to the product.
The comparison makes you feel bad, but you search for another image.

The click happened. Yet did it express a desire, or did it merely reveal that a particular stimulus succeeded in capturing your attention?

A response can be subjectively experienced as “mine” while also being encouraged by conditions that I did not consciously choose.

Recognizing this influence does not eliminate our responsibility. It expands our ability to understand where the choice began to be organized.

Emotion is both content and fuel

Outrage, fear, and desire were not invented by digital platforms. These emotions were part of human life long before social media.

What is new is the capacity to continuously observe, test, and select which stimuli generate the strongest response in each person.

A 2023 study by William Brady and colleagues showed that social media users tend to perceive more moral outrage in messages than the people who wrote them reported actually feeling. This overperception increased beliefs about hostility between groups, polarization, and extremism. (Nature Human Behaviour)

We are not only reacting to what other people feel. We may be reacting to an amplified version of what we imagine they feel.

Another study, published in 2022, investigated smartphone notifications through behavioral and electrophysiological measures. The results indicated interference with cognitive control and attention during a demanding task. This does not mean that every notification causes permanent harm. It shows that even a small interruption can compete for resources with what we were trying to accomplish. (PubMed)

We can observe the cycle:

The notification interrupts.
The content provokes.
The emotion guides the next click.
The click produces data.
The data refine the next provocation.

Emotion is not only experienced.

It can also be measured, predicted, and economically used.

It is not simply a child’s lack of self-control

UNICEF describes features such as infinite scrolling, autoplay, notifications, usage streaks, and view or like counters as elements that can prolong time spent and encourage people to return to platforms. Children and adolescents may be especially sensitive because their self-regulatory capacities are still developing and because social rewards, such as peer approval, carry particular importance during this stage of life. (UNICEF Parenting)

This prevents us from reducing the problem to the statement:

“The child must learn to put the phone down.”

Who should demonstrate greater self-control: a child, or a corporation with teams dedicated to engineering, psychology, design, data science, and artificial intelligence?

Education can strengthen critical perception, but it should not transfer all responsibility to the individual. Responsible design, transparency, data protection, regulation, and limits on persuasive commercial practices are equally necessary.

In 2026, UNICEF published a report based on consultations with more than two hundred children from seven countries, including Brazil. The children described opportunities for learning and expression, but also a lack of control, data exploitation, and environments that are not consistently safe or fair. The report concludes that policies and platforms should be developed with children, not merely for them. (UNICEF Innocenti)

Here we encounter shared agency again.

A child is not only someone who must be protected. The child is also a participant in the investigation of the digital world they inhabit.

We can construct our own interruptions

Platforms seek to remove friction: the video begins automatically, the feed never ends, and the next recommendation is already available.

But young people do not necessarily remain passive.

In interviews with adolescents aged 13 to 16, Nikhila Natarajan identified strategies created by the participants themselves to interrupt infinite scrolling. Some introduced time limits, blocks, reminders, and other frictions capable of restoring stopping points to an experience designed not to end. (International Journal of Communication)

Perhaps we can carry out a small exercise now.

Think about the last time you remained on a platform longer than you had intended.

What had you originally opened it to do?
What was the first interruption?
Which emotion kept you there?
Was there a natural point at which to stop?
What did the platform gain from your continued presence?
What did you stop perceiving in your Body-Territory?

These questions are not looking for someone to blame. They restore visibility to the encounter among intention, emotion, body, and digital architecture.

Paper, Rock, and Scissors in front of the screen

In the BrainLatam interpretation, Paper, Rock, and Scissors are not three anatomical connectomes recognized by neuroscience. They are provisional metacognitive maps for observing functional configurations.

In Rock, a message may demand immediate defense: attack, escape, block, reply, or share before it is too late.

In Scissors, we may quickly divide the world: friend or enemy, true or false, winner or failure, beautiful or ugly, included or excluded.

In Paper, we temporarily expand our surface of contact. We notice our breathing, posture, territory, the source of the information, and what we have not yet understood.

None of these modes is always good or bad. Rock protects. Scissors analyzes. Paper allows us to listen.

The metacognitive question becomes:

Which mode is this interface trying to request from me right now? And do I have the conditions to choose another movement?

A platform may discover that fear keeps us in Rock. It may learn that social comparison keeps Scissors cutting people apart and ranking lives. Recovering Paper may mean inserting a pause between stimulus and response.

Not to remain in contemplation forever, but to recover the possibility of choosing.

Attention was organized even before platforms existed

It would be a mistake to imagine that digital technologies were the first to learn how to organize emotions, perceptions, and behavior.

Human societies have always built spaces, rituals, narratives, music, and images capable of directing collective attention.

The archaeology of Chavín de Huántar in Peru offers an important window. A 2025 study found chemical and microbotanical evidence of the institutionalized ritual use of psychoactive plants, including vilca and tobacco-related species, inside an underground gallery. The study suggests that sensory experiences and altered states participated in rituals connected with social integration and the formation of hierarchies. (PubMed Central)

This evidence does not authorize us to call Chavín an “ancestral platform,” nor to reduce its practices to techniques of manipulation. It also does not permit us to romanticize the pre-Columbian world. It opens a historical question:

Who organizes collective attention, through which means, and to produce what kind of relationship?

At Caral, archaeoastronomical research conducted with the participation of Peruvian archaeologist Ruth Shady Solís identified relationships among buildings, the river, the landscape, and celestial events. Architecture may have directed attention toward seasonal, agricultural, and ritual cycles, integrating social space, earth, and sky. (Latin American Antiquity)

The difference is not that pre-Columbian societies possessed “pure” attention while ours is “artificial.”

The contemporary difference lies in the combination of continuous personalization, massive data collection, constant testing, global reach, and financial models based on behavioral prediction.

An ancient plaza could organize the collective gaze.

A digital platform can reorganize a different screen for each person, observe their response, and modify the next stimulus almost immediately.

When Latin American attention becomes raw material

In Latin America, the attention economy also encounters historical inequalities involving labor, infrastructure, and sovereignty.

A 2022 ethnography by Rafael Grohmann and colleagues investigated click-farm platforms in Brazil and Colombia. People performed tasks such as liking, following, commenting, and moving accounts, updating historical forms of informal and precarious labor. (Work Organisation, Labour & Globalisation)

This shows us that even what appears to be spontaneous attention may have been manufactured.

A post appears popular.
Popularity attracts real attention.
Attention increases commercial value.
But some of the initial signals may have been produced through poorly paid labor, commercialized accounts, or automated interactions.

The attention economy does not capture only those who look. It also organizes the labor of those who must manufacture visibility in order to survive.

In Sérgio Amadeu’s interpretation, this is part of a colonial relationship because territories produce data, culture, and behavior while control over the infrastructures and the capacity to process them remain concentrated in a small number of corporations. (Google Books)

An ecology of attention

In Ancestral Future, published in Portuguese in 2022 as Futuro ancestral, Ailton Krenak displaces our thinking from the idea of a future produced only by the market and brings us closer to rivers, territories, and relationships that sustained worlds before colonial expansion.

His reflection is not specifically about algorithms, but it allows us to make an important inference: attention can also be a bond, a form of care, and participation in the world—not merely a resource available for extraction. (Companhia das Letras)

Perhaps education needs to go beyond teaching people how to use digital tools.

Together, we can learn to ask:

• Who designed this environment?

• Which behavior does it reward?

• Which emotion is being selected?

• What data are being produced?

• Who receives the economic value?

• What disappears while my attention remains here?

• Does this choice correspond to the world I wish to build?

We are not seeking a return to life without technology.

We are seeking technology in which time spent is not confused with well-being, clicking is not confused with desire, and predictability is not confused with freedom.

The NeuroEducation of Weichö can help each person perceive that capture does not occur only “inside the mind.” It occurs through the encounter among Body-Territory, interface, economic model, language, social relationships, and material conditions of life.

We therefore arrive at a question that cannot be answered by neuroscience, the school, or the individual user alone:

How many of our digital choices arose from the Weichö, and how many were induced by structures that profit from capturing our attention?

Perhaps there is no simple boundary between the two.

But perceiving the dispute may already be the first movement through which attention can return to the life we wish to live.

Commented references

UNICEF Innocenti (2025). Childhood in a Digital World: Screen Time, Digital Skills and Mental Health.
The report rejects explanations based only on screen time and shows that content, harmful experiences, unequal access, and platform safety are decisive dimensions for understanding children’s digital lives. (UNICEF)

Baghdasaryan, B.; Vosloo, S. — UNICEF Innocenti (2026). Children’s Best Interests in Digital Policy and Practice.
Developed with the participation of children from seven countries, including Brazil, the report calls for platforms created with children, greater corporate accountability, and safe, fair, and inclusive digital environments. (UNICEF)

Milli, S. et al. (2025). Engagement, User Satisfaction, and the Amplification of Divisive Content on Social Media.
The algorithmic audit distinguishes observed behavior from reflected preference and shows that engagement-generating content is not necessarily what people say they wish to see. (PubMed)

Brady, W. J. et al. (2023). Overperception of Moral Outrage in Online Social Networks Inflates Beliefs About Intergroup Hostility.
The study shows that users may perceive more outrage in messages than their authors report feeling, increasing expectations of hostility and polarization. (Nature Human Behaviour)

Upshaw, J. D. et al. (2022). The Hidden Cost of a Smartphone: The Effects of Smartphone Notifications on Cognitive Control from a Behavioral and Electrophysiological Perspective.
The study combines behavioral and electrophysiological measures to investigate how notifications compete for attention and cognitive control during demanding tasks. (PubMed)

Natarajan, N. (2024). Do They Stop? How Do They Stop? Why Do They Stop? Whether, How, and Why Teens Insert “Frictions” Into Social Media’s Infinite Scroll.
The interviews show that adolescents are not merely passive victims of design and can create blocks, pauses, and other frictions to recover points of exit. (International Journal of Communication)

Silveira, S. A. da (2025). A hipótese do colonialismo de dados e o neoliberalismo.
The Brazilian sociologist analyzes how the transfer of public and social data to foreign corporate infrastructures deepens technological subordination and geopolitical inequalities. (Conexões)

Grohmann, R. et al. (2022). Click Farm Platforms: An Updating of Informal Work in Brazil and Colombia.
The ethnography reveals the precarious labor involved in manufacturing clicks, followers, and visibility, connecting the platform economy with historical forms of Latin American informality. (Work Organisation, Labour & Globalisation)

Rick, J. W. et al. (2025). Pre-Hispanic Ritual Use of Psychoactive Plants at Chavín de Huántar, Peru.
Chemical and microbotanical analyses provide direct evidence of the institutionalized use of psychoactive plants in Andean rituals, opening questions about attention, sensory experience, social integration, and power. (PubMed Central)

González-García, A. C. et al. (2021). The River and the Sky: Astronomy and Topography in Caral Society, America’s First Urban Centers.
This archaeological reference demonstrates relationships among architecture, river, landscape, and celestial events at Caral. Although published just before the post-2021 reference window, it remains important for understanding how social spaces organized collective attention and temporality. (Latin American Antiquity)

Krenak, A. (2022). Futuro ancestral.
The Brazilian Indigenous intellectual displaces the imagination of an exclusively market-driven future and restores rivers, territories, and other beings as participants in the possibilities of life’s continuity. (Companhia das Letras)