The Attention Economy Is Broken: What Communities Can Do About It

Your attention is the most valuable thing you own. More valuable than your money, which you can earn back, and more valuable than your time, which you at least get to allocate. Every day, billions of dollars move on a single transaction: something captures your focus, and someone else pays for access to it. Social media sells that access, campaigns buy it, memecoins hijack it. What a community loses in the process is the ability to talk to itself on its own terms.

How Attention Became a Commodity

Meta earned over $130 billion in advertising revenue in 2024. None of that came from selling anything to users; it came from selling users to advertisers. The notifications, the algorithmic nudges, the endless "you might also like" are all instruments for keeping you in the auction house a little longer.

That's a tech story until your mutual aid group runs on Instagram or Facebook Groups, at which point it becomes yours. The platform decides who sees what. An algorithm tuned for engagement, which is not the same thing as community health and was never meant to be, decides whether your post about Saturday's food distribution reaches ten people or a hundred. The most inflammatory take in your group gets amplified. The person doing the logistics gets buried under it.

Attention and Influence Are Two Sides of Power

Think about your community group. Whoever controls the communication channel controls the agenda. If your mutual aid collective runs on a WhatsApp group, whoever admins that group decides who gets to speak, what gets pinned, and who gets removed. If your co-op coordinates through Slack, whoever manages the workspace sets the rules.

Now scale that up. When global platforms auction off attention to the highest bidder, entire communities lose control over their own narrative. During the 2020 uprising in Minneapolis, mutual aid groups organizing bail funds and supply distribution were constantly fighting Facebook's algorithm, which suppressed their posts while amplifying sensational content. The people doing the actual work of community care were invisible on the very platforms they depended on.

Mutual aid networks that formed in Washington, DC during COVID hit this directly. The messages that mattered most, like where to pick up groceries and how to request help, were the ones getting lost in a feed built to maximize screen time. Some groups moved to Signal and others tried Discourse, and every migration cost them members, because attention is finite and each new platform asks for another slice of it.

Memecoins: The Purest Extraction of Attention

Social media extracts attention slowly. Memecoins do it in about six weeks. Through 2024 and 2025 the cycle repeated with almost no variation: hype captures attention, attention converts into speculative buying, the thing collapses, and the loudest early voices walk away richer than everyone who believed them.

TRUMP coin launched in January 2025, peaked near a $15 billion market cap, and fell more than 80% within weeks. The top 40 wallets cleared millions. Thousands of other people lost rent money. The financial damage is the obvious part. The part worth noticing is that every hour those people spent watching a price chart was an hour not spent organizing anything.

Political Campaigns Buy What Communities Can't Afford

The 2024 US presidential election ran through more than $4 billion in campaign spending, a large share of it digital. What that money buys is not really ad space. It buys the right to interrupt your feed, your inbox, and your group chats with something engineered to make you feel that you must act now.

Meanwhile, a mutual aid group in East LA trying to reach its own members about a weekend food distribution has zero budget for promoted posts. The asymmetry is staggering: a Super PAC can spend $10 million to flood a community with messaging, while the community itself can't even guarantee its members see a single post about real, tangible help.

What Local, Accountable Communication Looks Like

Nobody needs to abandon technology over this. What's needed is communication infrastructure where the community decides what surfaces, instead of an algorithm or an advertiser.

Parts of this already exist. The Mutual Aid Los Angeles Network, which connects more than 50 groups across LA County, coordinates through direct channels that no ranking system sits on top of. When the 2025 wildfires hit, messages went out fast and reached everyone, because the people doing the work also controlled the channel.

Time banks like the Dane County TimeBank in Wisconsin succeed partly because their communication stays local. Members know each other. Messages are relevant. There's no algorithm deciding that a request for eldercare help is less "engaging" than a political argument.

How Goodkeep Returns Attention to Communities

Goodkeep is built on a simple principle: community communication should serve the community, not a platform's revenue model.

Concretely: no ranked feed deciding which updates are worth showing, and no ads bidding against your own members for their attention. When someone posts about Saturday's distribution, everyone in the group sees it, for the unremarkable reason that the channel belongs to the group rather than to a company selling access to it.

The same principle extends to governance over the communication itself. A community sets its own rules about announcements and priorities. Pin a weekly update and it stays pinned, with nothing quietly demoting it. Decide that notifications should be reserved for real coordination and you can do that without paying for it in reach.

This isn't about building another social media platform. It's about giving communities the tools to communicate without paying an attention tax to Silicon Valley. Your group's attention belongs to your group. Full stop.

The Bigger Picture

Calling the attention economy broken undersells it. Nothing malfunctioned; it extracts because that's the design, and it does the job well. Every minute of a community's attention that a platform captures is a minute that didn't go into organizing or deciding something together. Getting that attention back is not a future project. It happens in the ordinary daily act of talking to each other somewhere you control.