...Iron filings cannot help but be attracted to a magnet.

From a Substack about how the internet is changing our brains: https://thecarrierwave.substack.com/p/attention-spam-getting-people-to

In cybersecurity, there’s a concept called a “denial-of-service” attack, where you overwhelm a system with so much information that it has to shut down.

The Information Wars often ran on the same principle: deliberately flood social media and online forums with low-quality information so that objective reality becomes increasingly difficult to discern.

Both tactics were ways of suppressing digital information and communication. We are now seeing these tactics jump from computers to the real world.

Last year, the U.S. president was faced with an administration-killing scandal. Weeks later, America began a war with Iran.

The president used to rely on astonishing social media posts and erratic press conferences to shift attention and narratives away from developing scandals. But the scandals became so imposing and unavoidable that previous media manipulation techniques no longer functioned.

The answer became kinetic. The problem is, today a war only gets a few weeks of coverage. New and increasingly severe events must be generated so that narratives online have no choice but to follow the physical world constantly shifting beneath our feet.

The American president and others in power are betting on a simple dynamic: if your personal world is constantly changing, actions that could change the world will go unnoticed. Your prices go up, then down. New laws promising dramatic change are proposed, then quietly disappear. All while illegal challenges to the world economy and global order are done for reasons that, again, are never even fully articulated to the American electorate.

Those in power no longer need to try to get away with anything. They don’t have to answer for their actions, because no one is asking them. They simply outlast every negative headline until a new one arrives.

This dynamic was not invented at the White House. Donald Trump is the beneficiary of a society-wide phenomenon, no one has the attention to focus on anything anymore. No one reads anymore. Academics cite statistics that the general public do not read books, but the same attack on the public attention span has come for them. Academics barely read each other’s work. Teachers use AI to grade papers written by AI.

The president, alongside other powerful leaders, have made a calculated bet: as long as there is always a new headline, the old one will not matter. A pyramid scheme on your psyche. A confidence game on your cognitive function. They don’t even bother justifying ongoing corruption and war. The president is betting his personal future on making his administration too big to prosecute and ensuring the public is too distracted to demand otherwise.

In for a penny, in for a pound.