We don’t live in an information age. We live in a manipulation age. And our greatest weakness isn’t gullibility — it’s fatigue. Platforms don’t need to fool us. They just need to keep us too tired to care whether we’re fooled or not.
The Exhaustion Economy
We live inside a machine designed to strip us of our ability to care enough to think. Social media isn’t just a space where fake things appear. It’s an exhaustion engine that floods us with so much news, ads, memes, outrage, tragedy, comedy that we don’t have the energy to sort through it.
Discernment takes work. It requires patience. And patience is scarce when every corner of our lives has been turned into commercial space. We’ve lost third spaces, places to simply exist, connect, breathe, because everything now comes with a price tag or an algorithm. Attention itself has become currency and platforms, politicians, corporations, and culture wars are all competing to buy it.
When exhaustion is the baseline, most people end up doing one of two things: absorb everything or absorb nothing. Numb acceptance, or blanket distrust. Neither requires discernment. Both keep us easy to manage.
Our Shrinking Span
Remember when TikTok stretched video limits from three minutes to ten? People groaned. Who’s going to watch ten whole minutes? The irony was painful. Ten minutes used to be nothing. A coffee break. A conversation. Now it’s an eternity.
We joke about having “goldfish brains,” but the truth is darker. Our attention spans aren’t naturally shrinking, they’re being trained down. We are being conditioned to accept stimulation only in microbursts, three seconds, fifteen seconds, sixty if we’re really patient.
And once we accept that rhythm, deeper engagement feels impossible. Who has time to fact-check an image when another one is already waiting in the next swipe? Who has patience to trace a headline back to a source when the feed is already feeding the next scandal?
The architecture of our online lives is designed to erode discernment, because discernment slows consumption. And in the attention economy, slowness is unprofitable.
Propaganda Beyond Politics
We hear “propaganda” and think of wartime posters, political slogans, state media. But propaganda isn’t confined to politics. It’s any information designed to bypass your critical thinking and go straight for your emotional core.
That’s why it works. Propaganda isn’t trying to persuade you with evidence. It’s trying to flood you with feeling. Outrage. Fear. Pride. Shame. Urgency. It doesn’t matter which lever gets pulled, as long as you move.
It can look like a government campaign, yes — but it also looks like an ad convincing you that your worth is measured by the shoes you wear, the car you drive, the vacation you can’t afford but put on credit anyway. It looks like a viral meme crafted to pit neighbor against neighbor, turning ordinary disagreements into tribal wars. It looks like an AI photo passed around like a joke until someone takes it seriously and outrage does the rest.
The point isn’t accuracy. The point is effect. Propaganda doesn’t care if you believe the details, only that you feel enough to react, share, or buy in. And when audiences are already exhausted, when attention spans are trimmed down to seconds, those effects land harder. We don’t slow down to ask: Where did this come from? Who benefits if I believe it? Instead, we absorb the feeling and move on, leaving the idea lodged inside us, unexamined but still powerful.
That’s how propaganda wins in the attention economy. Not through truth, but through speed. Not through persuasion, but through exhaustion.
Discernment as a Civic Tool
Here’s the line I can’t stop coming back to
Discernment is not a moral luxury. It’s a civic tool.
We tend to talk about discernment as if it’s a personality trait, the mark of someone who reads widely, thinks deeply, double-checks their sources. We frame it as an individual virtue, almost a hobby for intellectuals or careful people. But that framing misses the point.
Discernment is not just private wisdom. It’s the collective muscle that keeps societies from unraveling. It is the difference between communities that can solve problems together and communities that are manipulated into turning on each other. It’s the foundation of trust, the invisible glue that allows us to share a reality long enough to act inside it.
When we lose it, we lose more than the ability to separate truth from falsehood. We lose the ability to know what deserves our energy and what doesn’t — urgent from irrelevant, meaningful from manipulative. Every outrage looks the same size. Every claim looks equally valid. Every lie gets to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with every truth.
When it all collapses into static, truth doesn’t stand a chance. It’s not the smartest voice that wins, it’s the one with the biggest megaphone. Suddenly conspiracy threads sound as serious as public health warnings, and junk ads dress themselves up as destiny. It’s not agreement they need — just enough of us too confused or too tired to push back.
Discernment slows the spin. It doesn’t guarantee consensus, but it gives us the ground to argue in good faith. Without it, we’re not a society — we’re a swarm, buzzing at whatever sound is loudest.
Slowing Down Is a Weapon
I don’t pretend to have the solution. I can’t fix the platforms. I can’t regulate the algorithms. I don’t have the power to make billion-dollar companies stop mining our attention like it’s gold. But I do have the power to notice, to name the problem out loud, and to practice something different in myself.
That practice is clumsy, and it starts small. Pausing before I share. Labeling things honestly when I’m unsure. Asking myself the simplest questions — who benefits if I believe this? who loses? Curating my feed so it isn’t just an outrage loop. Choosing slowness, even when it feels unnatural and even when I feel the itch to keep scrolling.
These aren’t glamorous acts. They don’t look like resistance. They don’t come with applause. But they matter, because if attention is the currency, then every small refusal is a way of not spending blindly. Every pause, every second thought, every “wait, where did this come from?” is a micro-act of rebellion against an economy that profits from our exhaustion.
No single refusal is going to change the system. But refusals add up. They carve out a little more room to think, a little more space to breathe, a little more chance for discernment to survive. And maybe that’s the point — not to find the one solution, but to keep practicing the habit of not giving our attention away for free.
A Few Practices for Slowing the Scroll
I’m not preaching, just sharing what I’m trying. Call it “media hygiene,” a way to protect the civic immune system:
- Pause before reacting. Even ten seconds breaks the reflex.
- Read beyond the headline. Obvious, but rare.
- Look for origins. Reverse-image search or check timestamps.
- Ask: who benefits? Always.
- Label with humility. A simple “[Unverified]” makes a difference.
- Audit your feed. Unfollow accounts that thrive on outrage.
- Practice slowness. Watch a ten-minute video. Read something long. Let your brain stretch.
The Radical Act of Discernment
None of this will make the fake images stop. None of this will restore our lost third spaces overnight. None of this will magically regulate an industry built on our exhaustion.
But discernment doesn’t have to solve everything to matter.
It doesn’t make you cynical. It makes you free. Free to choose what deserves your attention. Free to decide what enters your mind and what passes by. Free to notice the difference between propaganda and truth, noise and signal, manipulation and meaning.
In a world where attention is currency, discernment might be the most radical act we have left.
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Spot on, my girl!!