Tressie McMillan Cottom on Trust, Power, and Finding Hope in Difficult News

The Monetization of Attention

• 💡 The current media economy has monetized attention in ways that are antithetical to human curiosity.
• ⚠️ While competing with platforms like TikTok and memes is difficult, the reward of cheap emotion-driven content over meaningful information is a political choice, not a natural occurrence.
• 💰 This is rooted in extreme wealth inequality and the infiltration of money into governance and campaign financing, leading to a political choice to cede attention for financial gain.

Political Choices and Media Ecosystems

• 🎯 The failure to regulate technology companies by both Democrats and Republicans highlights a lack of political appetite for such measures.
• ✊ It is a political choice to shape the media ecosystem to have a civic core, rather than accepting the surrender of privacy and citizenship rights to artificial intelligence.
• 🗣️ Focusing too much on individual attention spans, like time spent on TikTok, allows political actors to evade accountability.

Combating Political Exhaustion

• 🧠 Political exhaustion is often misconstrued as apathy; it stems from doing too little rather than being aware of too much.
• ⚡ The antidote to exhaustion is active engagement, not passive consumption of information.
• ✊ Engaging in actions like attending protests or teaching children to read, however small, reduces exhaustion by providing opportunities to act and make a difference.
• 🎯 The goal of overwhelming information is to convince individuals that they are powerless to act.