The Attention Economy Navigator, January 2026

This month on the Attention Economy Navigator, our guide to what you should be paying more attention to, and what you can probably pay less attention to. And why those stories might not be what you’d assume.

Just a quick content note: this discussion includes stories about murder, gun violence, an antisemitic attack against a house of worship, revenge porn, and child sexual abuse material. It’s been a rough few weeks in the headlines, please take care of yourself!

You can also listen to the podcast episode featuring Shaira Chaer and Jess St. Louis, or watch the panel plot these stories in real time on YouTube.

High Reality, High Signal

• “Raw eggs, ‘Scripture-backed fitness’ and a Porsche: The online world of the man accused of burning Mississippi’s largest synagogue” by Michael Goldberg and Molly Minta in Mississippi Today.
  • Cayden cringes about the twisted link between Christian identity conspiracy theories, antisemitism, and its weaponization by the Trump Administration; Shaira links this to the way that these kinds of real, material violence gets used as a political football.
  • This is a window into the way conspiracism operates in US politics.
  • This historic synagogue has a deep history in the Civil Rights Movement and was bombed in 1967 by the KKK; Beth Israel is committed to rebuilding.

High Reality, High Noise

• “ICE plans $100 million ‘wartime recruitment’ push targeting gun shows, military fans for hires” by Drew Harwell and Joyce Sohyun Lee in The Washington Post.
  • We can learn a lot about who MAGA thinks their core constituency is, and a lot about what’s to come by speaking to conspiratorial propaganda, through this push.
  • Jess thinks this is also a bid to shape reality, too: they are trying to mainstream the conspiratorial story about an “invasion.” But $100M is a scattershot effort: there’s something noisy about this that DHS is trying to turn into signal.
  • A lot of this is audience work is eerily similar to what Shaira found researching QAnon in 2023.

High Conspiracy, High Noise

• Grok’s deepfake features are being used to create nonconsensual pornographic images and other abuse material, only relenting after the government of the UK came after them.
  • Grok is integrated into the information technology stack for the Pentagon…so what in the hell else is this going to be used for?
  • There’s a way that this feels like it’s fueling an online outrage machine which is noisier and part of Musk’s whole corporate identity…thing. Jess points out how these things can be designed to be noisy: “user generated” content helps corporations evade accountability.
  • Cayden suggests this episode of In Bed With the Right for a helpful deep dive on using Grok to sexualize Renee Good as part of the policing of white womanhood.
• “War Profiteers Furious After Polymarket Refuses to Pay Out on Venezuelan Invasion Bets” by Joe Wilkins in Futurism.
  • Polymarket, Kalshi, and soon, Truth Predict, are grim high-water mark for late stage capitalism; there are signals within but it’s very noisy and quite conspiratorial.
  • Shaira also reminds us about ricosuave666…who claims be an Israeli military insider making money on Polymarket. Yikes.
  • You know that old management truism that “the best way to predict the future is to create it?” Maybe there’s a reason the house always wins. (Donald Trump Jr. might have something to do with it.)
  • We did, in fact, crash out on this one.

High Conspiracy, High Signal

• “Transgender Athletes Ask Supreme Court to Overturn State Bans” covered in many outlets.
  • There are two ways that the Court could rule: one that’s narrowly about these transgender students and one that’s much broader about rights for just about everyone.
  • This is very much rehearsing the “public choice economics” smoke-and-mirror act using white outrage about school integration to push anti-public education policy.
  • Jess points out that some of the narratives from the antis is that trans people don’t exist: we ourselves are a conspiracy.
• “Project 2026: Restoring America’s Promise” from the Heritage Foundation/Heritage Action for America.
  • Shaira notes that a lot of this is about controlling people’s bodies, cis or trans; erase LGBTQ people; and control what a “family” is, if you read between the lines.
  • These documents are used to signal something to multiple audiences and also a real plan for how the far Right intends to govern.
  • Is the Heritage Foundation moving back into the shadows after getting put on blast by Taraji P. Henson at the BET Awards?
• The murder of Renee Nicole Good, the narrative meaning of which is being hotly contested right now.
  • There are a lot of conspiratorial elements in this story, like the use of AI deepfakes “proving” the official story.
  • We struggle to map this one as there are so many things that are high-signal about this story, but the acceleration of conspiratorialism is alarming.

We swear we wanted to talk about something lighter that still provides insight, but it’s been a rough couple weeks.