The Attention Economy Navigator, March 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.

You can also listen to the podcast episode featuring Rynn Reed and Ravi Mangla, or watch the panel plot these stories in real time on YouTube.

High Reality, High Signal

• The New Republic investigates whether or not moderate Democratic voters even exist anymore: even the most moderate members of the big tent against authoritarianism need to speak to the very real struggles of everyday people and ballooning inequality.
  • Reactionary centrism from people like Third Way just can’t account for the critique of neoliberalism and can’t just hide behind saying “woke has gone too far.”
  • Rynn points out that we can think a little about an X-Y matrix where one axis is economic populism, and one is cultural; there’s actually nobody really in the high Left cultural positions with high Right economic positions…aside from Chuck Schumer’s imaginary family.
  • In spite of Citizens United, corporations still don’t vote! And their leaders are a superminority.
• Data centers are increasingly a wedge issue with no clear party lines, and represents a real realignment issue.
  • Convergence has covered data center organizing in print and on Block & Build here and here.
  • These are hot-button issues in rural areas as well: if Democrats don’t seize on this in the midterms, they may be giving up a huge amount of energy and attention to Republicans, who might just be blowing smoke on this.
  • Ravi thinks it’s a real opportunity to win people back, and so far the Democratic Party is struggling with it.
  • Rynn points out that contrary to the hype from the AI industry, regulation can create both safety and innovation. And historically it has.
• Trump’s response to the man-made energy crisis in Cuba is to…threaten to take it over.
  • Cubans, who have suffered from US blockade for nearly a century, are paying the price for Trump’s brazen war crimes.
  • Cayden thinks this is evidence for the way that Trump just reacts to stuff. He doesn’t have a plan at all.
  • Not a ton of reporting has broken out into the mainstream about this, but it’s a bellwether for how Trump wants US foreign policy to work; it doesn’t seem real in the sense that it’s not actionable.
  • Rynn wonders if this is just a little high five to Marco Rubio, with devastating consequences.

High Reality, High Noise

• The Texas Senate primary created all kinds of bad blood with creators, and it’s hard to tell what the long-term impact will be.
  • Should creators be held to journalistic standards? And what does it mean that some people on the internet wanted the Talarico campaign to denounce an amplifier account from social media?
  • Rynn points out that these things do affect some voters, but it’s not clear how or how much. It’s clear that this did create the impression that Talarico was insensitive around race, and Colin Allred had to actually make an official statement about it.
  • Cayden remembers Shafiqah Hudson and #YourSlipIsShowing, when 4chan used sock puppet accounts as supposed “social justice warriors” amplifying hashtags and ideas to rupture relationships and harm Black women in particular.
  • Ravi points out that our experience doesn’t have a clean divide between online and offline: we interact with our offline friends on social media, and our internet friends can become our offline friends too.
  • Digesting the divide also means reckoning with how our third spaces both offline and online are being eviscerated by neoliberalism.

High Conspiracy, High Signal

• The discussion about dark money in the Illinois 9th District primary is interesting: how social media creators get involved in races is uncharted territory, and shell PACs are creating a gray zone for political advertising.
  • AIPAC spent a ton of money in this race using shell PACs in order to make it harder to track their spending as a toxic brand.
  • The creator in question didn’t know that she was specifically making an anti-Abugazaleh attack ad, and there aren’t a ton of ways to hold people accountable for this stuff.
  • Creators do need to be paid for their labor, but is this the way?

High Conspiracy, High Noise

• Joe Kent loudly and publicly resigns from the National Counterterrorism Center for all the wrong reasons, proving that the enemy of my enemy is sometimes…still my enemy.
  • Cayden warns against how sticky antisemitism is: it’s a cultural meme that goes back in Western European culture for thousands of years.
  • Saying the only reason the US attacked Iran is because Israel wanted them to is also…false. And creates a shield of accountability for Trump, Hegseth, and co.’s war crimes.
  • Rynn’s observation of far Right social media shows that a lot of them are absolutely dragging Kent to hell while left-leaning pundits are celebrating him as a hero.
  • We also have a hot tip: take up a hobby. It might be cringe, but it’s better than war crimes.
• Sam Altman talks about “intelligence” as a utility that he…wants to charge us all for.
  • Rynn notes the constant privatization of everything: water and electricity are the basics of human life at this point, so they should be public!
  • Rynn’s hot take is that China’s AI development is just going to steamroll us anyway.
  • Cayden also shouts out 404 Media’s reporting on data cleaners and taggers in Africa: there’s a trans-continental data pipeline that are reinscribing colonial relationships and creating real harm amongst the workers who do this difficult, undervalued labor. The supply chains are all unethical, all the way down.
  • The only thing real about this story is the fact that Altman has more money than God so he can make it so.