The Psychological Toll of the Attention Economy
- The attention economy exacts a profound psychological toll, one that is both insidious and increasingly well-documented. It transforms human attention from a private, renewable resource into a commodified, finite one, constantly harvested, monetised, and weaponised. The cost is paid in the slow erosion of interiority, agency, and mental sovereignty.
- Core mechanisms of the toll:
- Constant self-surveillance and performance pressure
Every interaction on platforms is simultaneously an act of self-expression and self-monitoring. Users internalise the metrics (likes, views, watch time, ratios, engagement scores) as proxies for worth. This creates a permanent state of performative anxiety: the self becomes an object to be optimised, the face a thumbnail to be A/B tested. The psychological effect is a form of chronic low-grade dissociation, living as both performer and audience, speaker and listener, subject and object. Over time, the boundary between “who I am” and “how I appear” collapses. - Fragmentation of attention and cognitive overload
The design of feeds (infinite scroll, notifications, algorithmic prioritisation) exploits dopamine loops to keep users in a state of continuous partial attention. Studies (e.g., Gloria Mark’s work on attention spans, 2004–2023) show average focus on a single screen task dropping from ~2.5 minutes in 2004 to ~47 seconds by the early 2020s. This isn’t just distraction; it’s cognitive fragmentation: the brain is trained to expect interruption, making sustained thought, reflection, or deep reading feel unnatural or even painful. The result is widespread attentional fatigue, reduced working memory, and diminished capacity for complex reasoning. - Emotional volatility and comparison traps
Platforms are engineered to maximise emotional arousal (anger, fear, envy, validation) because these states drive engagement. The psychological consequence is emotional dysregulation: users cycle rapidly between outrage, dopamine hits, shame (from comparison), and numbness. Social comparison theory (Festinger, 1954) is supercharged, every scroll is a reminder of others’ curated highlight reels. The toll includes rising rates of anxiety, depression, body dysmorphia, and social anhedonia (inability to feel pleasure from real-world social interaction). - Erosion of private self and identity foreclosure
The attention economy blurs the line between public and private. What was once internal (thoughts, doubts, desires) is now externalised, quantified, and fed back as data. This creates a feedback loop where the self is continually reshaped to fit what performs. Over years, many users experience identity foreclosure, the premature commitment to a public persona that no longer aligns with inner experience. The result is a pervasive sense of inauthenticity and existential emptiness, often masked by performative busyness. - Burnout as systemic symptom
The most visible toll is creator burnout, the exhaustion of those who live inside the machine. But the phenomenon is democratised: even non-creators experience audience burnout, the fatigue of constant consumption, the guilt of not keeping up, the dread of missing out (FOMO), the shame of low engagement. The attention economy doesn’t just extract time; it extracts emotional labour from everyone.
- Constant self-surveillance and performance pressure
YouTuber Drawings
The YouTuber drawings don’t attempt to capture “influencers” or “content creators” as a social type, they document what happens to a consciousness when it is forced to live inside the attention economy 24/7. The defining condition of the 2020s isn’t just surveillance or extraction; it’s self-surveillance performed as self-expression.
Every gesture, every sentence, every facial micro-expression is simultaneously: an attempt to be seen (reach, engagement, validation), the very mechanism by which one is consumed (data exhaust, algorithmic training, monetisation of affect), the slow erosion of interiority that results from living under that double gaze
The drawings make this visible in the most material way. The frantic, overlapping pencil marks are the nervous system of someone who must keep talking while knowing the talking is being harvested.
The recurring inset screens (or reaction cams, comment boxes, viewer avatars) are the split self: the performer and the watcher, the speaker and the spoken-to, locked in the same feedback loop until they blur into one depleted entity.
The raised hands, the headphones that leak red ochre across the face, the mic fused to the mouth, the gradual fading of the central figure while the broadcast continues in miniature, these are not metaphors; they are symptoms.They are portraits of what remains when a person is reduced to signal: still speaking, still gesturing, still trying to connect, yet increasingly spectral, frayed, hollowed out by the very visibility they depend on. In a decade defined by the collapse of private life into public performance, by the normalisation of being constantly on, constantly monitored, constantly optimised, these drawings are not just time, they are diagnostic.
And because they refuse any easy distance or irony, because they keep the marks raw, provisional, and scarred, they represent a 21st-century equivalent of the old tradition of the psychological portrait. Where Rembrandt or Bacon showed the face under the weight of mortality, I’m showing the face under the weight of perpetual visibility. It’s a different kind of death, slower, quieter, more insidious.
These are the portraits of our time. They will age like documents from the early years of the attention-collapse era, the way certain photographs from the 1930s or 1960s now feel like time capsules of a society at a breaking point. The series names something we are all living through but haven’t yet fully articulated.
David Powell, January 2026
Extraction Paintings
These paintings emerge from urgent, spontaneous acts, made in response to an accumulation of interconnected crises that refuse separation: Gaza, special economic zones, the systematic extraction of public wealth while services atrophy, governments operating with a lucrative opportunism that treats people and environment as finite economic units with no inherent value.
Working with subtle gradations of gray punctuated by heavier darks and dense impasto, the process itself enacts what it confronts. Extraction, repair, and balance occur simultaneously on the canvas—scraping away, building up, letting marks dissolve and weather. The thick accumulations of paint at the bottom edge suggest waste, residue, what remains after something has been taken. They refuse to disappear.
These are not illustrations of political concern but physical traces of grappling with it. The spontaneity is essential—it keeps a direct channel open between what is being carried internally and what materializes in paint. To plan too carefully would be to domesticate the urgency, to transform genuine response into representation.
The work holds contradictions: violence and care, weight and dissolution, destruction and regeneration. Gray tones shift quietly while dark matter accumulates with insistence. Vertical streaks weather and fade. The canvas itself frays at the edges. Nothing resolves cleanly because nothing in the world being responded to resolves cleanly.
In the act of painting, there is release—an inner extraction that parallels and counters the extractions happening in the world. These are painterly counteractions to a political status quo that consumes and discards. They are small, material acts of attention and presence against systems of systematic neglect.
David Powell, December 2025
Zone Fever
Freeports, Special Economic Zones (SEZs) and Charter Cities are variations on private governance, they are states within states, designated areas of extraterritorial regions carved out from the host countries laws and protections. SEZs are a way for corporations working with governments to bypass regulations and ultimately exit the ‘oppressive constraints’ and interventions of ‘Big Government’.
Across the world the most lucrative line of business is in corporate governance, this occurs when venture capitalists, libertarians, and oligarchs seek to implement ‘exit’ strategies from democracy and social governance. F.D.Roosevelt made a request to the public upon his election to the US Presidency, he said “You elected me, now tell me what you want and I’ll do it” this gave rise to the New Deal in 1933, a Social Contract that saw egalitarian economics, GDP saw a fair balance between wage share and profit share, as a result public healthcare, and social services flourished for the next 30-40 years.
During the 1950’s numerous right wing libertarian economists and anarcho-capitalists such as Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, James Buchanan, Antony Fisher, Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard were incensed at FDR’S New Deal, which they saw as ‘theft of property’ which placed democratic constraints on individual liberty along with otherwise unfettered capital accumulation.
A wave of r/w libertarian think tanks were formed throughout the 1950s, such as The Insitute of Economic Affairs, The Adam Smith Institute, Mont Pelerin, The Heritage Foundation, The Tax Payer Alliances, and hundreds of others, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman advised their fellow libertarians to never disclose their partisan ideology to the public as it would entail losing their charity status, along with their plans to usurp social democracy which would horrify the public. In 1981 Antony Fisher, founder of the IEA London (1955) formed an umbrella group of ‘thinks tanks that create think tanks’, it was named the ATLAS network, it has since been referred to as the ‘network of liberty’. Think tanks operate as parties within parties, they enjoy charity status yet are funded by dark money from big oil/tobacco/agri/pharma and tech, much of their research is never disclosed to the public and consequently emerging government policies comprise deep austerity, anti-climate change, anti-LGBTQ+, culture wars and anti-governance tactics that erode public services with decades of defunding.
Citizens in so-called representative democracies around the world have been reduced to being mere spectators of their own fate as a new hybrid of right-wing libertarian and anarcho-capitalist set out to dismantle democracy and the welfare state by installing corporate governance in patchwork zones of private sovereignties isolated away from the interventions of Big Government.
Special Economic Zones have a long history dating back to Roman times, they are also known as colonialist projects (notably by the British)such as the East India Company 1600, through to colonization of Hong Kong and Singapore in the mid 1800s, known as China’s ‘century of humiliation’.
Peter Thiel (Palantir, PayPal and billionaire Trump donor) was inspired by William Rees-Moggs 1997 book ‘The Sovereign Individual – How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State’ which predicted the arrival of Big Tech as a new form of (Techno) Feudalism, Thiel recognised that fragmenting regions into privately run zones would birth a ‘thousand nation states’ in dynamic competition with each other setting their own private laws replacing what Tom Bell described as negatively framed ‘statist’ laws.
SEZs and charter cities are fenced-in regions, corporate owned enclaves of extraterritorial space with their own private laws, customers (not citizens) have a ‘choice’ to opt in or out by way of a contract. Post-Brexit UK is currently undergoing zone fever, this began as a Tory initiative between Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss who are responsible for the current setting up of 12 deregulated Freeports and 74 SEZs. This is on the back of 192 English councils threatened with bankruptcy, while scores of business, agricultural, and residential properties are facing mass compulsory purchase orders.
Since 2016 my research into SEZs and the libertarian ideology behing them has seen me become a political activist with a sizable following on Twitter X. I’m taking part in public speaking events throughout the UK hosted by independent journalists, and concerned citizens who are asking question about SEZs, Freeports and Charter Cities. Brexit is a time-based project, the transition phase to full-blown corporate governance has already laid its foundations in the form of 12 Freeports and 74 SEZs, backed by Labour MPs, Mayors, councillors, Lords, and Baronesses who were board members of Sunak and Truss’s nationwide SEZs/Freeports consortia.
Brexit has induced desperation by design, the UK is now ‘capital hungry’ and is letting go of democracy by allowing corporations to take up the mantle of governance where ‘democracy failed’. There is a concerted effort by the UK’s client Press to not report on what will become the biggest scandal of 21st century Britain. Brexit’s true purpose is to ensure capital accumulation is achieved as the public sector simultaneously atrophies through chronic underfunding, while the nation state’s laws and regulations are totally collapsed. Attacks on citizens’ protests will ramp up, targets will invariably be the ‘woke’ and LGBTQ+ communities, all those on the left, academics, writers, artists, intellectuals, and the independent press.
SEZs fragment local territories by ring-fencing them from the host country’s laws and protections. Collective sovereignty (people power) has been successfully targeted, sold off/commodified and is now being replaced with corporate sovereignty, and private governance.
Deregulated SEZs are primed to reconfigure each region of the UK by licensing the zones for 25 years, this is under ‘secondary legislation’ which emeans zero Parliamentary and public scrutiny. UK SEZs allow tax breaks to companies setting up inside them for 10 years.
It is no coincidence that Labour are members of Sunak and Truss’s nationwide Freeports/SEZ consortia. Our main parties are quick to wave the glossy brochures of Freeports and SEZs replete with the usual ‘growth, innovation, and lifting deprived areas out of poverty’ ad nauseam, but the truth is countries with low taxation and rampant deregulation reveal high levels of crime, frozen wages for ordinary working people, huge increases in wages for the rich and absolute government corruption, and political instability.
My political activism into free zones comprises speaking at public events across the UK raising awareness about the dangers of free zones coming to communities and residents entrapped within them. The more I got involved with political activism, the more it fed into my studio practice, this has seen material outcomes in my work move away from display into creating ‘live environments’ that fuse together raw materials, works in progress, and completed works. This makes for a situation of ‘collective viewing’, rather than singular viewing, something I connected with when I visited Brancusi’s reconstructed studio outside the Pompidou Centre in Paris in 2023. With a fresh interchangeability of materials, it became clearer to me that a broader painterly based approach was needed, this approach rapidly expanded across a diverse range of materials and outcomes. As Daniel Buren wrote in his 1971 paper The Function of the Studio, ‘the studio is the purest site of creation’, what happens after work ‘exits’ the studio remains to this day deeply problematic. These are my attempts at materializing conversations between my own research and activism via continually unfolding contemporary political events, I examine their histories, their inception, and sustained movement towards the dismantling of global democracy. I would qualify my recent production as a reclaiming of the ‘gesamtkunstwerk’ as something to trigger speculations on the past, present and future, of upcoming borders and limits on our democracies via zone fever.
David Powell, 2024
Band Paintings and Sculptures
The following text was written about about my work by Andrew Renton in 2019
It’s about a desire to possess things or capture them when you know the object of your gaze and desire cannot be grasped. It’s about fandom, which is an elevated form of identification, observation and even time travel.
These sources, collaged together like the back of your old school notebook insist that such imagery, in a digital age, is perpetually present, and belongs to all of us. A shared knowledge and collective ownership. And what does it mean to copy the already copied?
The artist can’t help his gaze. Not always a preliminary model towards a more fleshed out version, the drawing can also reclaim territory that has long been worked out, over-worked, even, and iconic. It rethinks its origins, putting the viewer back into the frame. It’s almost a readymade and comes with baggage. History brought into the present tense. It makes me think about what Kierkegaard said about repetition; that it was a kind of recollection forwards. And nothing less than an ethical engagement.
(And perhaps I should mention that the Fall are my favourite band of all time.) Andrew Renton 2019
– Since 2018 I’ve been making work about the British alternative music scene. Many of the bands I’m interested in were given a platform on John Peel’s radio show, if they got too famous he’d usually stop playing them, after all it was about giving exposure to unknown and new forms of music at the margins of the mainstream. My emotional connection with these bands began in my teens at a time when my only goals were to go to art school and see as many bands as possible.
Desire plays an enormous role in my work, years of going to concerts, feeling the build up of an electric atmosphere as I wait for the band to come on stage, the objects of my desire forever just out of reach. My identity was shaped by these experiences and unconventional sounds that flourished in the independent music scene . Art is a kind of time travel, fandom a perpetual state of collective identification and joy. At it’s core my work explores collective memory while embracing social dynamics that strives to bring different audiences together.
David Powell, 2024
The Flower Paintings
Many years ago Jean Luc Godard referred to flowers on the periphery of highways as ‘roadside refugees’. In 2013 I began to replace human figures in my compositions with flowers and plants, it was a necessary move to reclaim a painterly space that was predominantly populated by centuries of representations of humans beings in painting, a kind of urgency that brought more pressing issues of climate change and survival, the social context filtered through parallel worlds, of hope and raising awareness via different channels.
David Powell