Are we sacrificing real progress for digital distraction in the attention economy?

At Daily Maverick’s The Gathering 2025, journalist and panel moderator Lindsey Schutters posed the question: “What is the cost that society is paying for the attention economy?” 

“The cost is pretty much everything,” said Bronwyn Williams, a futurist and economist. “The cost is real progress. It is the real world that is being sort of subsumed and becoming more and more subservient to the gods of capital, which constantly promise more and more.” 

It was a blunt framing for a discussion that swung between optimism and alarm, tracing the fault lines of our digital age: machines as saviours or overlords, capital as liberator or casino chip. 

On stage with Williams were Khadeeja Bassier, COO at Ninety One and Larry Cooke, Binance’s head of legal for Africa, with Schutters steering the storm. 

Utopias, dystopias and the poverty of attention 

Bassier began by pointing out that society has split into two opposing camps. 

“It’s the ‘AI will deliver us as our saviour’, and then there’s the other side that says ‘dystopia, the machines will rule the humans’.” 

The greater danger, she argued, was our surrender. 

“We’ve implicitly ceded control to the technology, rather than taking control.” In doing so, we dismantled time, which once seemed never changing. AI produced a flood of constant content, leaving humans scrambling to pay attention at all. 

More information also meant less attention. The result was a marketplace where 10 seconds was all a business had to hook a human, and 47 seconds, according to Bassier, was the average time it took us to switch between digital tasks. 

Abstracted and distracted 

Williams mapped out what she called the “twice abstracted economy”. The first abstraction was financialisation, when real goods like food, water and clothing were commodified and traded. The second, now upon us, was attention: real value dissolved into speculative potential. 

“The potential of the next non-fungible token (NFT) or the next AI startup is infinite,” she said. That allure drew capital away from the tangible. The result, she said, was that very real crises were ignored. Malnutrition, for instance, affected one in four children globally, but in an economy obsessed with infinite digital upside, basic needs lost out. 

Tech as a tool or trap?  

Cooke refused to let the debate drown in dystopia. He reminded the audience that we were still in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, edging towards what he called the “imagination age”. 

To survive the distraction economy, he suggested cultivating the Korean concept of nunchi — the social awareness to sense mood and context — and argued that the same skill was needed to resist distraction. 

“How resilient are you to distraction? That is the question you need to answer.” 

Cooke argued that crypto and web3 could drive inclusion and access. They broke open the old model of centralised finance by creating decentralised systems where users could own and exchange value directly. That, he said, could expand access to financial tools once reserved for elites, allowing more people to participate in and benefit from global markets. 

The capital casino 

The question of where the wealth should flow was also a topic of dispute. Bassier said that in a world with an abundance of information it was an investment manager’s job to sift through it and make “responsible capital allocations” to support a non-extractive outcome in the long run. 

“Your responsibility is to the people who invest with you to deliver maximum returns on their investment. And that will come from the financialised economy rather than from the real economy,” Williams countered. 

Bassier rebutted, pointing to the infrastructure and real assets as valid investments. Technology, she said, helped investors separate meaningful projects from empty promises. 

“I think that’s deeply empowering because you can call bullshit.”

Africa’s digital hunger 

Cooke reminded the room that what might appear trivial to outsiders was often survival for Africans. Becoming an influencer, trading crypto or entering digital economies could put food on the table. 

Across the continent, adoption was accelerating. According to Cooke, Ghana, Ethiopia and Kenya were pushing ahead with AI and crypto innovation, building new economic ecosystems. 

He said that South Africa risked lagging behind. The country must decide whether it was being cautious in the right places or dragging its feet on policy and regulation. 

‘You get the future you invest in’ 

As the discussion closed, Williams left the audience with a challenge: “You get the future you invest in. You get the future you invest in whether that future is a future of NFTs, flying dystopian cars, or a Khumbaya kind of return to communism and living off the earth. It’s our choice. We get the future we want.” Between infinite potential and casino capitalism, the panel sketched out the stakes of our distracted age. Attention has become the scarce resource that drives everything from markets to politics, shaping where money flows and whose needs are met. DM