the attention economy erodes trust. It rewards the most dramatic claims, the most outrageous behavior, the most compelling narratives regardless of their relationship to truth or long-term consequences.

Free communication is not free. By decreasing the cost of information, we have decreased its value and invited its adulteration. To restore the health of our information ecosystem, we must understand the vulnerabilities of our overwhelmed minds and how the economics of information can be leveraged to protect us from being misled.

The traditional solutions - fact-checking, media literacy, content moderation - assume we’re dealing with a content problem when we’re actually facing an infrastructure problem. You can’t fact-check your way out of a system designed to reward misinformation. You can’t educate your way around algorithms optimized for polarization. You can’t moderate

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