The Hidden Cost & More of the Digitally Engagement Economy

To ban or not to ban, that is the question. Australia has lead the way with its ban on social media for under 16 year olds and opened minds to the detrimental impact of our poorly regulated digital society. Where the digital corporatocracy governs for commercial gain, through engineered distraction without boundaries, I believe they are silently and detrimentally redesigning the human mind. ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) is perhaps just one of the design failures in the attention economy amongst hidden neurodevelopment fallout from our increasingly digitally engineered world.

The rising prevalence of ADHD diagnoses is often framed as a clinical or parenting issue. Perhaps though this framing misses a deeper structural reality. Attention is not only a biological trait it is shaped by the environments we design. If the way we see shapes the way we live, as Walter Benjamin argued, then the way we now train attention shapes how minds develop, regulate emotion and relate to the world. Cross referencing with the work by Gene Cohen as I wrote about in some earlier pieces this is not confined to Childhood it is across the whole lifespan.

Anyone exposed to social media knows, modern digital environments optimise relentlessly for engagement. They reward rapid novelty, frequent switching, micro-bursts of stimulation and dopamine driven feedback loops. This trains attentional patterns that are fast, scanning and stimulus seeking. At the same time, our institutional environments, particularly schools and workplaces, continue to demand sustained focus, low stimulation, delayed reward and prolonged stillness. The result is a growing mismatch between how attention is conditioned and how attention is judged.

In a large part, this mismatch is being medicalised. Children whose nervous systems have been trained by high-stimulation digital environments increasingly appear disordered in low-stimulation institutional contexts. In many cases ADHD is real, genetic and deeply embodied but in others, I suggest we are diagnosing a design failure, an attention ecology that systematically trains distraction and then punishes it. We are engineering perceptual environments that erode self-regulation, boredom tolerance and deep focus and then pathologising the predictable outcomes. Welcome to the work of cognitive masochism by digital design!

Crucially, this is not only a childhood issue. Research on adult neuroplasticity, as I have referenced in Gene Cohen’s book The Mature Mind, shows that the adult brain remains adaptable across the lifespan, with later life often marked by growth in pattern recognition, emotional integration, wisdom and meaning making. This plasticity is a gift but it also means adults are not immune to the invidious fallout of digital attentional shaping. Digital environments continue to train habits of fragmentation, urgency and shallow focus well into adulthood, reshaping executive function, emotional regulation and even how meaning is constructed. The same design forces influencing children are quietly remoulding adult cognition, ageing trajectories and professional judgement.

The implications are ethical as much as clinical. When children’s and adults’ attention is shaped by commercial algorithms optimised for engagement rather than development, attentional outcomes become a by-product of business models. This reframes ADHD not only as a medical condition, but as a governance problem. Who designs the perceptual environment humans grow up and grow old inside and for what purpose?

If we are serious about addressing ADHD and the wider hidden biological fallout at scale, the solution cannot be limited to diagnosis and medication alone. It requires redesigning learning environments, digital platforms, workplaces and childhood attention economies (educational practices) to support the development of executive function, emotional regulation and embodied focus across the lifespan. In short, attention must be treated as critical developmental infrastructure, not as a resource to be extracted.

I akin this to a very visible digital pollution in our environment that is leaving its ‘tells’ everywhere yet unacknowledged. Australia’s sticking plaster ban needs an upgrade I feel, perhaps an Ultra Low emissions zone (ULEZ) approach, after all its socially accepted for urban vehicle emission control, but applied not just to social media companies but all digital environments. Yes, I expect social media companies to struggle, as their very business models are digitally toxic, re-engineer their platforms to eliminate their digital emissions cuts off their business model but also the source of addiction. So whilst banning social media is a start in defence of the wellbeing of our youth, society needs to look further upstream for the fix to really put a stop to the downstream pollution.

We should reflect on Walter Benjamin’s warning that when technologies reshape perception, they quietly reshape society and at a biological level we barely understand. Now look forward into an AI mediated world. We are no longer just consuming engineered experiences we are developing and ageing inside them. If AI curates what we see, how fast we see it and what rewards our attention from childhood through maturity, then AI is not merely augmenting cognition; it is participating in human neurodevelopment and abusing adult neuroplasticity. The real question is no longer whether AI is safe or powerful but whether we are willing to design perceptual environments that cultivate depth, agency and mature judgement or whether we will continue to outsource the shaping of attention, identity and wisdom itself to engagement optimised machines and then diagnose the consequences across the lifespan.