The Crisis of Attention

Our Most Finite Civic Resource

Dec 21, 2025

Hello, and welcome to the latest edition of our 50501 CO newsletter!

In this newsletter, we discuss how our attention can be used to deteriorate resistance to authoritarianism. In addition, you’ll find information on upcoming activities from the 50501 calendar, actions you can take outside of protesting, and also find out about additional ways to connect with us.

See you on the streets! ✊✊✊

Actions and Activities

(The below list contains details on all actions this week and next week which have been submitted to our 50501 CO calendar; click the link above for more details and the full calendar)

Arvada

12/28: 11:00am - 12:00pm - Pop Up Rally (Safeway at 80th and Wadsworth in Arvada)

Littleton

12/27: 11:00 - 1:00pm - Protest Against Tyranny (5700 South Broadway)

Loveland

12/27: 12:00 - 2:00pm - Hands Off (US 287 from US34/Sprouts to Tesla)

Superior

12/27: 11:00am - 1:00pm - Weekly Rally in Superior (2 S Marshall Rd)

Thornton

12/26: 4:00 - 6:00pm - 4th Friday Intersection protest (112th avenue and Colorado Boulevard)

The Crisis of Attention: Our Most Finite Civic Resource

Lately I’ve been thinking about the “attention economy,” a phrase I’ve heard for years but never really stopped to examine. The more I look at it, the clearer it becomes: attention might be the rarest thing I have left, and almost everything in my daily life is built to drain it.

We live in a world built to hijack our focus every waking second. News alerts, social feeds, autoplay videos, ads pretending not to be ads, apps blurring into other apps. Every screen, every headline, every company and candidate and influencer has a hand out, tugging at our sleeve like an impatient child.

And because the competition is relentless, everyone sharpens their tactics. Outrage works. Drama works. A story framed as catastrophe will outrun a story framed as nuance every time. Even good journalism gets pulled into the current, not out of malice, but because if no one clicks, it disappears. Attention is the currency, and the marketplace is loud.

Somewhere in all this noise, politics learned the same game. It stopped trying to persuade and started trying to capture. A quiet policy change gets ignored. A spectacle gets coverage. A thoughtful argument reaches a few. A viral insult reaches millions. The system rewards whoever can dominate the narrative, even briefly. It does not matter if they are telling the truth. It matters only whether they can hold your gaze long enough to redirect it.

And here is the part that keeps circling back in my mind: attention is not just a personal resource. It is a civic one. Democracy runs on it. Our ability to stay aware, to remember what happened last month, to follow the thread of a story past the first twenty-four hours, all of that is part of the machinery of self-government. When we lose our ability to focus, we lose something much bigger than productivity. We lose the part of citizenship that relies on continuity and memory.

Attention is finite. Not metaphorically. Literally. There is only so much focus the human brain can offer before it scatters. And every notification, every feed scroll, every breathless headline about someone else’s meltdown drains a little more of that reservoir. It is not surprising we end up exhausted, or numb, or unsure of what truly matters. We are not failing. We are overloaded.

Authoritarian politics takes advantage of that. It thrives in the gap between what we remember and what we are too tired to keep tracking. If public attention is stretched thin enough, everything starts to blur. Not because people do not care, but because they are worn out. And a worn-out public is easier to manage, easier to mislead, and easier to shape around whatever narrative happens to be loudest.

But the point is not to swear off technology or retreat into the woods. We are not going back to a pre-digital world. The point is to recognize attention as something we can steward instead of surrender. A civic resource worth protecting, not just a personal flaw we scold ourselves about.

That stewardship can be small. It can look like reading one article all the way through instead of five headlines halfway. It can look like pausing before sharing something that just made your pulse spike. It can look like giving one issue, one story, one community your full attention for more than a day, so it does not evaporate the moment the feed wants you to move on.

And yes, it can look like noticing when a politician or pundit tries to pull you back into the carnival. Not every fire is a five-alarm fire. Not every crisis is a crisis. Some things are real and urgent. Some things are designed to keep you distracted from the real and urgent.

What we pay attention to becomes the story we believe we are living in. And that story shapes what feels possible, or impossible, in public life.

Our attention is finite. But it is still ours. And reclaiming even a little of it is the first step toward feeling like the world has not been entirely written without us.

Non-Protest Actions Bingo

The below bingo card contains a list of actions you can take (other than protesting) to help further the cause. If you get a bingo, tag us on social media to let us know!