Zadie Smith’s Stark Warning on Digital Attention Economy and Mind Control

British novelist Zadie Smith has issued a pointed critique of our digital information ecosystem, likening modern tech platforms to sophisticated propaganda tools that dwarf those of previous authoritarian regimes.

In a wide-ranging conversation with David Remnick on the New Yorker Radio Hour podcast, Smith, promoting her new essay collection “Dead and Alive,” argued that our collective attention has been colonized by technology companies with alarming consequences for democracy and human well-being.

“My emphasis has been on, to put it boldly, mind control,” Smith told Remnick. “I think what’s been interesting about the manipulations of the digital age is that it is absolutely natural and normal for people to be offended at the idea that they are being manipulated.”

Smith, who describes herself as living “basically in 2003” regarding her media consumption habits, deliberately avoids social media platforms and the constant information stream that dominates modern life. She neither doom-scrolls nor feels compelled to respond immediately to political developments, preferring a more measured approach to forming opinions.

“I’m like the slow food movement of writing. It just takes me a minute to think,” she explained, emphasizing the value of deliberate contemplation in an age of reactionary discourse.

The conversation took a particularly sobering turn when Smith read from her essay “The Dream of the Raised Arm,” written on Election Day 2024. In it, she references Charlotte Barat’s account of dreams during the early days of the Third Reich, making a startling comparison between propaganda tools of that era and today’s digital landscape.

“Such were the paltry propaganda tools Hitler turned to his advantage in spectacular fashion. Though they were like crayons on paper, compared with what a man like Elon Musk now has at his disposal,” Smith read from her essay.

When asked to elaborate on the comparison between 1930s Germany and present-day America, Smith focused on what she sees as the most insidious aspect of modern technology: its ability to manipulate consciousness while maintaining the illusion of neutrality.

“From the very beginning, everything digital, everything online has been talked about as if it’s not ideological, as if it’s neutral,” she noted. “But it was never neutral. Something that is colonizing your attention, manipulating the way it’s directed, is not neutral.”

Smith challenged the common framing of internet radicalization as merely a political phenomenon, arguing that the normalization of children spending six hours daily on screens represents its own form of radicalization—one that has fundamentally altered our understanding of healthy human consciousness.

Her critique extends to the economic foundations of social media platforms, which she argues have built billion-dollar empires by capturing and monetizing human attention. In a talk to 14-year-olds in Barcelona that she referenced during the podcast, Smith suggested a radical but simple solution: “To seriously damage the billionaire empires that have been built on your attention and are now manipulating your democracies, to achieve that right now, all you guys would need to do is look away.”

Despite the gravity of her concerns, Smith expressed optimism that public awareness is growing. “It’s happening. People are conscious of it,” she said, predicting that citizens will eventually demand regulations to counter digital platforms’ grip on children’s attention.

“I think people will want it at some point, because I think people want to go towards joy and freedom, and I don’t think that is joy or freedom,” Smith concluded, suggesting that the current digital paradigm is fundamentally at odds with human flourishing.

As concerns about social media’s impact on mental health, democracy, and social cohesion continue to mount across the political spectrum, Smith’s perspective offers a provocative framework for understanding these issues not just as technological problems but as profound questions about attention, consciousness, and human freedom in the digital age.