As President Joe Biden seeks approval on a $6 trillion budget, it will become increasingly unconvincing to give in to popular misunderstanding and continue throwing “socialism” under the bus. The president and his administration would do better to reclaim and rehabilitate the word by highlighting the proud legacy of socialist activism within the American labour movement.

QAnon, a far-right conspiracy theory popular among supporters of Donald Trump, is symptomatic of a problematic digital culture of echo chambers and algorithmically sealed filter bubbles. Here, credulity, manipulation, resentment, tribalism, and misinformation mix and ferment into strange and powerful brews. Such is the dark side of participatory media. The roots of QAnon, however, run deeper.

Attention, as a dialectic of focus and distraction, has become central to understanding mediated life in the information economy. If we are our experiences, and there are more possibilities to experience than ever before, then the highly selective allocation, surrender, and capture of attention determines what we become—and all that we can become⁠—as individuals and as a society.

Philosophers and psychologists teach us that boredom can be a good thing when it provides impetus for articulating our moral commitments and pursuing the personal and societal changes needed to realize them. There is reason to believe that is happening now. Let us hope that once the pandemic is behind us, and we’re left dealing with its fallout, we will all reap the benefits of that realignment.