For a while, this space has been quiet as I tried to figure out exactly what Comfortably Certain needed to become while also navigating another pivotal season in my life.
This summer, everything changed for me.
Through the lectures and work of media scholar Sut Jhally, I experienced an intellectual pivot that reshaped my entire academic trajectory and may ultimately reshape my career. And I further realized that the comfort and certainty of modern life are precisely what we need to examine.
Moving forward, this Substack is becoming a living, public research log for an independent project I am developing ahead of my future PhD applications.
The Managed Reality Project.
The Working Premise: The Attention State
I believe we may be living in what I am currently calling The Attention State—an amalgamation of surveillance capitalism, the attention economy, social media culture, and related systems of media, technological, political, and economic power.
It is a proposed system in which Orwellian surveillance and Huxleyan distraction converge with Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman’s concept of Manufacturing Consent and Shoshana Zuboff’s work on Surveillance Capitalism.
Alongside these well-known forces is a mechanism I am tentatively referring to as Managed Reality: the structured curation of reality itself through simulacra, algorithmic informational ecosystems, and other systemic forces that shape what people are exposed to before democratic consent is ever manufactured.
These ideas are in their infancy and I am not presenting them as settled conclusions, but rather as questions worth investigating
Over the coming months and years, I will begin building the project’s academic foundation through sustained reading, literature mapping, conceptual development, and methodological experimentation and exploration. Ideally this process will include collaboration with established scholars who can challenge, refine, and strengthen the work.
My goal is to investigate whether The Attention State provides a useful way of understanding contemporary society and whether Managed Reality can be identified, defined, and examined as one of its central mechanisms through rigorous social science research.
The Core Inquiries
Before exploring the broader implications of the project, I am interested in two foundational theoretical questions:
Can The Attention State be understood as a coherent synthesis of existing theories, and if so, what explanatory power does that synthesis provide beyond the individual theories themselves?
Can Managed Reality be identified as a distinct mechanism within (or defining characteristic of) the Attention State?
If these theoretical foundations prove useful, the project will then explore a broader set of substantive questions:
Democratic Viability: How does the emergence of attention as a primary strategic resource affect democratic viability, culture, identity, and knowledge?
Attention Governance: To what extent has attention become a primary instrument of governance? Not necessarily through a single actor, but through the combined incentives of governments, corporations, platforms, advertisers, media organizations, and increasingly AI systems?
The New Social Order: If industrial societies were organized around physical resources and information societies around data, what are the structural characteristics of a society in which human attention becomes the primary resource being extracted, optimized, and monetized?
Cognitive Autonomy: How do managed information environments (including algorithmic curation, recommendation systems, and other forms of informational mediation) influence cognitive autonomy, and what implications might this have for democratic decision-making and individual agency?
What to Expect
I will use this space to document the entire research process and as a record of how the questions develop, where the evidence leads, and whether the initial hypothesis survives serious investigation.
It will unfold through sharing literature reviews, emerging connections, conceptual maps, journal entries, methodological questions, dead ends, breakthroughs, revisions, and the eventual evolution (or rejection) of the framework.
My previous essays on artificial intelligence, platform politics, branding, media, and digital economics will remain freely available as part of the larger intellectual ecosystem surrounding the project.
Why a Paid Research Log?
Because this is foundational academic groundwork intended for future doctoral applications, some material will remain public, while active research notes and work in development will live within a paid tier.
Public Posts:
High-level media commentary, general essays, reading reflections, and broader updates on the political economy of attention. (My previous articles exploring AI economics, branding, and platform politics will remain freely archived here as well).
The Research Log:
Developing literature reviews, research annotations, conceptual maps, methodology drafts, algorithmic auditing notes, and early data-collection frameworks.
The paid research log creates a more contained space in which I can share unfinished intellectual work with readers who are genuinely invested in following (and potentially contributing to) the project’s development.
If you are an academic, student, data scientist, practitioner, or simply someone watching the world change and thinking, I want to understand how this machine works, welcome.
The more thoughtful minds exploring these questions, the better.
The groundwork starts now.