America Runs on Advertising: The Attention Economy as National Infrastructure

This paper argues that advertising functions as a core component of American economic infrastructure rather than a cultural preference or discretionary industry. When attention becomes the primary input to economic activity, advertising becomes the mechanism that extracts, organizes, and distributes that attention. The system’s behavior—its escalation, ubiquity, and emotional intensity—emerges not from coordinated design but from structural incentives that reward attention capture and punish restraint. Individuals experience fragmentation, exhaustion, and symbolic overload not because of personal failure, but because the system externalizes its operational costs onto cognition. By analyzing advertising as an attention‑extraction architecture, the paper explains why the system appears intentional, why it cannot self‑correct, and why it persists despite widespread recognition of its harms. The goal is not to propose solutions but to make the structure visible, providing conceptual clarity for understanding an economy that runs on attention.