Abstract This article argues that platform capitalism generates a distinct legal problem that existing regulatory frameworks, designed to address disinformation and censorship, structurally fail to recognise: attention fragmentation. The commodification of attention produces a form of distraction that undermines the preconditions legal accountability itself depends on. Platform capitalism’s business model rewards engagement, and the dominant architectures reward a fragmented modality of engagement in particular, producing subjects who have internalised the logic of self-optimisation that Han identifies as psychopolitics. Through a theoretical genealogy from Debord’s externally imposed spectacle to Han’s psychopolitical internalisation, this article explains why distraction resists conventional legal intervention. Turning to environmental governance as a particularly stark illustration, the article reveals four structural vulnerabilities that make environmental regulation systematically susceptible to attention collapse: temporal mismatch, monitoring dependency, breakdown of accountability chains and asymmetric harm distribution. The article identifies possible policy interventions but emphasises their structural limits; legal reform cannot guarantee attention when the economic system profits from its commodification and fragmentation. The effectiveness of law in the age of platform capitalism depends on confronting the alignment between extractive capital’s interest in deregulation and platform capital’s dependence on engagement-driven fragmentation.
Henrique Marcos (Thu,) studied this question.