Can Mythmaking Survive the Attention Economy?
The Overexposure Paradox: When Too Much Attention Makes Stories Forgettable
Once, while briefing the Prime Minister on a routine speech, I made the mistake of saying, “Sir, your remarks are only about five minutes, so we don’t need too much rehearsal time – it’s not exactly going to change the world.” As if minutes alone determined impact. Without missing a beat, he replied, “Well, the Gettysburg Address was less than five minutes."
The Gettysburg Address, of course, is one of the most famous speeches ever. Yet, no recording of it exists. Even its exact wording is uncertain. There are five known copies written in Lincoln's own hand – each featuring slight variations and named after the original recipients: the Bliss Copy, the Nicolay Copy, the Hay Copy, the Everett Copy, and the Bancroft Copy. William V. Rathvon, who was 9 at the time of the address, is the only known Gettysburg eyewitness to have recorded their memories on audio, more than 74 years after the 271-word speech was delivered.
In France, Charles de Gaulle’s Appel du 18 Juin is considered one of the most important speeches in French history, even though the original audio is missing. Documentaries often substitute it with the recording of the June 22 speech, which has survived, though they don’t always clarify that it is not the original June 18 address. While the content of the two texts is similar, the June 22 speech presents a more detailed argument, delivered on the very day the Franco-German armistice was signed. Additionally, the June 18 appeal is often mistaken for the text on the famous poster "À tous les Français." In 2023, the newspaper Le Monde used AI and a voice actor to recreate the speech – though not without asking the obvious ethical question: Do AI recreations of lost speeches honour memory… or replace it?
Since the U.S. election in November, a lot of people, including
at the New York Times, have been talking more and more about the attention economy, this idea that capturing attention translates to a form of power and wealth:“Musk is probably the most attentionally rich person in the world alongside Donald Trump, and Musk’s attentional riches might be more important now than his financial riches. And so if you’re going to think about politics predictively, you have to scrutinize how attention is being spent, amassed and controlled.”
In a world where hundreds of ads, threads, posts, podcasts, books, video games – and even part time Substackers – compete for our attention every waking minute, those who understand how to capture it hold a clear advantage.
Think about comments like “they’re eating the pets” or the Puerto Rico joke. Anyone who has ever worked on a political campaign would have tried to avoid those at all cost. But not Trump and Vance – they didn’t win despite the attention they drew, they won because of it.
of MSNBC also discussed this with Sean Illing on The Gray Area podcast to promote his new book The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource. “For [Hayes], the reordering of our social and economic conditions around the pursuit of attention is in his words ‘a transformation as profound as the dawn of industrial capitalism.’”What’s interesting is that in 2012, around the time this “reordering” was gaining momentum, Ezra Klein argued in The New Yorker that presidential speeches held little persuasive power – despite their exposure.
“The annual State of the Union address offers the clearest example of the misconception [that speeches can influence]. The best speechwriters are put on the task. The biggest policy announcements are saved for it. The speech is carried on all the major networks, and Americans have traditionally considered watching it to be something of a civic duty. And yet Gallup, after reviewing polls dating back to 1978, concluded that ‘these speeches rarely affect a president’s public standing in a meaningful way, despite the amount of attention they receive.’”
So if a president’s speech doesn’t influence his constituents… what is it really for? The romantic notion is that a well-crafted speech holds immense persuasive power. But in practice, it’s more of a communication tool used to set the tone and agenda for a government.
Today, however, speeches have taken on a new role: generating content to feed the attention economy. In a way, Ezra Klein has come full circle – once dismissed as ineffective, speeches are now a key asset in making presidents attentionally wealthy.
In the Canadian context, politicians have long understood that few people actually watch Question Period in the House of Commons. At best, for years, they used to hope for a memorable line to make it onto the nightly news. But now, they’ve discovered the potential of Parliament as a stage for social media. Even backbenchers of the Official Opposition often use a close-up clip of themselves delivering fiery attacks directly to the Prime Minister’s face as if he’s sitting right there when he’s not even in the room (the PM participates in QP only twice a week or less).
Beyond being a communication tool, speeches have another remarkable quality: the ability to gain value over time, much like art, strengthening their impact posthumously in the pages of history – where their persuasive potency can multiply.
Great speeches helped mythicize figures like De Gaulle and Lincoln who became anchors of their country’s national ethos.
Now here’s the paradox: if overexposure today makes a speech more effective at capturing attention in the moment, does it also kill its ability to be mythicized?
The very conditions that make something go viral – constant exposure, instant analysis, following trends and algorithms – also prevent it from attaining mythic status because myths thrive on scarcity, mystery, and the slow burn of memory and reinterpretation over time.
In his famous 1936 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin wrote: "Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space (…)" Benjamin developed the concept of aura, which is the intangible quality that gives an artwork its authenticity and emotional depth, automatically fading when copies replace the original experience.
Does it matter that modern speeches no longer have aura?
Just like art, when a speech is written or even delivered, no one really knows how it will go down in history.
Initially, President Reagan's “Tear Down This Wall” speech received limited attention when it was delivered in 1987. John Kornblum, who was U.S. Ambassador in Berlin at the time said: "[Reagan's speech] wasn't really elevated to its current status until 1989, after the wall came down."
Even if we can never predict which speech will become the anchor of a nation, we need to believe that it’s still possible.
The contemporary difficulty of creating myths matters because, as Yuval Noah Harari often argues, common stories are the foundation of large-scale human cooperation, providing a shared belief system and a sense of purpose.
Maybe our democracies will survive on a Happy Meal diet of clicks, memes, and likes, but will we starve our ability to create the shared myths and stories that shape our understanding of the world?
Today, in a moment when attention is the ultimate currency, the idea of a timeless speech feels like another relic of the past.
In a way, I think both the Prime Minister and I were right that day. It’s not the less-than-five minutes of the Gettysburg Address that made it so famous – it was the 162 years we spent imagining it.
Lincoln’s speech didn’t go viral – it lived.
What would it take for a speech to ever achieve Gettysburg status again?
Could it be about something very simple like… looking away.
Not watching. Not scrolling. Not reacting.
A speech that would go something like this:
To build a resistance against the attention economy and those who benefit from it, the most effective rebellious act is to turn off your phone…
The trouble is, how would we ever hear it?