Every morning on the metro into Brussels, the scene barely changes. As the carriages slide under the city, faces glow faintly in the reflection of phones. Everyone is scrolling.
Wars a continent away. Sports clips. The outrage of the day. The train moves forward, but few people look up. Now attention plays out differently. Not only on battlefields or in summit rooms, but in these quiet, shared moments of distraction.
Modern conflicts are now fought twice: once with weapons and once with stories. Bombs destroy buildings; narratives shape who the world believes. Across conflicts, the struggle for attention has become as strategic as deploying drones or sanctions.
Algorithms often reward outrage, punish nuance and quietly decide which version of events travels furthest. Winning attention has become its own kind of victory.
Geopolitics too has been compressed into seconds. Short, emotionally charged clips from front lines can attract more views than many European news broadcasts. They deliver feeling without context—a digital sugar rush that leaves little room for reflection. I spent years inside the EU’s communications machinery and saw how quickly narratives can rise, shift and fall.
Brexit illustrated this with unusual clarity. In the days after the vote, many in the Brussels bubble were genuinely surprise at the outcome. Growing up in working-class northern England, I actually thought the leave vote share would be higher.
For many voters, Brexit was a chance to express identity and belonging. One camp offered a national story and the EU at the time largely stayed out of the debate. The result showed that if you don’t get your side of the story across, others will tell it for you.
Stories shape political outcomes
Politics has always been about stories and identity. What has changed is the medium. In Ukraine, a large part of the battle in the West has been simply keeping people from looking away. In Africa, conflicts in places like northern Nigeria or Sudan often barely register beyond the continent. Attention itself has become a battlefield, unevenly distributed and fiercely contested.
The flood of information has not made us better informed. It has made us more suspicious. There was a time when a single image could shock the world into action. Today, with deepfakes and autogenerated content becoming routine, even genuine footage from war zones is often doubted. Shock has given way to scepticism.
Those who thrive on outrage—whether in politics or media—understand that the system rewards attention, not accuracy. The louder the provocation, the greater the reach. This polarisation is not an accident. It is an economy. Outrage keeps users engaged and societies divided. Divide et impera has simply moved online.
This leads to a more troubling question. If we struggle to agree on basic facts with people who share our language, institutions and culture, what chance do we have with those who do not? The danger is not disagreement itself. It is the erosion of a shared reality in which disagreement can even take place.
I often think back to summers in 1990s Italy, my other home, where arguments unfolded face to face in local bars—about politics, football, love. Voices rose, hands moved, someone delivered a dramatic line. Then it ended the same way almost every time: with a coffee, a laugh, and someone heading back to work. The scene repeated the next day. People disagreed and still kept talking.
As face-to-face conversation fades, our arguments migrate online. They become louder, harsher and stripped of warmth and accountability. Healthier debate will require rebuilding spaces where disagreement remains human again. And this also means the story cannot belong only to the loudest voices or to the algorithms that amplify them.
In the age of the attention war, the hardest thing to hold is focus.
