The Attention Economy Is Stealing Your Town... (And How We Take It Back)
The major platforms—Facebook, YouTube, Instagram—made a deliberate shift. They replaced the "follow" with the "algorithm." What does that mean in practice? It means that even if you follow a local business with 10,000 followers, when they post something, maybe 200 people see it. Maybe fewer.
There's this moment that happens when you walk into a business that's been in your town for two years and you had no idea it existed.
I had that moment last week in Booneville. I wandered into a black building downtown with a Japanese name on the side—Yorokobi, a tea house. Not sweet tea. Loose-leaf, carefully brewed tea inspired by Japanese culture. The owner had traveled extensively, fallen in love with the craft, and brought it home to Arkansas. The employee working there told me they'd been open for two years. She said people walk in almost daily and say the same thing: "I didn't even know you were here."
Here's the thing that should bother us: I've lived in Russellville my whole life. I know businesses there that have been around longer than I've been alive, and they tell me the exact same story. People are shocked to discover them.
So where is everyone's attention if it's not on what's around them?
We all know the answer to that question.
When They Killed the Follow
Around 2016, something fundamental changed about the internet. If you felt it but couldn't quite name it, you're not alone.
The major platforms—Facebook, YouTube, Instagram—made a deliberate shift. They replaced the "follow" with the "algorithm." What does that mean in practice? It means that even if you follow a local business with 10,000 followers, when they post something, maybe 200 people see it. Maybe fewer. The platform decides what you see based on one primary goal: keeping you scrolling longer so you see more ads.
According to a 2023 Pew Research study, about half of U.S. adults now get their news regularly from social media, but the platforms prioritize engagement over relevance or proximity. That means you're more likely to see an outrage-inducing national story than a post about the new tea house two towns over.
You subscribed to that local bakery's page because you wanted to know their hours and their weekly specials. Instead, you got served fifteen videos designed to make you angry, three ads for things you don't need, and maybe—maybe—one post from that bakery if the algorithm decided it was "engaging" enough.
This isn't an accident. It's the business model.
The platforms are free because you are the product. Advertisers are the customers. Your attention is the commodity being bought and sold. And the cost of that transaction isn't just your time—it's your connection to the place you actually live.
The Dead Internet Theory (And Why Your Town Feels Empty Online)
There's a concept making the rounds called the "dead internet theory." The idea is that most of the content, comments, likes, and arguments you see online aren't coming from real people—they're bots. Not necessarily AI in the flashy ChatGPT sense, but automated accounts run by corporations, political operatives, or even nation-states trying to manipulate opinion on everything from elections to medicine to what you think about your own neighbors.
It sounds paranoid until you start paying attention.
I put it this way on a recent episode of LevelUp Russellville: "If you think your views are based in reality, maybe they are. But chances are you've been manipulated. We all have in some form or fashion."
A 2025 study from Indiana University's Observatory on Social Media found that bots accounted for an estimated 9-15% of active Twitter accounts during major news events, with the potential to significantly sway public perception. That's millions of fake voices shaping what feels like consensus.
And here's the local angle: while you're being fed a steady diet of national outrage and manufactured conflict, your actual neighbors—the ones running businesses, organizing events, trying to make Russellville better—are invisible.
We've become more connected than ever through the internet, and somehow more disconnected within our own geographic communities.
What Happens When You Delete It All
About four months ago, I sold my iPhone and switched to a more secure device. No social media apps. Six weeks after that, I went further: I deleted my Meta account entirely. No Facebook. No Instagram. Gone.
But eventually, enough was enough.
"I gotta say y'all, it's such a breath of fresh air," I said. "There have been some minor inconveniences... but it's well worth not falling into the doom scrolling pits of despair and the complaining and the negativity that Facebook brings."
My business? Still growing. My awareness of local events? Actually better, because I'm looking around me instead of at a screen.
The irony is thick: I started my company five or six years ago specifically to help e-commerce businesses run better Facebook ads. I participated in the system I now consider morally wrong. But I'm proof you can step out of it and survive—even thrive.
The question is: if we're not going back to Facebook, and Google isn't prioritizing local connection, what do we do instead?
Building the "Anti-Social Media" Network
For the last two and a half years, my team and I have been working on something called Town Square. Not the podcast—the platform. And after countless iterations, pivots, moments of doubt and clarity, we've come full circle to the original idea: a website and app that just has local stuff on it.
That's it. No algorithm. No ads. No manipulated feeds.
If you're a resident, you log in, find what you need fast—events, businesses, churches, clubs, organizations—and get out. You can follow the "anchors" (businesses, nonprofits, community groups) you care about. When they post, you see it. All of it. No boosting required.
If you're an anchor, you make a free profile. If you have 500 followers, all 500 see your posts. You own that relationship. Well, you co-own it—because it belongs as much to the resident as it does to you.
Compare that to Facebook, where you might have 10,000 followers but only 2% see your post unless you click that little button that says "boost this post" and hand over your credit card details.
Town Square also introduces something called "neighbors"—local content creators, historians, journalists, or just people who want to share something valuable with their community. Think of them as the new local influencers, but in the original sense of the word: people who actually influence their neighbors because they provide real value, not because they're chasing engagement metrics.
I'll have a neighbor profile where I share my podcast episodes and blog posts. Featured businesses can showcase that content on their own profiles. It's a web of local connection, not a black hole of distraction.
And here's where it gets interesting: Town Square is building an interactive toolkit. Neighbors and anchors will be able to create experiences—scavenger hunts, games, challenges—that get people out into the community. Maybe a local business sponsors a scavenger hunt where you take pictures of historic landmarks around Russellville. Complete it, and you're entered to win a free dinner, skydiving trip, or a stack of coupons from local shops.
A hundred people play the game. One person wins the dinner. But all hundred of them engaged with local businesses, learned something about their town, and maybe became customers for life.
It's using technology not to siphon attention, but to direct it back where it belongs.
The Revolution Is Local
According to the U.S. Census Bureau's 2023 American Community Survey, about 76% of Americans live in the same state they did a year ago, and the majority live within 25 miles of where they grew up. We are, by nature, local creatures.
But our digital lives tell a different story. We're constantly pulled into national conversations, global outrage, distant problems we can't solve. Meanwhile, the problems we can solve—the ones right in front of us—go unnoticed.
The average person is living paycheck to paycheck, their attention fractured, their time limited. I get it: "I can't expect them to care about local economy and community and businesses the same way that you and I do."
But what if we made it easier? What if we built tools that respected people's time, gave them real value, and rewarded them for engaging locally?
That's the vision. Not to compete with Facebook or Google, but to go deeper than either of them ever could on a single community—its history, its stories, the fabric that makes it unique.
Town Square isn't just for Russellville. It's a model that could work for Dardanelle, Clarksville, Booneville, and communities around the world. Because every town has anchors that deserve to be seen. Every town has neighbors with something valuable to share. And every town has residents who are tired of being the product.
What If We Had Our Own Space?
We're building something that belongs to all of us. A place where your attention isn't sold to the highest bidder. A place where following a local business actually means you see their posts. A place where your town isn't just a dot on a map, but a living, breathing community you can see and touch and support.
You can hear more about my journey away from big tech and toward something better on the latest episode of LevelUp Russellville. It's a raw, honest conversation recorded on the road under a full Arkansas moon—just me, my thoughts, and a vision for what comes next.
The tea house in Booneville is still there, still serving carefully brewed tea, still wondering why more people don't know about it.
Maybe it's time we all started looking around.
My team at Town Square and I are ready to help. If you're a business, organization, or school interested in learning how to use technology for good—whether that's building local connection or leveraging tools like AI to scale your work—we're available. You can reach us at 479-397-4600 or email tal@rvtownsquare.com.