The attention model explains Hollywood's longest-running fiction

Why Independence Day is a load of Horse Shit

In *Independence Day*, President Thomas J. Whitmore stands on a makeshift platform in the Nevada desert and delivers a speech so rousing that it unites the entire human race. Fighter pilots from every nation scramble their jets. Differences are set aside. Humanity fights as one.

The film made $817 million.

Now add Fox News.

"PRESIDENT USES ALIEN INVASION TO DISTRACT FROM BORDER CRISIS." Tucker Carlson interviews a retired Air Force general who says the whole thing is a false flag. A Substack emerges arguing the aliens are a globalist psyop. Someone on X posts that the aliens haven't actually *attacked* anyone and maybe we should hear their side. An MSNBC panel debates whether Whitmore's speech was exclusionary because he said "mankind." A GoFundMe appears for the aliens.

Meanwhile, the mothership destroys Washington.

The film works — the speech works, the unity works, the whole thing works — because the attention market doesn't exist inside the movie. Nobody in that universe is extracting rents from opposing the president during an alien invasion. Nobody has a Patreon that depends on calling the response a conspiracy. Nobody's podcast needs the invasion to last six seasons.

Remove the attention market and America looks like *Independence Day*.

Add it back and America looks like America.

The Stored Capital Trick

Here's what's actually happening. Hollywood isn't depicting present-day America. It's borrowing identity capital that was accumulated decades ago, before the attention market existed to contest it.

When you watch a film where the American president is wise and decisive, where NASA solves the impossible problem, where the Marines arrive just in time — you're not watching a portrait of modern governance. You're watching a withdrawal from an identity bank account that was filled up between roughly 1941 and 1969.

The Second World War. The Marshall Plan. The Moon landing. The Berlin Airlift. All of it accumulated before cable news, before social media, before anyone could extract rents from opposing it in real time

This is *exactly* the same mechanism that protects the NHS in Britain. The NHS was established at the single moment of maximum national unity — the aftermath of a war that required total mobilisation. It accumulated identity capital before the attention market arrived. Nobody can polarise it because the identity is too deep, too abstract, and too universally held.

American institutional competence — the idea of it — works the same way in cinema. The schema is pre-installed. The audience already has it. The operating cost of telling that story is near zero because the identity market was built before anyone could extract rents from dismantling it.

Hollywood isn't lying to you. It's showing you the version of America that existed before the attention market ate everything.

The Apollo Problem

The Apollo programme is the cleanest proof case.

Twelve me walked on the Moon. They did it with less computing power than your toaster. It was, by any reasonable measure, the single most extraordinary engineering achievement in human history, and it was accomplished by a government bureaucracy.

It worked because it operated inside the administrative regime — but before the attention market could punish it.

NASA in the 1960s had visibility, but that visibility was universally positive. There was no cable news channel running segments about cost overruns. There was no congressional subcommittee livestreaming hearings for engagement. There was no X account with 400,000 followers posting "EXPOSED: What NASA doesn't want you to know about the Van Allen Belt."

The attention carried no negative value. Visibility didn't activate scrutiny in the way it does now. So the engineers could engineer, the managers could manage, and the whole thing could work.

Now look at what happens when space becomes attention-market content. Elon Musk turns rocket launches into personal brand events. Space Force becomes a culture war football. NASA funding debates get polarised along identity lines that have nothing to do with rocketry. The engineers are exactly as good as they were in 1969. Probably better. But the institutional environment they work in has been colonised by the attention market, and the attention market rewards conflict, not competence.

The Apollo programme couldn't happen today. Not because America forgot how to build things. Because building things requires the administrative regime to function, and the administrative regime requires invisibility. The moment you make governance visible, it enters the attention market. And the attention market doesn't reward getting things right. It rewards getting attention.

Aaron Sorkin's Beautiful Lie

*The West Wing* ran for seven seasons and won more Emmys than any drama in history. Its entire premise was: what if the American government was staffed by brilliant, principled people who argued passionately but governed competently?

Twenty-six million people watched the first season because they wanted it to be true. The schema was installed. American audiences had decades of stored identity capital telling them that this is what their government should look like — and they were willing to pay HBO prices to see it depicted on screen.

But here's the thing Sorkin could never write: “The West Wing” set in the retail-centric regime. President Bartlet cares about winning elections, yes — but attention is an input to governance, not the product itself. His staff argues about policy because policy matters. They seek media coverage because it helps them pass legislation. Attention serves the work.

That regime no longer exists.

Modern American politics operates in the retail political regime. Attention *is* the product. You don't get noticed in order to govern — you govern (or refuse to govern) in order to get noticed. The rational endpoint isn't Bartlet's measured eloquence. It's whatever generates the most engagement in the next sixty seconds.

Sorkin can't write a realistic version of modern Washington because realistic modern Washington wouldn't be a drama. It would be a horror film about rational people optimising for the wrong objective function, and the twist ending is that there's no twist — they just keep doing it forever because the incentives never change.

Why British Films Don't Bother

Notice something odd: British cinema almost never depicts British government as competent. The default British political film is *The Thick of It*, *Yes Minister*, *In the Loop* — bumbling, venal, absurd.

This isn't because Britain has worse politicians. It's because British pre-communications identity capital isn't stored in governance. It's stored in the monarchy and the NHS. Those are the identity containers that were established before the attention market could polarise them.

Parliament was always visible, always contested, always inside the political attention market. There was never a moment when British governance accumulated the kind of universally-held identity capital that American governance did between 1941 and 1969. Britain's "competent government" identity capital is thin. Its monarchy and healthcare identity capital is enormous.

So Hollywood makes films about competent American presidents because the stored capital exists to support the fiction. British filmmakers make *The Thick of It* because they don't have equivalent capital to draw on. Both are telling the truth about their respective identity banks. One just has a larger balance in a different account.

The Real Joke

The funniest thing about all of this is that Hollywood's depiction of competent America is itself operating under the same economics as everything else in the book.

A film about a competent American president is a *sequel*. Not literally — but economically. It's borrowing pre-built identity capital, plugging into an existing schema, reducing the operating cost of audience acquisition to near zero. The audience already believes in competent America. You just have to activate the template.

A film about America as it actually operates — a vast, brilliant, well-resourced nation that cannot build a high-speed railway, cannot agree on healthcare, cannot stop its own citizens from shooting each other, and cannot have a presidential debate without both candidates lying on national television — would be an *original*. You'd have to build the identity, the world, the audience attachment, and the emotional architecture from nothing.

Originality is the problem. In a global attention market where budgets validate risk and a single failure is existential, the rational strategy is to extract rents from identity capital that already exists.

The economics that explains why every summer produces another Spider-Man also explains why every year produces another film where America saves the world.

It's the same model. Same equations. Different screen.