We are living through the deadliest summer in Europe since records began. Red alerts are in force across France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, and the UK. The WHO has called the event a health emergency.
Earlier this same year, the EU quietly gutted the core of its corporate climate rules. The “Omnibus” rollback let 90 percent of Europe’s companies off the hook for climate reporting, and pushed supply-chain due diligence back to the end of the decade. The whole fight happened inside Brussels policy circles. Millions of people who actually care about climate never even knew the rules were under threat. The information was right there in public. We just were not looking.
That is the puzzle my new article in the European Journal of Risk Regulation is about. I argue that distraction is its own mechanism of environmental deregulation. It is a different animal from disinformation or censorship, and our laws cannot see it, because they are built to ask whether information is false or hidden, never whether anyone can pay attention to it long enough for it to matter. The Omnibus was never a secret. It just got buried under everything else, and the only people left fighting it were lawyers who speak fluent Brussels.
Drawing on Byung-Chul Han’s idea of psychopolitics, I argue that distraction is strong because it feels good. The platforms have turned us into people who scatter our own attention, because we have learned to read likes and shares as a measure of our own worth.
Two money-making machines point the same way without ever coordinating. Polluters win when enforcement gets sloppy, because cleaning up is expensive. Platforms win when our attention shatters, because our distraction is literally the product.
So when you cannot focus on the slow, unglamorous work of holding polluters and platforms accountable, that is not a personal failing. It is capitalism doing what capitalism does.
Here is where I want to push back hardest: the reflex to treat this as a willpower problem, something we each fix with more discipline and a screen-time app, is itself part of the trap. That is the neoliberal move, taking a structural problem and handing it back to the individual as a private burden. But no amount of personal willpower fixes an economy built to fragment attention and profit from it. This is a collective problem, and it can only have a collective solution.
The article grew out of the “Law and Digital Distraction” symposium held at the Maastricht University Faculty of Law on 2 October 2025, co-organised by the Law and Popular Culture Research Network and the Maastricht Law and Tech Lab. Special thanks to Konrad Kollnig and Livia Solaro for convening the event, to Caroline Cauffman, Ulrik Lyngs, and Wen-Ting Yang for their contributions to the panel, and to Ishitaa Narwane for moderating.
All errors are my responsibility.
Open access: https://doi.org/10.1017/err.2026.10106
Henrique Marcos 