Is George Santos Another Frustrated Millennial?

Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on Feb 9, 2023

An impressively perceptive take on the Santos saga from one of his fellow millennials was provided by Danielle Lee Tomson, who recently defended her doctorate at Columbia University as a scholar specializing in conservative social media influencers.

In Politico, she describes Santos as a product of an “attention economy” like the one created by the Kardashians and other influencers on social media platforms. For this new, rising generation, “attention is the most valuable currency, over truth or morality — even money,” she writes. “Santos is simply a product of his environment.”

Like many others in his generation, the 34-year-old Santos has watched national recognition lead to power and influence in a media age much more accelerated than the one us TV-age baby boomers grew up in.

Santos, among others, is simply “playing to the incentives of the attention economy, which exploded in the past decade,” Thomson writes. “Those trying to shame Santos will find their words falling on deaf ears: For the congressman, it is more important to be noticed than liked.”

“Attention economics,” I have learned, is a new-wave approach to information management that treats our attention spans as a scarce commodity.

I won’t try to go any more deeply into it than that. But it rang a lot of bells with me when she wrote of an environment in which everyone wants to pitch their “personal brand” in the public marketplace and, as Santos tends to confirm, a “fake it till you make it” attitude pervades.

Indeed, some modern-day scammers and hustlers like accused cryptocurrency fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried or Anna Delvey, aka Anna Sorokin, who posed as a wealthy heiress to fleece young New York social swells, seem to reveal how lying for dollars has become a national sport.

Suddenly some wise words from my dearly departed dad come echoing back into my mind: “Always try to be honest with your financial habits,” he said. “That way you don’t have to waste time trying to remember which lie you told last time.”

Some people, I have since learned, don’t seem to care. “Fake it ‘til you make it,” they say, and hope they don’t get taken away.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)