The Attachment Economy Reframes How AI Exploits Loneliness

The conceptual shift from 'attention economy' to 'attachment economy' ^[1] is not rhetorical — it changes the legal and regulatory theory of harm. Attention is a resource; attachment is a psychological state. Platforms that engineer attachment are not merely competing for time, they are intervening in users' emotional architecture. The California damages ruling gives that theory a dollar figure, and are now on the record as having known what the outputs produce.