How Western Media and Advertising work is the root cause.
Cutting and pasting from the first sentence on MIT's class on the Attention Economy.
"In Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan proposes that in paying for space and time in newspapers and magazines, on radio and television, advertisers are effectively buying a piece of the reader, listener, or viewer. And he wryly observes that the ad agencies “would gladly pay the reader, listener, or viewer directly for his time and attention if they knew how to do so.” The absurdity of this proposition underscores the essentially mediated nature of human attention."
The class clearly shows how Human Attention is over exploited way before AI showed up.
All Human Attention is mostly directed towards Consumption, Status Signaling and Accumulation of Wealth through Mass Media/Advertising/Marketing/PR/Influencers etc.
There are examples in history where Human Attention at large scales can be directed towards things other than Consumption, Status Signaling, Accumulation of Wealth. A big one is Gandhi and his influence on a huge variety of people to live a simple life.
But ofcourse the moment charismatic leaders like that exits the stage, the Attention Allocation defaults back to status quo.
So we need very different leaders and a very different kind of Media and Advertising ecosystem to cause shifts in how finite Global Human Attention gets allocated. Lot of imagination is required. Unfortunately our most imaginative minds are in service of financial overlords and rent collectors to sell the plebs new iphones and more Star Wars movies, "experiences" and merch.