One of the problems facing the current moment, the economist Tyler Cowen argues, is not merely the proliferation of news that is fake, but also the proliferation of news that is true: Everyday consumers simply have too much information to make reasonable sense of, Cowen suggests. And the too-muchness is its own kind of problem, because it allows for a very particular kind of mass cynicism: Consumers, now with a glut of information at their disposal—even the true information!—can cherry-pick their realities. And the sources who provide the fruits in question—journalists, academics, experts of all sorts—are also subject to the forces of informational glut. Via social media and cable news and other platforms of constant exposure, those people are revealed in multidimensional ways that they never would have been before. “It’s not quite that you have discovered that the emperor has no clothes,” Cowen writes. “But perhaps you have noticed that he (or she) is missing a few critical garments.” His column is titled “How Real News Is Worse Than Fake News,” and it makes an extremely convincing argument.

What the column is also talking about, however, is attention: the way the modern media consumer is made to pay attention to elements of information-generation that were, in an earlier age, largely kept from view. One of the massive cultural shifts that has taken place in America over the past decade is a broad movement away from a news economy driven by scarcity—the space in a newspaper, or a magazine, or a broadcast—and toward one driven by abundance: the 24-hour news cycle, the proliferation of news sources, the limitlessness of the digital page.

Which is also to say that “attention,” in today’s media ecosystem, means something slightly but meaningfully different from what it meant under the previous regime. News consumption demands not just consumption itself, but also selection among so many, many choices: CNN or MSNBC or Fox or PBS or Showtime or Netflix or The New York Times or The Washington Post or NPR or The Atlantic or Vice or The Gateway Pundit or Facebook or Twitter or your favorite blog or really any blog or multiple other options—ongoing, demanding, incessant, proliferating—competing for your precious time and, with it, your precious attention.

The anxieties accompanying this paradox of informational choice might help explain why, recently, “mindfulness” has arisen as a cultural preoccupation. And why, among the memes that have gained traction of late, the one that made jokes about the affordances of the expanding brain—the mind that is uniquely capable of transcending its own gray limitations to espouse a shimmeringly holistic view of the universe itself—caught on. Intelligence is a relative thing, in the sense that what it means to be smart in the America of 2018 is quite different from what it means to be smart in the America of 1918, or 1818; brilliance in 2018, the galaxy brain suggests, involves the ability to overcome the limitations of one’s own meager mind. It is to achieve the kind of holistic understanding embodied by Google, climate scientists, Janet from The Good Place, and pretty much no one else. Beings uniquely able to see things whole, and to see them true.