When Attention Becomes Currency: Haitian Gangs and the New Economy of Territorial Control

In February 2024, a quiet shift took place in Haiti’s political economy. The two great criminal federations of Port-au-Prince, long rivals, merged. The G9 and the G-Pèp, once divided by bloody feuds, came together under a name heavy with symbolism: Viv Ansanm (“living together” in Creole). Within a few months, the coalition had consolidated its grip on nearly 90% of the capital, according to estimates by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime. But beyond the territorial expansion, what intrigues observers is the growing economic sophistication of this domination. Power is no longer exercised through force alone: it is now organized through a system of information, visibility, and control of attention that redefines the very nature of the criminal economy.

Jimmy Chérizier, alias Barbecue, is no longer just a warlord. He has become a media figure. His filmed appearances, his speeches livestreamed on TikTok or Facebook, his messages forwarded on WhatsApp give him a digital omnipresence that reaches beyond the realm of terror. Every appearance, every public threat, every viral image helps build a symbolic power: that of a man who can no longer be ignored, who is feared but also recognized. It is this recognition, or rather this visibility, that gives him a functional legitimacy. And behind that legitimacy lies an economic mechanism of formidable efficiency: turning collective attention into territorial rent.

An economy of informed fear

The Global Initiative estimates that revenue from extortion in container transport amounts to between $60 million and $75 million a year. But that figure is only the visible tip of an economic iceberg. Extrapolating to other forms of extraction (shakedowns of traders, “taxes” on markets, passage fees, levies on public transport), total flows could approach $1 billion a year, or between 5 and 8% of Haiti’s informal GDP, which is put at 60% of a national economy of about $30 billion according to the latest World Bank and IMF data.

These revenues circulate through a singular economic architecture: the economy of informed fear. Far from being limited to physical coercion, it rests on the mass dissemination of information, signals, and images that steer behavior before any violence even occurs. Threatening messages, execution videos, and shows of force posted on social media act as coordination devices: they tell the population “who controls what,” “how much has to be paid,” “which route to avoid.” In other words, terror becomes a message, and the message a mechanism of economic regulation.

Herbert Simon and cognitive scarcity

To understand this transformation, one has to go back to an insight formulated more than half a century ago by the economist Herbert Simon. In 1971, in Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World, he wrote: “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” In a world saturated with messages, the scarce resource is no longer information but the capacity to process it. Whoever manages to capture and steer collective attention therefore holds greater economic power than someone who merely holds weapons or material wealth.

Haiti illustrates this reversal brutally. The country has about 2.6 million social media users, of whom 72% concentrate their activity on Facebook, and 86% access the internet by mobile phone (DataReportal 2024). This configuration creates an attention bottleneck: a small number of platforms concentrate almost all public visibility. In this context, to dominate the digital space is to dominate the collective field of perception, and therefore to influence economic, political, and social behavior.

Without theorizing the model, Viv Ansanm has intuitively grasped what the big tech companies took decades to formalize: attention is a currency. Facebook converts it into advertising revenue; the gangs turn it into symbolic capital, then into coercive profitability. Their “business model” rests on a simple equation: the more visible the fear, the lower the cost of physical coercion.

Bourdieu, or the invisible mechanics of recognized power

In La Distinction (1979) and Raisons pratiques (1994), Pierre Bourdieu described symbolic capital as a form of power founded on collective recognition. This power need not be just, still less moral: it works as long as social perception recognizes it as legitimate. When a doctor or a judge speaks, their authority does not stem solely from their competence: it is accepted because it is embedded in a system of collective beliefs. The patient does not check the diplomas; the citizen does not retry every decision: trust is institutionalized. Bourdieu calls this misrecognition: the moment when the mechanisms that produce power fade behind the self-evidence of power itself.

Applied to the Haitian context, this logic sheds light on the Chérizier phenomenon. Every TikTok livestream, every speech relayed through thousands of shares builds, interaction by interaction, a symbolic capital of domination. “Chérizier controls Cité Soleil” becomes a recognized social fact, internalized by residents, traders, drivers, and humanitarian organizations. This recognition, even when it is founded on fear, confers an authority that no longer needs to be constantly reasserted. It saves on the costs of legitimation: there is no longer any need to impose by force what society already perceives as reality.

It is this shared perception that makes economic domination effective. Symbolic authority, converted into anticipatory obedience, yields a measurable return: fewer revolts, less resistance, more predictability in the flows of money and goods.

Lower transaction costs: when fear becomes infrastructure

Since Ronald Coase (1937), standard economics has taught us that all productive activity generates transaction costs: searching for information, negotiating, monitoring, enforcing. Extortion is no exception. Informational dominance, however, slashes these costs.

First, identification: traders announce their own deliveries on WhatsApp, and transport operators post their routes on Facebook. Economic information circulates freely; the gangs need only watch it. Next, communication: threats, once delivered in person by messengers, now spread through voice messages or viral videos. According to the Washington Post (2022), “gang messages appear first on WhatsApp before spreading to other platforms,” making potential sanctions visible almost instantly. Finally, monitoring: violent content posted online serves as a credible signal. As in Michael Spence’s signaling theory, the high cost of producing these videos (media exposure, the risk of being traced) guarantees their credibility. Fear becomes self-sustaining: the signal replaces the act.

This mechanism gives Viv Ansanm a formidable efficiency. Once the information infrastructure is in place, the marginal cost of extortion falls: each new trader being “shaken down” costs less to control. In Platform Capitalism (2017), Nick Srnicek describes a similar logic among the big digital platforms: the cost of adding one more user tends toward zero. Haiti’s gangs apply the same principle in another register: once the network of fear is in place, each additional transaction increases the profitability of the system.

Figures that confirm a system taking shape

The extortion economy is no longer chaotic: it has been rationalized. The Global Initiative estimates that revenue from container racketeering exceeds $60 million a year, while Haiti’s finance ministry cites a total of $70 million from all sources. These figures, modest on a global scale, represent a colossal windfall in a country whose GDP per capita is around $2,700.

These funds do not all vanish into immediate consumption or the purchase of weapons. The Global Initiative’s 2024 and 2025 reports point to growing financialization: land acquisitions, investments in urban transport, stakes in formal businesses held through front men. In other words, the criminal economy is gradually merging into the legal economy. The boundaries are blurring. The capital of fear is turning into hard assets. This evolution recalls the Colombian precedent: in the 1980s, the Medellín and Cali cartels converted their illegal profits into real estate and agricultural investments, creating hybrid economic structures that survive to this day.

A telling coincidence: digital visibility and territorial expansion

Between October 2024 and June 2025, the correlation between digital intensification and territorial expansion is striking. The Haitian Times has documented a dramatic increase in TikTok livestreams by Chérizier and his allies, while the United Nations recorded 1,018 dead and 239,000 displaced in the Artibonite and Centre departments, Viv Ansanm’s new strongholds. Widely shared videos of threats and executions often precede the physical attacks. The ground is prepared by fear: people flee before the fighters even arrive. The effect of “anticipated terror” becomes a low-cost instrument of expansion.

Pierre Espérance, director of the National Human Rights Defense Network (RNDDH), sums it up this way: “They have understood the power of the media; they use it to instill fear and to recruit.” The remark sheds light on the strategic dimension of the phenomenon. Digital tools no longer serve merely to intimidate, but to rationalize conquest.

The invisible costs: the disintegration of social capital

While the gains for the armed groups are obvious, the losses for the national economy are immense. Haiti, already in chronic recession, is watching its social capital, the mutual trust that makes economic cooperation possible, unravel. Where uncertainty reigns, trade collapses. Businesses cut jobs, banks stop lending in high-risk areas, supply chains fragment. Studies of El Salvador show that the presence of gangs can reduce local productivity by 15 to 20%. In Haiti, where 90% of employment is in the informal sector, the consequences are even more serious: the collapse of small businesses, shrinking consumption, an exodus of skills.

The 1.3 million internally displaced people recorded by the UN represent not only a human tragedy but also a drain of human capital. Entire neighborhoods are being emptied of their skilled workers; local networks, the very essence of the informal economy, are falling apart. The loss is cumulative: each displacement means the disappearance of a productive micro-ecosystem.

The fragmentation of territory: from a national economy to local archipelagos

As the zones of control stabilize, the Haitian economy is reorganizing itself into a mosaic. Transport operators must negotiate at every checkpoint, every stretch of road becomes an economic border, every gang sets its own “toll.” Moving a container from Varreux to the Cul-de-Sac plain sometimes involves as many as seven successive payments. Logistics costs soar, and consumer prices follow. This fragmentation recalls the war economies of Central Africa or of Lebanon in the 1980s: micro-territories linked by irregular flows, with no central coordination.

This fragmentation comes with an unprecedented phenomenon: visibility as a stabilizing factor. The more visible a group is, the more it is recognized, and the more readily its local “sovereignty” is accepted. The network effect works in fear just as it does in finance: notoriety reinforces credibility. In other words, digital domination creates negative network externalities: the more an actor controls visibility, the riskier it becomes to ignore it. Violence no longer even needs to be a daily occurrence; its image is enough to regulate order.

A political economy of fear

What the Haitian case reveals extends beyond its borders. It is a distorting mirror of digital globalization: an economy in which attention becomes the raw material of domination. The logics at work in the slums of Port-au-Prince are not so different from those of the tech giants: capturing attention, converting it into power, monetizing visibility. The difference lies in the purpose: Facebook sells advertising space; Viv Ansanm sells survival.

This analogy, far from being provocative, underscores the systemic nature of the phenomenon. The line between the legal and the illegal economy is blurring, not by chance but by structure. Both obey the same rationality: maximize visibility, reduce transaction costs, control the perception of reality. Where the state fails, the network becomes the institution. Virality replaces the law.

In this context, public policies focused exclusively on security look ill-suited. An attention economy cannot be fought with military force alone. The cognitive space has to be won back: by producing competing narratives, restoring the credibility of public information, rebuilding circuits of economic trust. In other words, reclaiming territory must begin with reclaiming the public’s gaze.

The stakes of a cognitive reconstruction

Rebuilding Haiti will not just mean reconstructing its roads or its institutions: it will mean learning anew how to organize visibility. The weak states of the twenty-first century are challenged not only on the military or financial front; they are challenged on the terrain of attention. Whoever controls the flows of perception controls economic coordination. In the Haitian case, social networks (WhatsApp, TikTok, Facebook) have become spaces of parallel governance, where the law is written in real time, in images and emotions.

The state will therefore have to reinvent its tools: create trusted digital channels; provide reliable economic and security information; invest in media literacy and cyber-resilience. Otherwise, it will remain invisible where the battle for power is now being fought: on the phone screen.

From Port-au-Prince to the world

The story Haiti tells is not one of an isolated collapse. It is one of a global shift: from territorial sovereignty to informational sovereignty. Where the state retreats, fear becomes an economy; where it endures, attention becomes a market. These two logics are merely opposite faces of the same cognitive revolution.

Watching Viv Ansanm, we are not merely contemplating a Haitian tragedy. We are seeing the emergence of a primitive form of attention capitalism applied to illegal governance: an economy in which visibility is at once power, commodity, and instrument of regulation. If this hypothesis holds, it calls for rethinking development, security, and communication policies: there is no longer any economy without an economy of attention.

Haiti, in its pain, may be showing us the starkest face of the world to come: a world in which domination is imposed no longer only through force or wealth, but through the capacity to capture, steer, and monetize where people look.