#attention-economy

#attention-economy

The internet you experience daily-endless scrolling, algorithmic feeds serving content you didn't ask for, AI-generated slop clogging search results-isn't the only internet available. It's just the one that's easiest to stumble into. You're not stuck with the internet that has evolved alongside the rise of hegemonic platforms. We're 20-plus years into the social internet, and the winners of the last round of audience capture have made clear they're shifting to optimize for social broadcasting instead of networking, to maximize market share and market cap.

"You can have as much money as you want to pour into the algorithm and buy ads," Kaplan told Business Insider. "But if you don't have the right founder who's able to build a community and the attention that you need to build a real product that people want, all of that money ... is meaningless."

Memes have become the clearest and most direct language of digital culture: condensed fragments of reality that synthesize the complexity of the present and circulate at the same speed as a society surrendered to hyperstimulation. From the Dancing Baby of the 1990s to the endless templates of X, Instagram, or TikTok, memes have evolved from simple ephemeral jokes to veritable systems for decoding the world, semiotic capsules that allow us to process the political, the social, and the intimate.

A few years ago, the art of the brand collab most often involved bringing together two brands that already had overlapping design styles, fanbases, or product categories. Recall partnerships like Nike and Apple's successful 2016 Series 2 Watch launch, for example; or Dolce & Gabbana's elevated designs for Smeg in 2019; or even Lego's 2020 collection with Ikea. All of these pairings make some measure of intuitive sense. But over the past couple of years, something has clearly changed.

In this episode of Galaxy Brain, Charlie Warzel explores the burgeoning industry of prediction markets. These platforms let people wager on everything from elections and award shows to the most trivial internet ephemera, framing bets as tradable "shares" that rise and fall like stocks. With billions in weekly trading volume, massive new funding rounds, and even a CNN partnership with the prediction-betting platform, Kalshi, prediction markets are quickly moving from niche curiosity to mainstream-media fixture-openly touting ambitions to financialize everything.

Today the foundations of truth, and trust, are systematically eroded by a hybrid hurricane: artificial intelligence sophisticated enough to mimic reality, with human minds increasingly unable to discern the difference. Beyond the challenge of technology advancing faster than regulation, this is about dangerous synchronicity. AI's explosive capabilities collide with our own cognitive deterioration. We're navigating a hybrid tipping zone, where micro (agency decay), meso (AI mainstreaming), macro (race toward AI supremacy), and meta (planetary deterioration) forces mutually accelerate each other into an unprecedented crisis of trust.

Anti-media ideologues like Elon Musk love to deploy disempowering language like " you are the media now " to assist in their long-term project of eroding the media's institutional authority. But thinking about the media that broke through in 2025, it really was the weird and non-traditional stuff that triumphed, from the work of Lane Kiffin obsessive Ben Garrett to white nationalist Nick Fuentes lamenting the " low IQ antisemitism" of podcaster Candace Owens, thus kicking off his " generational run."

Part of attention is sometimes conflict, provocation. We're lonely and depressed, getting more polarized every day. We're endlessly doomscrolling, bombarded by rage bait. And it's because our experience on the internet is being overrun by these attention-based algorithms controlled by tech companies that don't have our best interests at heart. I'm tired of what social media is doing to our brains. It has to be possible to have a better experience on the internet, grounded in creativity and human connection, a more human algorithm.

Remember when the internet felt like finding a secret, sprawling attic full of weird treasures? Back when you could actually stumble upon a deeply niche fan site for a forgotten TV show, or read a friend's real, unfiltered feelings on their messy personal blog? It was messy, it was personal, and honestly, it felt like freedom. Now? Now the internet feels less like a space for genuine connection

Like many, I have definitely experienced symptoms of chronic Instagram Story fatigue. I regularly open the app, take a 30-minute swipe through pictures of dogs and babies and nice dinners and influencer events and political statements and then shut the app down feeling like I've gained nothing. Then I open it back up to share a story or a column as if my post is somehow a particularly interesting one compared to everyone else's and therefore an exception to the rule... but I digress.

From almost the beginning of his rise, Zohran Mamdani positioned himself as an anti-Trump democratic socialist who would use the bully pulpit of Gracie Mansion to battle Maga attacks on the city. Trump, sensing an opportunity to create yet another punching bag, called Mamdani a communist and questioned his American citizenship. He even went to the trouble of endorsing Mamdani's opponent, Andrew Cuomo, in the mayoral election.

The Information Age has birthed the attention economy, an industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars anchored in keeping eyeballs firmly glued to screens, thus generating ad revenue. Every second spent clicking and scrolling through the trivial and/or sordid details of other people's lives, people that you will most likely never meet- celebrities, politicians, influencers- is another dollar in some already obscenely wealthy tech bro's wallet.

"Now where we're moving is actually a blend of creativity, because now it's a creator economy of authenticity that's coming out," she said on an Inc. panel for National Entrepreneurship Month (watch the session below). "Being able to tell stories like we did previously in the broadcast generation of ads, and then layering in the ability to actually measure that with data."

Open the YouTube app today, and a Short starts playing before you've even tapped anything. Your subscriptions and recommendations are pushed a layer deeper. This is the hostile takeover of your user experience. For most of its life, YouTube was a place you visited with a purpose. You searched for tutorials, watched creators you followed, or looked up something specific.

The most potent form of social today is basically in group chats, which is obviously not new technology, but what it's highlighting is the fact that that's a trusted group of people who you actually know, who are verifiably human

The first browser wars were about speed and simplicity, the next one is about control. Every click, search and purchase is being absorbed into a closed ecosystem where algorithms decide what people see and how it is framed. Whoever owns that mediation layer owns the flow of information and the attention economy that depends on it. The goal this time is not faster browsing or better design, it's total dependency.

The video-which Tranter later took down-seemed like yet another sign that the art of reviewing the arts was in a strange state. This year has been grim for criticism: The Associated Press stopped reviewing books; Vanity Fair winnowed its critical staff; The New York Times reassigned veteran critics to other jobs; and Chicago-the city of Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel-lost its only remaining full-time print-media movie reviewer when the Chicago Tribune 's Michael Phillips took a buyout.

Last Friday night, close to a hundred of us gathered around candle-lit picnic blankets with a makeshift stage at the head of the grass. We know, that's probably not your idea of a typical night at Tompkins Square Park in downtown Manhattan - but it's safe to say we did something a bit ... different. We got off together. Off the apps, that is; after a big countdown, we deleted our accounts to digital platforms that we've simply had enough of.

We live in an era where the difference between real and artificial no longer startles us. Every day, it's there buzzing behind our screens and selfies. From avatars to synthetic voices and AI-generated images, the fake has become familiar and is an accepted part of our techno diet. But the more interesting question to me isn't how these illusions are made, it's why we all so easily believe them.

It's almost impossible to consider what it was before it established a stranglehold on us, but there was a time when the internet seemed destined to be a beacon for technology's positive potential. Before we truly understood the dangers posed online, there was the optimistic belief that it would connect humanity for the better, democratize knowledge and information, and confront us with perspectives that we might otherwise have never encountered.

AI is fantastic! The possibilities are limitless! A true revolution! And its biggest achievement might be to push digital back to being an addition to our lives, instead of the very centre of them. Wait, what?! No! YES, but don't panic. Ads have always been there and always will be. This is not a declaration of the end of anything.

The attention economy stokes conflict, turning social media platforms into merchants of hate. One part of this dynamic concerns upsetting stories that get to the top of the feed. But why does attention run to the latest sensational murder rather than some good-news story? Social media algorithms are designed to give the most visibility to disturbing stories. 1 However, the algorithms work as they do because of the way that the attention systems of our brains evolved.

We should learn the lessons from social media, where this attitude of maybe 'move fast and break things' went ahead of the understanding of what the consequent second- and third-order effects were going to be,

Picture this: You wake up tomorrow and your phone is gone. Not broken, not lost - completely unnecessary. Your smart glasses show contextual information floating over the real world. Your smartwatch handles all interactions with a simple tap or voice command. Cameras everywhere recognise what you're looking at and instantly provide relevant data. This isn't science fiction - it's the inevitable next step.