Topic
Attention Economics
When attention becomes the scarce resource, everything downstream — media, value, truth — reorganizes around capturing it.
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The Worth of Views
A view is the atom of the attention economy — and almost no one asks what it is actually worth, or to whom. Measured in views, everything optimizes for views; and the worth of being seen quietly detaches from the worth of what is seen. The metric eats the value it was meant to track.
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The Essence of Media
A medium is not a neutral pipe that carries content unchanged. It has a grain — things it makes easy and things it makes hard — and that grain selects what survives passage through it. The essence of any medium is not what it carries but what it rewards. Attention media reward one thing, and it is not truth.
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Attention as Currency
Attention has every property of money — scarce, exchangeable, accumulable, convertible into power — with one brutal difference. Money you can earn back. The attention you spend is subtracted directly from a finite life. The economy built on it is therefore not an exchange but an extraction.
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The Manufacture of Relevance
What feels urgent and important to you is increasingly not discovered but produced — manufactured by systems optimizing for capture, pulling the ancient levers of novelty and outrage. When relevance is manufactured per-person at scale, a shared sense of what matters is the first casualty, and a common reality is the second.
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The Audience That Isn't Human
The attention economy assumed a human on each end — a real mind to capture, a real mind to perform for. That assumption is dissolving. When the content is synthetic, the engagement is automated, and the audience may be machines, the value of a view falls to zero and one question is left standing: is there anyone there at all?
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