I completely and totally agree with the article that the attention economy in its current manifestation is in crisis, but I’m much less sanguine about the outcomes. The problem with the theory presented here, to me, is that it’s missing a theory of power. The attention economy isn’t an accident, but the result of the inherently political nature of society. Humans, being social animals, gain power by convincing other people of things. From David Graeber (who I’m always quoting lol):

Politics, after all, is the art of persuasion; the political is that dimension of social life in which things really do become true if enough people believe them. The problem is that in order to play the game effectively, one can never acknowledge this: it may be true that, if I could convince everyone in the world that I was the King of France, I would in fact become the King of France; but it would never work if I were to admit that this was the only basis of my claim.

In other words, just because algorithmic social media becomes uninteresting doesn’t mean the death of the attention economy as such, because the attention economy is something innate to humanity, in some form. Today its algorithmic feeds, but 500 years ago it was royal ownership of printing presses.

I think we already see the beginnings of the next round. As an example, the YouTuber Veritsasium has been doing educational videos about science for over a decade, and he’s by and large good and reliable. Recently, he did a video about self-driving cars, sponsored by Waymo, which was full of (what I’ll charitably call) problematic claims that were clearly written by Waymo, as fellow YouTuber Tom Nicholas pointed out. Veritasium is a human that makes good videos. People follow him directly, bypassing algorithmic shenanigans, but Waymo was able to leverage their resources to get into that trusted, no-algorithm space. We live in a society that commodifies everything, and as human-made content becomes rarer, more people like Veritsaium will be presented with more and increasingly lucrative opportunities to sell bits and pieces of their authenticity for manufactured content (be it by AI or a marketing team), while new people that could be like Veritsaium will be drowned out by the heaps of bullshit clogging up the web.

This has an analogy in our physical world. As more and more of our physical world looks the same, as a result of the homogenizing forces of capital (office parks, suburbia, generic blocky bulidings, etc.), the fewer and fewer remaining parts that are special, like say Venice, become too valuable for their own survival. They become “touristy,” which is itself a sort of ironically homogenized commodified authenticity.

edit: oops I got Tom’s name wrong lol fixed