AI Content and the War for Your Attention

I would bet large portions of my net worth that this is the future. This will be the gateway. AI will upstream everything about the consumer experience, and I totally agree with that. My bigger question is what it does to casual phone use. I agree there are very obvious and incredibly useful use cases if it gets good enough, particularly the agentic idea you described. There's a lot of potential, and the idea of it essentially becoming the interface, similar to how the browser functioned, is compelling.

I believe the entire system is on the verge of collapse due to a massive pollution problem. The book's treatment of spam exemplifies the signature pollution of attention capitalism in the attention age. If aggregating attention is lucrative, money will follow where attention pools. To the extent that you can cheaply automate the extraction of that attention, even through brute force and wasteful methods, spam will inevitably arise. This phenomenon has already occurred with junk mail, phone calls, texts, and email.

I'm currently obsessed with AI slop, especially the subgenres. What's funny about much AI is that it doesn't feel sophisticated. Instead, it feels reverse-engineered in a traceable way. While not all AI is like this, some of it is. We all have moments with this technology where we're surprised. For instance, it's clear that religious themes and babies perform well. This has led to an entire universe of AI babies singing, "Bless the Lord, O my soul." I saw one yesterday featuring Jesus with a baby; both were singing, "Bless the Lord, O my soul," and Jesus was holding a disembodied foot. This is signature AI slop.

I often write in my book about the effects of social attention and its impact. The democratization of fame is a genuinely new phenomenon, distinct from past eras. You're right; it modifies behavior. I've experienced this firsthand. While fame is relative, people recognize me on the street. This awareness means that if I were to, say, yell at a car that cut me off or nearly hit me, people might know it was me and associate that behavior with me. This is part of the behavioral modification.

I totally agree. The scale is really the problem. My question is, where is the revenue in that model? This is an interesting question that I'm obsessed with. It's the germ of something I explored in my book and am now writing about in relation to AI. We tend to conflate useful tech with lucrative tech, especially in this era. These are not the same. There are incredibly useful technologies that aren't particularly lucrative, like penicillin or antibiotics. No one is making enormous fortunes from them. Even solar power, arguably the most useful technology of our age, is profitable, but no one is making Rockefeller-level fortunes from it right now.

It's interesting to consider this from the opposite perspective. In the 1920s and 30s, with the rise of mass broadcast mediums that could capture attention at scale, an inverse problem emerged: the problem of mass media. Walter Lippmann encountered this while propagandizing for World War I. He realized it was an incredibly powerful tool. You could broadcast messages to many people, influencing them to think similarly or shift their opinions. This was a problem Lippmann and others grappled with.

There are fundamental tensions between the need for endless growth and the boundaries encountered, including the impact on people. A company could simply provide a useful service and generate significant profit. Google, for instance, had a genuinely useful service that transformed how we access information. It was incredibly profitable, a true money-printing machine, yet it wasn't enough. Growth was still required beyond that. Now, with the use of AI, the entire open web—the foundation for Google's initial success—is collapsing. What emerges next, especially with the interface we have with AI chatbots, remains to be seen.