From Dollar Dominance to the Slop Machine

We need strategic investments in creation over extraction while acknowledging that the attention economy is a part of that. But it doesn't have to be the dominant logic of resource allocation. It doesn’t need to be so extractive.

Treating attention as infrastructure rather than a market to be optimized. Right now, we treat attention like a commodity. It’s something to be mined, optimized, and sold to the highest bidder. But attention is infrastructure! It’s the invisible highway that ideas, identities, and institutions travel on. We have to invest in it like we would a high... See more

We're trapped in the “infinite AI TikTok slop machine” - an information environment that makes long-term strategic thinking nearly impossible while rewarding the kind of attention-seeking behavior that undermines our competitive position. We need more infrastructure around real ideas.

Nadia Asparouhova's book about antimemetics helps explain why we're stuck in these destructive loops. Antimemes are high-impact, low-transmissibility ideas. Compared to traditional memes, they are hard to spread because they're complex, counterintuitive, or culturally taboo.

The attention economy is hostile to antimeme development. It rewards ideas... See more

Nadia Asparouhova's book about antimemetics helps explain why we're stuck in these destructive loops. Antimemes are high-impact, low-transmissibility ideas. Compared to traditional memes, they are hard to spread because they're complex, counterintuitive, or culturally taboo.

The attention economy is hostile to antimeme development. It rewards ideas... See more

We're not just losing to China because they're good at what they do. We're losing because our own systems are increasingly optimized for outcomes that make us less competitive.

We all know that the attention economy erodes trust. It rewards the most dramatic claims, the most outrageous behavior, the most compelling narratives regardless of their relationship to truth or long-term consequences.

As Ezra and I discussed, it creates adverse selection: the people most willing to play by attention economy rules are often the le... See more

And that’s the conundrum of an extractive economy. Everyone protects what they have instead of incentivizing what they could make.

China is building the infrastructure for 21st-century economic dominance. As we're financializing everything, they're electrifying everything. We're optimizing for attention while they're optimizing for capacity. We must figure out how to channel the dynamics of the attention economy toward creation rather than extraction .