Trump, Mamdani, and Cluely

Information abundance creates attention scarcity! By 1997 (!) Michael Goldhaber was pushed this further with The Attention Economy and the Net arguing that attention was becoming the new currency of the digital age.

Mamdani proved attention is the path to institutional override. Just like Trump, but from the other side.

People speculate on ideas, personalities, etc. Why wouldn’t they? But when this happens, you end up with a system optimized for speed and virality rather than stability or accuracy.

Cluely is good at getting people to pay attention to them and is largely copying the enterprise Jake Paul playbook (stunts, virality, nihilism, and a vibe-first narrative) for B2C AI apps. We’ve already seen “brain-rot marketing” take over culture so it was only a matter of time before it hit the startup world.

And this gets into the tricky part of the attention economy - it’s easy to get eyeballs, sure, and people will do wilder and wilder stunts to keep eyes on them. But what happens when people stop paying attention? Here, it’s that Iran will likely continue pursuing a nuclear bomb because all they have to do to understand the narrative is watch the fe... See more