Severin Matusek

We're all participants in a cognitive economy that trades in attention, belief, and behavior. Shape the feed, shape the future. What happens when everything becomes an attention-speculation machine?

We're now living in a system where attention dynamics are the operating system for resource allocation, political decisions, and identity formation.

Robert Shiller coined narrative economics, arguing that stories drive economic behavior. I think we are in a new iteration of all of this where the stories aren't just influencing economic activity, they are the economic activity. Attention is a precursor to wealth (in many ways) and speculation drives it.

The "checks and balances" no longer come from Congress or the courts, but from the feed.

And in politics, this type of speculation has become the closest thing to agency for people who feel like they are no longer served by the economy. 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.

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

Military strategy and diplomacy all became subordinate to social media dynamics. But he is moving on as if war is only a weekend thing.

Trump yet again inverted system architecture - flipping how information and decision-making traditionally flow.

What we’re seeing isn’t just a media trend. It’s a shift in the architecture of power. Attention → Speculation → Allocation. This is the new supply chain.