Severin Matusek

The takeaways? Consumers are redefining what value means to them, which is undoubtedly influencing how they shop. Discount and wholesale channels continue to attract consumers across age groups and income levels (for example, 80 percent of surveyed US Gen Zers report having shopped at a wholesaler in the previous month).29 Brands will need to strat... See more

Peloponnesian War of Robot Overlords

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.