These are the Last Days of the Attention Economy

Insight

The old internet is being hit from both sides simultaneously.

On the demand side, users are leaving. Not for another platform — for a different medium entirely. Instead of scrolling feeds, watching YouTube videos, and reading blog posts, they are going to AI. It answers faster, goes deeper, and wastes none of their time. The audience that once made social media and search valuable is quietly moving elsewhere.

On the supply side, AI is flooding every channel with infinite content. More posts, more articles, more videos than any human could ever consume — produced at near-zero cost. The unique, hard-to-replicate content that once justified the attention economy's existence now costs nothing to generate. The supply side's value proposition is collapsing under the weight of its own abundance.

AI is simultaneously draining demand and drowning supply. The attention economy isn't being disrupted. It's being hollowed out from both ends at once.

Meanwhile the platforms aren't going quietly. What Cory Doctorow calls enshittification — more ads, more algorithmic extraction, more clickbait — is the death rattle of a model that has already peaked. The user experience degrades. Ad costs rise. Organic reach collapses. Everyone building on these platforms is working harder for less.

This is the structural collapse of the internet contract as we've known it.

Deep Dive

For thirty years the internet ran on a single model: capture human attention, hold it, monetize it. Every platform, algorithm, and content strategy was built around this. It worked because attention was scarce and content was expensive to produce.

Both of those assumptions are now false.

Content costs nothing. And attention — the human kind, the kind that buys things and builds relationships — is moving to AI, where it gets something genuinely more valuable in return. Not a feed optimized for engagement. A conversation optimized for the person having it.

This is the shift from one-to-many to infinity-to-one. Every previous media evolution pushed outward — one message to more people. AI pulls inward — all of the world's information converging to one person, in one conversation, serving one actual need. The feed was built to capture you. AI is built to serve you.

What Replaces It

The collapse of the attention economy is not the end of value creation. It's the end of attention as the proxy for value.

What's emerging is a value economy — where what surfaces isn't what's most engaging, but what's most useful. Where the companies, creators, and products that win are the ones that solve real problems clearly enough that AI can identify and recommend them to the people who need them.

The old flywheel: create content → capture attention → convert to revenue.

The new flywheel: create real value → structure it so AI can surface it → reach people at the exact moment of need → earn the result.

We are at the very beginning of this transition. The next article is about what building inside this new economy looks like day to day — and why the biggest constraint has shifted from execution to something most people haven't developed yet.

In this series

• 1. We Are Living Through the Biggest Shift Since the Internet

• 2. These are the Last Days of the Attention Economy

• 3. The Conversation Is the Work

• 4. The New Leverage: What AI Makes Possible That Nobody Has Priced In Yet

• 5. Forget Followers. Here Is How Value Actually Surfaces in the Age of AI.

• 6. The Imagination Age

• 7. Skills in the Age of AI: Execution Is Free. Distribution Is Handled. So what’s left?

Talk soon,

Stefan