The Collapse of the Attention Economy

I have been watching the internet for as long as I can remember. Not as a fan. Not in search of authority. But as a cultural event.

I grew up just early enough to remember a world before it fully arrived. Born in 1995, I belong to a borderline generation — one that still ran around aimlessly outside, without devices, without constant mediation, at least until around the age of ten. When the internet entered my life, it felt strange, fascinating, almost unreal. People were uploading photos into some abstract space. Others were recording themselves talking, playing, failing, laughing — as if reality had suddenly grown a second layer.

What fascinated me most were social platforms and, especially, YouTube. In its early days, it felt like a chaotic playground. Acne-covered teenagers recording let’s plays with cheap microphones. Clips of animals, accidents, absurd humor. It was clumsy, unserious, oddly human. No one was building a brand. No one was optimizing a funnel. It was simply people experimenting with being visible.

Then something shifted.

Capital arrived. The space professionalized. “YouTuber” and “influencer” slowly crystallized into social roles — lucrative ones, though rarely respected. I watched the entire transformation unfold in real time: from kids with cheap and barely working webcams to polished rooms, from bedrooms to houses, from houses to full-scale creator compounds with PR teams, logistics, editors, studios, and warehouses. What began with a cheap microphone turned into production pipelines worth millions.

Watching this evolution was genuinely fascinating. And in some ways, it still is. But with time, a different picture began to emerge. What we called “the internet economy,” or later the creator economy, was not really about producing anything. It was a desperate attempt by a post-industrial system — one increasingly detached from material production — to extract something at scale. And attention was one of the last remaining resources left to mine.

This extraction phase was both powerful and extremely short-lived. However, the attention economy did two crucial things.

First, it rewarded performative personalities in a system that had little else left to offer. Jumping into ball pits. Overreacting. Silly trends. Viral dances. Manufactured drama. None of this was an economy in the classical sense. Nothing necessary or durable was produced. What circulated was attention — organized around individual egos — later converted into advertising, merchandise, and e-commerce for large brands.

Second, it offered distraction. People gave away their most finite resource — time, attention, fragments of their lives — to escape a world that was becoming increasingly unlivable. Rising costs, collapsing social contracts, diminishing prospects. In that sense, the attention economy functioned as anesthesia. Absurd, manipulative, often predatory — but effective.

Winning this economy meant mastering the extraction of attention: manipulating emotion, triggering outrage, optimizing retention. Being good at stealing time. This is not something to admire. But the moral judgment is secondary. The system rewarded these behaviors because it needed them.

The truly unnatural part is the speed.

The entire cycle — from amateur chaos to creator empires with luxury cars in the driveway — unfolded in barely fifteen years. It peaked around the pandemic, a historical anomaly when time collapsed, screens replaced reality, and attention spiked under artificial conditions. From the perspective of business, branding, or cultural formation, this kind of explosive rise is not normal. It is a glitch.

And glitches end.

What we are witnessing now is not a slowdown. It is not a temporary dip. The cycle is over. The music has stopped playing — just echoes into the void.

Attention is not just saturated — it is oversaturated. Platforms are no longer in expansion mode. Algorithms are no longer designed to promote discovery. They are defensive systems, overwhelmed by content volumes they can no longer meaningfully distribute.

This is visible everywhere. Social platforms no longer show you what your friends post. Not out of malice, but because they cannot. There is simply too much content. Instead, algorithms run cold-start experiments: your post is shown to a tiny sample, reactions are measured, and only then is exposure expanded — or quietly killed.

For small creators, this increasingly means silence. Not rejection. Not critique. Just silence — the kind that offers no explanation, no opposition, and no indication of where the boundary even is.

Larger creators still perform confidence, still monetize residual momentum, still benefit from structural advantages. But even there, the returns are shrinking. What emerges is a collective pattern of denial — a festival of doubling down. More content. Bigger productions. More editors. More money spent to defend an identity built during an unrepeatable phase.

Accepting the end of the cycle would require acknowledging something deeply destabilizing: that much of this success was not exceptional talent or heroic effort, but timing. Alignment with a technological phase before capital fully enclosed the space. That realization is psychologically unbearable for many.

But the collapse of this economy is not driven by algorithms alone.

There is a second constraint, far less discussed, and far more final. This entire system was not sustained only by platforms or advertisers. It was sustained by the audience itself — not just through attention, but through money.

Subscriptions, donations, merchandise, paid memberships, tickets, brand loyalty. Voluntary spending that gave creators the illusion of independence and the material freedom to create.

That support was possible because a large part of the audience still had disposable income, psychological slack, and the sense that participation in this economy did not threaten their own stability.

Under a sustained squeeze on the middle class — rising costs, unstable work, debt, and permanent uncertainty — discretionary spending collapses first. People do not unsubscribe because they stopped caring. They unsubscribe because they can no longer afford to care.

An attention economy without surplus income is not an economy. It is a performance without a patron.

Also, at this point, the so-called “dead internet theory” is no longer purely speculative. Even in 2024 — and the trend has only accelerated since — industry data indicates that automated bots account for a substantial share of online activity. But that is only the visible layer. The deeper reality is that algorithmic activity — testing, ranking, generating, and simulating — now vastly exceeds direct human participation.

Creators who recognize this inevitable ending — or have smart advisors — choose exit over denial. For example, the biggest TikTok creator, Khaby Lame, recently sold rights to his image and concept to a company intending to scale the format globally across languages using AI — a record, nine-figure deal that reads less like ambition and more like acceptance that the cycle has already closed.

This has already happened, but most creators respond by trying harder, louder, faster — without understanding that the music has stopped. And the tragedy is not just economic. It is existential — an entire generation grew up inside this system. And here lies the real danger.

We now have a massive group of people — roughly between 18 and 35 — whose identities were formed inside the attention economy. People conditioned to measure existence through numbers. Likes. Views. Engagement. Visibility. A generation that never learned silence — or learned it only as failure.

When this cycle collapses, they will not face “loss.” They will face normality — experienced as a catastrophe.

For many, this will coincide with other converging pressures:

• AI replacing cognitive labor, even entry-level intellectual work.
• The collapse of cheap globalization.
• Rising energy costs and inflation.
• Military spending replacing welfare.
• Permanent geopolitical tension that increasingly resembles a fragmented world war rather than isolated conflicts.
• The middle class is being squeezed from all sides.
• The old promises no longer hold.
• And the last remaining illusion — that attention could substitute for meaning, income, or identity — is dissolving.

This is where radicalization begins.

Because now, even without AI, attention would remain fully enclosed by capital. With AI in the equation, displacement accelerates. And what happens after the attention economy fully collapses? What comes next? What does the system have left to offer?

In a system that no longer produces new, broadly accessible markets, the drift toward Universal Basic Income begins to look less like a political choice and more like a structural necessity — a way of keeping circulation alive once growth stalls.

After all, money is already largely detached from tangible value, which makes the distinction between circulating attention, digital products, or direct transfers mostly symbolic. From the standpoint of circulation alone, it makes little difference whether people trade in creator economies or receive income directly to meet their needs.

However, even if UBI — or any other mechanism designed to keep the system moving — may stabilize bodies, it will not stabilize identities.

Removing the struggle without replacing the structure produces a vacuum. And a vacuum does not create peace. It creates extremism, because identity collapse is never gentle. When people suddenly lose the symbols that organize their lives, they do not become free. They become dangerous — to themselves and to others.

We saw a glimpse of this during the pandemic. When routines and roles disappeared overnight, the result was not enlightenment but psychological destabilization: anxiety, aggression, derealization. Now imagine this at scale, permanently, without a clear endpoint.

What makes this moment especially haunting is its innocence. The internet began with jokes, animals, fails, and curiosity. It felt playful. Harmless.

Yet in hindsight, it was a brief extraction cycle inside a system that had already stopped producing real value decades earlier — at least since 2008. The attention economy did not fix that system, but acted as a distraction from it. And now that distraction is failing.

There is no clean ending here. No optimistic conclusion. Only a recognition: the collapse of the internet as we knew it is not merely the end of a technological phase. It is the removal of a massive psychological buffer.

And we are not prepared for what comes after silence.