We live in a world which bears little resemblance to that of our parents. The rules dictating our lives shifted subtly as the 20th century transitioned into the 21st. Now, we find ourselves in a new social paradigm where two parallel economies exist.
The more recognisable of the two economies is traditional capitalism; which is still dictated by rules of scarcity, labour, supply, and consumption. Then, there is another economy taking over the digital space. Online, products never degrade and the supply of content vastly outpaces the demand.
The digital economy is now influencing its counterpart and distorting how the regular economy would ordinarily work. In the traditional capitalist economy, the values of goods and currencies are drawn from human labour. Under capitalism, control of production comes from power over human labour.
In the digital economy, human labour is worth next to nothing. The products could remain on the internet forever and, for the first time in human history, production vastly outpaces any possible rate of consumption. To add to this devaluation, we have AI systems able to generate content faster than any human.
The integration of large language models, like ChatGPT, across the internet exemplifies the process of an attention economy. AI is exorbitantly expensive and often met with opposition when added to pre-existing platforms. Despite this, we continue to see it pop up everywhere because the goal of AI integration is not consumer satisfaction or profit.
Instead, AI’s role in this new economy is reducing the mental burden of individuals so they can waste their attention on something else. Human labour does not dictate value or wield substantial power in the digital economy. Instead, an individual’s attention and ability to consume have become the point on which power hinges.
To be powerful in the modern world is to command an audience and hold their finite attention. The chief concern in our lives is no longer where and how we get our material things; instead, we are concerned about which material things we should spend our time with. Just as advancements in farming technology allowed for the transition from feudal sustenancefarming to capitalist mass production.
Advancements in mass production and communication technology have freed portions of the population from industrial production. Consequently, we see the rise of a new class who acquire their fortunes through exploiting the new value of attention. However, this new economy is not a departure from capitalism but an evolution of it.
Having domi-