The first ever artificial intelligence algorithm was written by hand — in bulky 3×5 cards — and distributed among a group of researchers on a rainy afternoon in January, 1956. Each of the group members received one card with a specific set of rules for their designated physical movements — effectively becoming an active and embodied part of the computer program. Together, by moving slowly and awkwardly across a large room at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pennsylvania, the researchers created an algorithm that could prove real mathematical theorems.
The authors of the algorithm were Allen Newell, Herbert A. Simon, and Cliff Shaw , who would later run the program on an actual computer at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California. In July of that same year, a workshop called the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligencewould inaugurate the field that now defines so much of our relationship with digital technology, and introduce the world to the first principles for building thinking machines.
Herbert Simon would continue to influence computer science, economics, and cognitive psychology for the next few decades. In 1971, he gave a talk titled “Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World” in which he brilliantly noted, that “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” In a time when the mass media and advertising industries were booming, Simon was the prescient and definitive voice that identified what we now call “the attention economy.”
Fast forward through the voracious last decades of the 20th century and the rise of the consumer internet in the 21st , and attention has indeed become the “bottleneck of human thought.”
What Simon and the early AI pioneers couldn’t have predicted was how the democratization of content creation and the digital platform economy would fundamentally alter the economics of attention itself. In an age in which billions of people simultaneously consume and produce content through algorithmic feeds, attention isn’t scarce anymore — it has been devalued by its own proliferation.
As attention is increasingly squeezed and commoditized through an abundance of content, it becomes a superficial, thin layer that cannot hold the weight of business expectations and long-term strategies. Trust and influence have now emerged as the scarcest and most precious resources in the networked economy.
Why the attention economy failed
Attention is a weak metric to begin with. It’s involuntary and often unconscious, it can be easily manipulated through clickbait, outrage, or controversy. It’s fleeting by nature. In the digital marketing and media industries, attention-driven metrics no longer guarantee genuine interest or actual human intent — and even high numbers often mask low conversion rates.
The pursuit of attention produces spikes in engagement that quickly fade without creating lasting value or retention for brands, as the many one-hit wonders on social media demonstrate every day. Short-term metrics can now even hide long-term damage, as companies face skyrocketing customer acquisition costs against shrinking lifetime value.
In 2025, the attention economy is unraveling at the seams. Monetizing eyeballs yields diminishing returns as ad rates decline and acquisition costs soar. Meanwhile, audiences bombarded with infinite content retain less information — and experience unprecedented levels of fatigue and burnout.
This paradox — where attention becomes simultaneously more expensive to capture yet less valuable once obtained — creates a critical inflection point for marketers and business owners. Success now depends not on maximizing clicks but on creating meaningful engagement that cuts through the noise and delivers genuine value. And, doing so in increasingly oversaturated and privacy-conscious global markets.
Infinite content
The digital universe now expands at dizzying speeds and in scales that are hard to grasp: more than 500 hours of video uploaded every minute, 8 billion chips per year, 250,000 podcasts, and counting. The wide availability of creative software tools and mobile connectivity has triggered a fundamental shift on the internet. After the democratization of digital distribution in the 2010s, we are now facing the opening up of digital creation and its many second-order effects.
This unprecedented explosion in authorship, formats, genres, networks, and channels — further accelerated by algorithmic generation — seriously disrupts existing business models and legacy marketing strategies.
Before the rise of the consumer internet, content production required substantial resources and institutional backing. The barriers to entry were formidable: expensive equipment, specialized technical knowledge, social connections and distribution networks, and significant capital investment. This centralized system — owned by traditional gatekeepers like publishing houses, television networks, film studios, and record labels — created a relatively controlled and limited flow of content, even at a global scale. Professional creators produced material for passive consumers.
The internet began dismantling these barriers through several waves of technological change. First, blogging platforms and early social media made online publishing easy and accessible. Next, smartphone proliferation has put high-quality cameras and recording devices in billions of hands and pockets. Finally, user-friendly creation tools eliminated the need for serious technical expertise, while platforms like YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Substack provided instant distribution channels with potential global reach.
The creator economy emerged as platforms developed monetization tools, enabling individuals and small groups everywhere to aspire to new sustainable careers through content creation and community-building. This growing sector now represents a disruptive movement in how media, entertainment, and advertising are produced, consumed, distributed, and monetized. Current research indicates to over 165 million people worldwide consider themselves creators. This reshaping of entertainment and marketing raises critical questions about data privacy and user consent. Creators, from YouTube vloggers to TikTok stars, are not just content producers — they are the de facto data managers, handling and processing sensitive information about their audiences.
The economic impact has been profound. The creator economy is defined by individuals building personal media brands that compete directly with traditional institutions. The relationship between creators and audience has evolved from the simple broadcast model to a more intimate, community-based approach where creators often maintain direct relationships with supporters through either platform or subscription channels.
However, this democratization intensified the supply and demand imbalance. When content creation required substantial resources, natural constraints limited its production. With those constraints removed, we’ve entered an era of content abundance in which anyone can contribute to the information ecosystem. This shift has intensified the attention devaluation that defines our time.
This shift has also changed content itself. Without institutional filtering, we see greater diversity in voices and perspectives, but also more fragmentation, filter bubbles, and challenges to determining information quality. Content has become increasingly personalized, ephemeral, and optimized for platform metrics rather than for meaningful impact.
This widening gap between infinite content and finite attention follows predictable economic principles: as supply dramatically outpaces demand, the value of attention plummets. These structural shifts have fundamentally changed the way companies must approach audience engagement, requiring strategies that acknowledge the new economic and social realities of attention.
Synthetic attention
“Synthetic attention” is one of the undercurrents of the digital economy that is about to become a tidal wave, engulfing our metrics and measurement systems.
On the fraudulent end of this current, click farms and engagement mills have been the early warning signs. These sophisticated networks have already demonstrated how ill-gotten economic value can be produced and derived, at scale, from a patchwork of cheap human labor and automated workflows. This industrialization of attention effectively manufactures the appearance of interest and attention online, posing a significant threat to the integrity of digital advertising worldwide.
These operations, which manipulate engagement metrics through artificial interactions with online content, have evolved to exploit technological and regulatory gaps across different jurisdictions. The customization capabilities of modern click farms further demonstrate their sophistication. Clients can specify detailed requirements for engagement, including preferred platforms, interaction types (clicks, likes, shares), target demographics, and even desired geographic origin of the engagement. This level of service means click farms can tailor their fraudulent activities to precisely match the specific needs of those seeking to manipulate digital metrics for various purposes. The advertising industry faces mounting challenges as these networks drain billions in ad spend annually, distort performance metrics, and erode trust in digital platforms.
Synthetic engagement that becomes indistinguishable from authentic, human interest is the second major reason why the attention economy is a broken framework.
The emergence of AI summaries and generated executive briefings creates yet another layer of complexity. This is the other end of the machine attention wave: in an already highly-saturated environment, AI assistants and agents are being proposed to help us break down and filter the enormous amounts of information that come our way.
Analyzing and reflecting on large bodies of media is one of the promising new capabilities of our robot companions. From that perspective, it becomes clear how the contemporary abundance of media could be managed and rendered useful to us time-constrained human beings: if you subscribe to hundreds of great newsletters, or podcasts, or people, having an AI assistant go through all of the daily output and identify key topics for you could in fact constitute a major productivity gain.
But a world where most digital information is either produced or consumed by robots before it reaches our human senses is yet another reason that attention becomes useless for measuring any sort of sustainable relationship. When algorithms summarize articles nobody reads, when engagement is manufactured rather than earned, we transform the internet into something fundamentally different.
The attention economy failed by trying to commodify what cannot be commodified. Genuine relationships defy mass production — they are inherently intimate, limited, and unscalable. Their very value lies in their resistance to mindless industrialization.
Trust in the Age of Digital Abundance
Businesses — especially small ones — have traditionally built trust through direct, personal connections with customers, stakeholders, and suppliers. These connections reinforced a business’s reputation within its local community, as did referrals and testimonials. In the digital space, these local ties need to be translated globally and in technologically-mediated ways that can pose significant challenges for organizations of any size. Word of mouth travels differently on the internet.
This evolution toward a more complex and rigorous ecosystem will fundamentally transform how businesses build trust in the next three to five years, with distinct regional patterns emerging across Europe, the US, and the Asia-Pacific (APAC).
Consumers increasingly distrust opaque institutions. They prefer brands that are transparent about their business and data collection practices. This generational shift is as much about trust as a core value as it is about the deep economic moat it can create for businesses everywhere. Brands that demonstrate a clear ethical standing — and provide the most effective tools to enact it — can now charge a premium for their services and differentiate themselves from mass-market competition. Moving from institutional authority to procedural transparency aligns with broader trends in digital governance, AI adoption, and consumer expectations.
From authority to transparency
Brands and businesses will shift from claiming authority (i.e., “trust us because we’re experts”) to demonstrating process (“trust us because here’s exactly how we operate”).
This is a fundamental reordering of credibility in the digital economy because it means that trust will no longer be assumed — it must be actively demonstrated and verified.
New approaches like Privacy-Led Marketing point the way toward how consent management can become a strong competitive advantage by highlighting the critical frontier where privacy, truth, and business interests converge. Consent user experience is rapidly evolving from a regulatory burden to a powerful differentiator — particularly for businesses that can adapt quickly. What we might call “advanced consent flows” will replace all-or-nothing permissions with transparent and contextual consent journeys.
In this sense, two practices become key to achieving a sustainable competitive edge: clearly articulating what value customers receive for sharing specific data and allowing relationships to evolve through adjustable permissions over time. The return on this investment is clear: reduced acquisition friction, higher-quality data, and increased trust capital. Thoughtful consent becomes a powerful trust signal that reduces other marketing costs.
Systems that only remember what customers explicitly permit and how they want their information handled will prevail. They reduce “compliance fatigue” and align with the growing consumer expectation of personalized digital assistance. Such systems can also add value by providing regular communications about exactly how data has been used for each client, visually documenting every piece of information collected and its purpose. These build deeper trust than competitors who simply offer generic privacy policies.
As businesses adapt and rise to the occasion, traditional approaches will need to be strengthened and amplified by larger reputation ecosystems. From celebrating independent audits and certification of data practices to emphasizing local storage and processing of customer data, transparency has the power to reshape entire strategic plans and marketing operations.
From brand identity to trust networks
In the age of digital abundance, consent is recognized not only as a privacy mechanism but as a fundamental aspect of customer relationships. Businesses that treat consent as a core experience design feature will be able to turn it into an asset that customers actively manage as part of their relationship with trusted brands. This will ultimately create the foundation for more sophisticated personalization and verification systems.
The erosion of trust in traditional institutions is happening at the same time as — and is perhaps correlated with — the rise of community-based validation. In other words, peers collectively assess the credibility of products and services. These emerging social structures are native to the internet and its multi-platform, algorithm-driven feeds. They validate information based on process rather than source, and evaluate not just accuracy but methodology, transparency, and collaborative practices.
In this sprawling landscape, trust derives less from the businesses themselves and more from how their services are embedded in verifiable networks and communities.
These multi-dimensional trust networks can take many shapes. From today’s social media comment sections and user forums, where company reputations can rise and fall, to tomorrow’s decentralized applications and immersive environments. But regardless of specific technical implementations, trust is increasingly peer-driven, rather than defined from top to bottom.
After attention: an integrated trust strategy
While we won’t see the full transformation of the trust ecosystem overnight, the next few years will radically change how customers establish and maintain relationships with brands and services. Widespread and abundant AI content generation, evolving privacy regulations around the world, and new consumer expectations around transparency will dictate the conditions under which every business will need to operate.
From data compliance to privacy empowerment, from advocacy to leadership, and from opaque processes to collective data governance, an integrated trust strategy requires brands to embed privacy into their entire technical and ethical architecture. Data security, user control, and transparency must be community-validated — not just corporate promises.
What makes Privacy-Led Marketing approaches so powerful is how they integrate traditional elements with future-proof methodologies. Community vouching is indeed strongest when combined with institutional legitimacy — blending peer-based verification with established credibility mechanisms. Privacy literacy initiatives achieve better results when people are empowered to influence decisions about shared information. Openness about data practices creates more meaningful connections when first-party data is real-time and directly relevant, leading to higher conversion rates.
Whether your business operates in an environment with stronger privacy regulations and cultural preferences for institutional guarantees, or a more innovation-driven, fragmented landscape with greater emphasis on individual choice, now is the time to consider the power of trust as a growth engine.