The Great­est Threat to the World — the “Atten­tion Economy”
It’s not cli­mate, inequal­ity, pol­lu­tion, bio­di­ver­sity, star­va­tion — or any of the other exis­ten­tial threats you can name. None of those is the great­est threat to the world today. (AI: Chat­GPT 5, Claude 4.5, Gem­ini 3)

It’s the “credibility void” cre­ated by 20+ years of the “atten­tion econ­omy” that opti­mized for engage­ment over credibility to max­i­mize returns and increase depen­dency on expo­sure plat­forms. This “credibility void” is the meta-threat to the world because with­out credibility, it isn’t pos­si­ble to dis­cuss, com­mu­ni­cate or begin to for­mu­late pos­si­ble solu­tions to any of the exis­ten­tial threats fac­ing the world today.

It was the Expo­sure Era of the “Big Tech Mega-Monop­oly Mid­dle­men” (BTM3) that siphoned off the power, influ­ence, and credibility of mar­keters world­wide by rent­ing mar­keters “access” to their own cus­tomers. And every mar­keter jumped on the “big data, track­ing cook­ies, inter­rup­tion-based expo­sures” band­wagon designed to sys­tem­at­i­cally reduced credibility and increase depen­dency on expo­sures. Mar­ket­ing was the ori­gin point of the “atten­tion economy.”

The thou­sands of AdTech mid­dle­men in the dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing food chain(above), that fed into the BTM3s, are the fric­tion in the “atten­tion econ­omy.” Mar­keters put their money in one end and results came out the other — ONLY after every­one got their “cut.” The bal­ance of power in mar­ket­ing shifted…(AI answers & com­ments). And it’s now a cri­sis.

After 20+ years, online mar­ket­ing was a low credibility, $500+ bil­lion indus­try of “sur­veil­lance cap­i­tal­ism,” accused of mon­e­tiz­ing lying, cheat­ing, steal­ing, manip­u­la­tion, and fraud on a global scale. The “atten­tion econ­omy” was sur­veil­lance-based ad tech, behav­ioral manip­u­la­tion, and fil­ter bub­bles that were sup­posed to improve online adver­tis­ing — not gen­er­ate bil­lions for orga­nized crime.

While pro­vid­ing the ben­e­fits of con­ve­nient (sup­pos­edly) “free” ser­vices, (search, social, and sell­ing). The “atten­tion econ­omy” extracted sig­nif­i­cant indi­rect “costs” from con­sumers, mar­keters, and soci­ety at large in the form of:

Inva­sive Surveillance
Reduced Per­sonal Privacy
Exploita­tion w/o Permission
Destructive/Extractive/Fraudulent AdTech Sup­ply Chains
Exploitive Opaque Mega-Monopolies
Value of Per­sonal Data Goes to Third Parties
Increased Sup­ply-Side Manipulation
Increased Infor­ma­tion Asymmetry
Nar­row­ing Choices w/Algo­rith­mic “Echo Chambers”
Increased Cyber Inse­cu­rity (data breaches, hack­ing, ID theft, etc.)
Dis­as­trous Unin­tended Consequences
Pending/Increasing World­wide Regulation

All the com­pa­nies in the above graphic are mid­dle­men mem­bers of sup­ply chains that feed into sev­eral BTM3s that take the lion’s share of all global online ad rev­enues. And despite know­ing exactly how destruc­tive the effects of what they were doing would be on con­sumers and soci­ety — noth­ing stood in the way of increas­ing rev­enue and growth.

It sounded log­i­cal enough, and mar­keters bought into the BTM3 that unleashed the “atten­tion econ­omy” on the world. Sup­pos­edly 21st-cen­tury big tech + 21st-cen­tury big data would = more “right per­son, right mes­sage, right time — at the cheap­est cost” — and every­one in the chart was get­ting there cut. How­ever, the process remained opaque, its claimed effi­cacy in ques­tion, and it pro­duced some truly dis­as­trous unin­tended con­se­quences. Many believed the “atten­tion econ­omy” would cause the destruc­tion of con­sumer choice, pri­vacy, democ­racy, and free mar­kets. “We’re build­ing a dystopia just to make peo­ple click on ads,” with lev­els of com­plex­ity and fraud that mir­ror the 2008 sub­prime mort­gage bubble.

Mar­keters and con­sumers were never told specif­i­cally how the “big data algo­rithms” would be designed or used, nor could any­one have fore­seen the mag­ni­tude of the unin­tended con­se­quences of so much data in so few unac­count­able hands. “Sur­veil­lance Cap­i­tal­ism” had become the default, if not sole, inter­net busi­ness model. Even while experts con­tin­ued to sound the alarm, the mar­keters (the old “Kings”), sur­ren­dered ever more con­sumer influ­ence to the mega-monop­o­lies (the new “Kings”) they funded.

These BTM3 are now pro­duc­ing “smart con­nected devices” (that can­not be blocked) that observe and report on con­sumers 24/7/365. Con­sumers will be sur­rounded by these “smart-every­thing devices” (includ­ing VAPAs — voice-acti­vated per­sonal assis­tants — Alexa, Siri, Co-Pilot, Google, etc.), home secu­rity sys­tems, chil­dren’s toys, smart watches, cell phones, and many more all designed to col­lect per­sonal infor­ma­tion, pack­age that per­sonal infor­ma­tion and rent it to any­one who wants it. All with­out con­sumer knowl­edge, per­mis­sion, con­trol, or recourse. For mar­keters, VAPAs are par­tic­u­larly wor­ri­some, poten­tially cut­ting brands out of the loop as the VAPAs select what to buy.

The “atten­tion econ­omy” is inher­ently unsta­ble because it’s an inef­fi­cient extrac­tive model mon­e­tiz­ing lying, cheat­ing, steal­ing, and manip­u­la­tion of con­sumers — at the “point-of-inter­rup­tion” (POI). The suc­cess of this model depends on no one find­ing out the real costs, and there is mount­ing evi­dence that the processes actu­ally never worked nearly as well as claimed.

The “atten­tion econ­omy” was never con­sumer, mar­keter, or free-mar­ket aligned. By design, it’s extrac­tive, manip­u­la­tive, and depen­dent upon con­sumers being unaware. Include the unin­tended con­se­quences and there is lit­tle upside. Many tech experts, schol­ars, con­sumers, gov­ern­ments, and econ­o­mists believe (The Social Dilemma) that sur­veil­lance track­ing presents an exis­ten­tial threat to democ­racy, free mar­kets, and human rights. And gov­ern­ments are begin­ning to agree by seek­ing to reg­u­late “sur­veil­lance cap­i­tal­ism” and the asso­ci­ated prac­tices. An arti­cle in the Wall Street Jour­nal about the state of online mar­ket­ing in the 21st cen­tury and one expert’s view of online mar­ket­ing.

As ever more gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tion and actions against the “BTM3s” increase, mar­keters and con­sumers need some­thing bet­ter — before it’s too late. (“So once again we see a his­toric oppor­tu­nity for an alliance of com­pa­nies to found an alter­na­tive ecosys­tem — one that returns us to the ear­lier promise of the dig­i­tal age as an era of empow­er­ment and the democ­ra­ti­za­tion of knowl­edge.”)

We must find a way to trans­form the “atten­tion econ­omy” into the “credibility econ­omy,” before it’s too late. 

And it’s get­ting worse — The AI “Per­fect Storm”
In the after­math of the atten­tion econ­omy a “Per­fect Storm” is brew­ing of AI, the demise of third-party track­ing cook­ies, and increas­ing gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tion of BTM3s world­wide — none of which is good for mar­keters. Tak­ing each point in order — mar­keters can­not afford a “seat at the AI table” — which will be occu­pied by the same BTM3s that mar­keters and con­sumers financed in the last go-round; the true impact of the “crum­bling” of third-party track­ing cook­ies is unknown at this time, but it cer­tainly won’t ben­e­fit mar­keters; and the increas­ing anti-trust and pri­vacy actions against BTM3 by gov­ern­ments world­wide will only add to the uncer­tainty. The BTM3s will always do what is in their best inter­est — because that’s what monop­o­lies do — but this time, with AI, mar­keters, and con­sumers could both end up being elim­i­nated from the choos­ing and buy­ing process alto­gether because the BTM3 w/AI pow­ered-PAs (per­sonal assis­tants) could do all the choos­ing (and buying).

The ONLY Solu­tion — Man­u­fac­tur­ing Authen­tic Credibility at Scale
Credibility is the most valu­able asset of every com­pany and the great­est threat to the world today.

Credibility is the most valu­able asset of every com­pany because it can enhance or destroy every other asset of the com­pany and con­versely, the lack of credibility is the great­est threat fac­ing the world today.

After the 20+ years of the “atten­tion econ­omy” from the BTM3, mar­keters can now take back their power and influ­ence by “man­u­fac­tur­ing as much authen­tic credibility at scale” as they want and cre­at­ing the “credibility economy.” 

A sim­ple “credibility for­mula” gives con­sumers and mar­keters what they both want. A “credibility for­mula” that auto­mat­i­cally max­i­mizes mar­keters’ credibility and mul­ti­plies mar­ket­ing “voice and tone” to amplify all (past, present, and future) mar­ket­ing expo­sures, unlock­ing increased returns from all pre­vi­ous expo­sures and cre­at­ing a con­sumer “point-of-need” (PON) mar­ket­ing plat­form — where mar­ket­ing is the mes­sage and the media, not the inter­rup­tion. A “mar­ket­ing Wikipedia.”

A “credibility for­mula” that auto­mat­i­cally and con­tin­u­ously max­i­mizes a mar­keter’s credibility is the ONLY solu­tion to putting back the credibility that the “atten­tion econ­omy” destroyed and it lever­ages the same meth­ods and processes that spawned the “atten­tion econ­omy” but with­out the fric­tion of extrac­tion, dimin­ish­ing returns, and fraud. The “credibility econ­omy” would be a true, fric­tion­less, increas­ing returns model.