Silicon Valley companies may be owning the ad and attention economy, but paying for ads and attention, in their eyes, is for losers.

While traditional companies design creative campaigns to evoke emotions and tell stories, carefully avoiding other brands assets - and pay to have those put in front of eyeballs by tech and influencers, the Memetic Attention Economy of the Silicon Valley AI Edgelords works differently:

The cult leaders of /e/accel, crypto and toxic techno optimism cults function more like Dune’s Wormcallers, dropping their memetic plungers onto X, using the identity, work and recognition of others to attract attention:

As Scarlet Johansson found out and Hayo Miyazaki have discovered, their lives work and the attached potential to evoke emotions and attention are being used to summon massive, sandworm like hype waves that sweep with the zero nuance style of memetic warfare through the internet, creating awareness for the products he wishes to peddle.

Once the attention worm is summoned, the work is left to the botlike army of LinkedIn zero-entropy hypewave "Author - Web3 CEO - AGI" influencers who rush in to ride the hype wave to spread the good news of “another drop” from the high priests of AI, declaring the imminent extinction for the worlds creative profession accompanied with their inference offering in form of a Studio Ghibli style AI Slop so the faithful may marvel and forget that OpenAI has no moat.

Along the way, the carefully built brand and artistic expression of thousands of artists is commoditized, devalued and left stained, with no recourse for creatives as hapless governments bow down to growth narratives that will never materialize.

No, the AI lords are not content with taking all content for training without consent, they also revel in taking others achievements to create attention. Their products, which would never be able to output in the style of Studio Ghibli if not the work of studio Ghibli, is grow on the attention that can be created with Miyazaki’s life work so it may be monetized. Not to pay artists but to buy another luxury car and government influence.

Cure cancer? Nice story bro.

The influencer economy is a modern sweat shop that forces people to jettison their dignity and values for rapidly devaluing likes and shares, barely even money to drive the message of the cult leaders, incentivized by algorithms honed human base instincts and monetized by everyone along the way.

The collateral damage is the pollution of human knowledge, the distortion of reality, the ever increasingly cost of purifying truth from AI slop and the ruins of creative professionals deprived of lifelong careers, meaningful work and any illusion that society cares for anything but chasing Silicon Valley fake growth narratives.

You are allowed to be angry.

Credits to Yutaro Kojima for the Dune framing.