The Idiot’s Dividend: Pipes, Feeds, and Why Only Platforms Can Hold Attention

The internet didn’t become stupid by accident. Feeds reward the cheapest thing to understand, AI removes the friction, and the only people who actually hold attention are the ones who own the pipes.

Oct 14, 2025

👋🏼 from MIPCOM, where I gave a talk this morning and roasted a major publication while they were sitting in the front row (not unintentionally). If you’re here too, come say hi before I get blacklisted from the press lounge.

The Pipes, the Beige, and the Brief Moment You Felt Like a Genius

Welcome to the Mall of Everything

Platforms aren’t “apps”. Facebook is not an app. ChatGPT is not an app. TikTok is not an app. They’re all landlords (think: surfaces) with algorithms for escalators. They decide which floor you’re on, when your lights turn off, and whether your rent doubles because a hamster did numbers on Tuesday. You can juggle, cry, or deep-fry a trend in your shop window. They don’t care. The landlord tweaks the stairs and poof your queue vanishes. This is what’s sweetly (lol) termed technofeudalism: they own the pipes, you rent the pressure.

The feeds that run the modern world reward lowest-common-denominator (LCD) performance because machines prefer things they can recognise fast: faces, simple beats, big feelings, neat endings. AI then drops the cost of making those beats to near zero, floods the pipes with “fine, I suppose,” and we settle into slop equilibrium. The scarce thing is no longer “can you make content?” but “can you prove it’s real, risky, or rare?” Think: liveness, provenance, and skin-in-the-game. Basically, the unfakeables.

If you’ve ever felt briefly immortal because a hack worked (shock face at :03, twist at :09, loop at :12), congratulations: you earned the Idiot’s Dividend, a temporary surplus for optimising memetic compressibility before copycats arrive and the platform quietly patches your fun.

We quietly fired the humans

You remember them, those cute editors, curators, schedulers, and critics? Yah, they’re mostly gone and we gave the keys to ranking systems that never sleep. Those systems weren’t hired to judge quality but to keep the feed warm at 3am in Jakarta and 11am in Jersey. Result: anything fast to recognise and easy to share gets a free ride. The cheapest, safest path to scale became “be a bit of an idiot on camera”: highly legible, memetically compressible, copy-friendly.

But read the protectionist headlines and you’ll get the wrong idea. So let’s be clear: craft didn’t die, it lost distribution to infinite, performative stupidity the machine can spot instantly. If you’ve ever watched a brilliant thing lose to a man pointing at text bubbles, you’ve met the new head of programming.

Attention as transaction

Fame now flows through clout swaps, not taste. You borrow someone else’s audience to validate yours. They borrow your audience back. The loop looks like momentum and often is, until you realise what just happened. It works, in the same way that energy drinks “work”.

False market thinking

The biggest mistake is treating attention like a stockpile you can own. You don’t. You lease it from the feed owner, and your “inventory” perishes the moment a ranking toggle flips. “Boost to reach your followers” isn’t a friendly suggestion but the rent bill for access to the flat you furnished.

AI as endgame

When creation costs collapse to almost nothing, output floods. Average quality converges to “fine”and training data slowly becomes yesterday’s model-made mush. Cultural signal decays into second-hand vibes. Scarcity moves from making to proving: you win not by adding more stuff to the pipe, but by proving the stuff is alive, traceable, and has real risk attached. Liveness, provenance, skin-in-the-game (the unfakeables) are the new luxury goods.

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Why the cheap trick spikes, why it collapses, how to keep something

You post the 12-second hack. The machine loves how clean it is: one face, one emotion, one tidy payoff. It slings you onto escalators you didn’t know existed. Comments pile up, CPMs look gorgeous, three people ask for your “framework” and you suddenly believe in destiny. You didn’t outsmart the market but accidentally rented an arbitrage window on a signal the system finds delicious.

Then physics arrives

Replicability invites a copycat flood, marginal utility falls with each clone, viewers develop an allergy to your exact eyebrow raise, and somewhere in a conference room a slider moves to protect ad quality. The traffic dies on a Tuesday. Worse, the audience you acquired were skim-scrollers (fast to click, slow to care) so conversions, returns and word-of-mouth don’t materialise. Keep chasing the hack and you start training your future self to be dumber on purpose. That’s the rot.

The ledger is simple

Spikes recruit low-intent cohorts with low Return-to-Post and weak D7/D30. They skew to segments that are cheapest to win in the auction. And every hour you spend feeding the trick is an hour you didn’t spend building something you can carry off-platform. The dividend always dissolves because the edge was never yours, it belonged to the exploit. Treat it accordingly.

Here’s the good news

The pipes don’t care what they carry. If you feed them slop, they’ll pour slop. If you feed them something alive, traceable, and mildly unhinged in a competent way, they’ll carry that too. Platforms will always move the escalator. Our job is to build calves and carry our own staircase.

Take a creative stance

Median takes die in median feeds. Pick a position strong enough that someone smart could disagree with it and someone feeling something small can feel seen and part of something bigger. Write the sentence you’d defend in front of a hostile room and a bored algorithm. If you can’t feel a tiny risk of embarrassment, it isn’t a stance, it’s packaging.

Make the unfakeable

Add something the machine can’t conjure on demand:

Liveness: risk you can’t retake (premieres, open studios, live edits, table reads).
Provenance: the making made visible (build logs, version history, named mistakes).
Skin-in-the-game: a cost or a guarantee (refunds, wagers, performance pricing).
Slop is infinite, proof is scarce. Scarcity is strategy.

Own a pipe (even a small, ugly one)

A thousand people on email beat a hundred thousand maybes in a for-you feed. Build the list, the SMS, the membership, the calendar ritual. You don’t need to boil the ocean, but a kettle that whistles every week is a good thing.

Small and weird can beat big and beige

Beige scales fast but weird endures. Your edge is the thing you’d do in a power cut with no camera and three curious people. Or said another way: why you went to film school. Put that on tape and prove it happened.

Strange Loop