The Machine Eating Your Face Has a Manual (The Attention Economy: Part II)
From Liver King to Trump’s memecoin to MrBeast’s chocolate empire: all proof the same machine is running your life.
Oh 👋🏼. This is Part II of the Attention Economy series.
Part I mapped how education, housing, and labour collapsed into structural failure, and why attention emerged as the last viable asset. Check it out.
Also, I’ve got a few public appearances on the horizon. Come say hi if you’re around: Content Canada in Toronto (3 Sept); CineLATAM in Miami (15–18 Sept); and the LA Tourism Market Forum (9 Sept).
Your Daily Mugging
Let’s start with ten scandals that pretend to be separate but all run on the same system.
December 2022: Brian “Liver King” Johnson admitted to steroid use, with leaked emails showing a habit worth about $11,000 a month in HGH and other PEDs, basically the GDP of a small Balkan pharmacy, while boasting businesses doing over $100 million a year (Washington Post, EW). May 2025: Netflix drops Untold: The Liver King. He’s still selling supplements. The confession didn’t collapse the empire because in the machine, exposure isn’t an ending, it’s simply another narrative arc. The steroids became the story, the story drove speculation, the speculation kept capital flowing.
May 2023: Bryan Johnson, the “Don’t Die” guy who spends $2 million a year on longevity, underwent a “multi-generational plasma exchange” with his 17-year-old son. The FDA had already warned in 2019 that “young plasma” infusions are unapproved pseudoscience. Johnson stopped in July, admitting it showed “no benefits.” His Blueprint brand kept growing anyway.
November 2023: Bloomberg reported Prime, the hydration brand from Logan Paul and KSI, was on track to surpass $1.2 billion in annual sales. This followed Coffeezilla’s Dec 2022 three-part exposé on Paul’s CryptoZoo NFT project, which raised millions and never delivered a functioning game — corroborated by TIME. The series garnered millions of views (e.g., Part 1). Related lawsuits remain ongoing, including the CryptoZoo class action (Holland v. CryptoZoo docket) and Paul’s defamation suit against Coffeezilla (Paul v. Findeisen docket).
December 2024: Hailey Welch — the “Hawk Tuah” girl — watched a memecoin with her name hit about $490 million market cap and then crash over 90% within minutes. Six months from drunk street interview to financial instrument to collapse. Investors sued for losses exceeding $151,000. The machine can turn a blowjob noise into a half-billion-dollar asset class before you’ve even finished your pint.
January 17, 2025: Trump launched $TRUMP three days before inauguration. By January 20 it topped $10 billion market value. By January 30: $86–$100 million in trading fees. By February 3: down about two-thirds. Chainalysis showed whales clearing >$10 million each, while ~764,000 wallets finished in the red. The presidency became a pre-sale event with tokenomics.
March 27, 2025: UK regulator Ofcom fined OnlyFans £1.05 million for age-verification failures. May 22: Reuters reports sale talks at ~$8 billion. FY2023: $6.6 billion in gross payments; ≈$1.3 billion revenue. The fines are what Silicon Valley calls a “marketing write-off.”
May 2025: Mexican authorities sought compensation after MrBeast filmed at Maya archaeological sites for a video pushing Feastables; INAH filed an administrative lawsuit against the production company (El País; background explainer: Business Insider). The outrage is the conversion funnel.
June 25, 2025: The UK’s Advertising Standards Authority ruled against influencers telling ADHD followers to swap prescribed meds for saffron supplements, officially chastising neurochemistry as brand collaboration.
August 16, 2025: Deepfake ads using the late Dr Michael Mosley to sell supplements surfaced across UK platforms. The machine resurrects the dead as holographic vitamin salesmen, a lovely example of capitalism’s necromancy.
Today: Someone is tokenising something that shouldn’t be tokenised. Someone is deepfaking someone who can’t consent. Someone is turning a medical crisis into a monetisation strategy. The infrastructure is ready. The platforms profit from it. Your attention funds it.
Take a moment to sit with that list. Blood transfusions from teenagers, Presidential memecoins, dead doctors hawking ashwagandha, a drunk girl’s sex joke becoming a half-billion-dollar rug pull, steroid-fuelled supplement empires, and archaeological destruction for candy bar sales.
You think these are different stories? Different scandals? Different industries? They’re the same story, the same machine. Every single one operates on identical physics:
Attention → Narrative → Speculation → Capital
Today we’re talking about:
The Architecture — The conveyor belt: Attention → Narrative → Speculation → Capital. Four layers, three transforms, one open-air casino. Your boredom in, someone else’s yacht out.
The Physics — Ten rules that actually govern it: coherence beats correctness, conflict spreads faster than truth, the platform always gets its tithe. Laws you can test, not vibes you can manifest.
The Gauges — Dials you can actually run: Attention Liquidity, Narrative Coherence, Speculation Multiplier, Capital Realisation Efficiency. Plus the cancers metastasising underneath: Coherence Debt and Trust Drag.
The Operators — Case files from OpenAI, MrBeast, Trump, Musk. Different costumes, same choreography. Watch how each strip-mines attention, refines belief, spins futures, and harvests capital.
The Fallout — Negative-attention spirals, platform rent extraction, ecological bills for trillion-joule scrolls, and necromantic deepfakes of dead doctors hawking supplements. The machine doesn’t just extract; it corrodes.
[Full Subscribers Only] — Operator’s Guide: a next steps for film, TV, music, gaming, and culture as a whole. Spot which layer of the machine you’re in (Attention, Narrative, Speculation, Capital), run the diagnostic (AL, NCI, SM, CRE), and get one move to make by next Friday to stop being the ore and start being the operator.
The ANSC Stack: How Your Brain Becomes Someone Else's Bitcoin
All those scandals weren’t random detours. Each one is a proof of concept in how attention gets strip-mined, refined, priced, and slaughtered. And you already know how it works, because you’ve been feeding it for years: every notification, every scroll, every “just five more minutes” that became three hours watching a man inject beef tallow into his tear ducts for “ancestral vision.” Let’s go through the four main components. We’ll move layer by layer, and at each step we’ll show you what to measure and what to do next.
Attention (A): The Strip-Mining Operation
Forget "eyeballs." Forget "engagement." Forget whatever lies your CMO tells investors. Attention is your consciousness getting processed into someone else's yacht payment.
The data is actually burying the lede: Under-25s aren’t just “watching 130 videos a day”; they’re donating time. In the UK, 18–24 TikTok visitors spend 64 minutes a day, with women 18–24 at 1h17 and men at 48 minutes; about 74% of 18–24s visited in May 2024. Zoom out and that cohort is online 6 hours 1 minute per day. Scrolling turns attention into product at industrial scale. Raw minutes aren’t value; until you compress them into a story, attention is just heat loss.
The Metric
Attention Liquidity (AL) = how much usable audience attention you can actually extract relative to how much distribution you’ve got.
If AL is high → people are giving you more time than your pipes should even allow (you’re running them hot, maybe too hot).
If AL is low → you’ve got reach but nobody’s sticking (lots of impressions, no absorption).
Think of it as the “flow rate” of human focus through your channel; how efficiently raw distribution (reach) turns into actual minutes surrendered.
The Equation = Weekly engaged minutes ÷ Weekly distribution capacity
AL > 1.5 → you’re cooking people’s brains too hot. They’ll ghost you by next month.
AL < 0.2 → you’re already dead, the algorithm just hasn’t buried the body yet.
AL = 1.0–1.3 → The MrBeast Zone™: maximum extraction without triggering revolt.
MrBeast pulls in 10–15 billion minutes of attention annually, a conservative estimate derived from his hundreds of millions of views multiplied by average watch time. Even at U.S. minimum wage, that’s $1–2 billion worth of human time. He channels that into ~$250 million in Feastables sales, sometimes eclipsing his media revenue. His YouTube channel now exists chiefly as the consciousness-harvesting rig for his candy business (and future businesses).
That’s a ~29% consciousness-to-chocolate conversion rate. Goldman Sachs would murder for those margins—if they had a sense of irony.
Calculate Your Personal Exploitation
Check your screen time for today.
Multiply by 365. (That’s your annual donation to Silicon Valley.)
Multiply by your hourly wage. (That’s what you paid them to mine you.)
Divide by what you actually got back. (Your humiliation ratio.)
Next time you unwrap a Feastables bar, remember: you’ve bought proof that your time was successfully laundered into sugar.
Attention without narrative is a spill: noisy, costly, uncontained. So we build pipes.
Narrative (N): The Belief Factory
Raw attention is worthless. It’s crude oil. Narrative is the refinery that makes it combustible. Without narrative, attention is just noise—bright, loud, instantly forgotten. With narrative, it becomes belief. And belief is portable. Belief is transmissible. Belief can be sold.
Narrative is the compression layer: it takes “thing that happened” and mutates it into “thing that means something.” The test is brutally simple: can drunk people at a bar repeat it back without screwing it up? If yes, you’ve got narrative. If no, you’ve just wasted everyone’s neurons. Narrative is the compressor: it turns “something happened” into “something that travels.”
The Metric
Narrative Coherence Index (NCI) = Consistency + Conflict + Closure + Repeatability (each weighted 25%).
Think of NCI as your story’s tensile strength. If one leg collapses, the whole structure folds.
Consistency: Does the story eat itself?
Conflict: Can a toddler point at what’s wrong?
Closure: Is the ending obvious?
Repeatability: Can an idiot remember it after three pints?
The higher the score, the faster it travels.
A Live Demo
A few years back, a story ricocheted through Facebook groups and WhatsApp chains: “They’re eating the dogs.” No source, no evidence, just a four-word panic grenade about immigrants supposedly turning household pets into dinner. It was a lie. But it spread like wildfire because it was engineered — not for truth, but for transmission.
Let’s score it:
Consistency: Immigrants = bad (never wavers).
Conflict: Pets in danger (primal, toddler-simple).
Closure: Stop them (built-in call to action).
Repeatability: Four words. Idiot-proof.
Result: NCI ≈ 73. Zero facts. Perfect narrative. It travelled faster than COVID because it was built for speed, not accuracy.
Now compare that to your company’s 47-word mission statement about “leveraging synergies to unlock innovation.” It has no conflict, no closure, no repeatability. NCI = 0. Dead before it leaves your mouth.
Operator Heuristic
NCI > 70 → spreads like gossip.
NCI < 40 → dead in the group chat.
NCI = 50–60 → you’ve got a meme template, but not a movement.
Case Receipts
QAnon: No data, all vibes, but scored high NCI by offering conflict (the cabal), closure (The Storm), and repeatability (WWG1WGA). It became a distributed storytelling franchise.
Charli XCX’s Brat: A single aesthetic compressed into repeatable green + Arial. The fan-built Brat Generator turned an album drop into a memetic operating system. That’s narrative engineered for adoption.
Trump’s “Stop the Steal”: False, but coherent: Consistency (election rigged), Conflict (your vote stolen), Closure (take it back), Repeatability (three words). It raised hundreds of millions in small-dollar donations.
Attention without narrative is a one-night stand. Everybody had fun, nobody remembers your name.
Belief that never gets priced is theatre; the next layer asks what odds you’d give it.
Speculation (S): The Casino Floor
This is where belief stops being free and starts carrying odds. Narrative is portable, but speculation is bankable. It’s where “thing that means something” mutates into “thing you can price.”
Speculation is every pre-order, every poll surge, every resale chart, every memecoin pump. It’s your attention crystallised into a futures contract. The machine doesn’t ask if the story is true. It asks: “Would you bet your rent on it?” Treat the Speculation Multiplier as a directional gauge, not gospel; you’re watching sentiment harden into stakes.
The Metric
Speculation Multiplier (SM) = % change in priced expectation ÷ % change in narrative attention
If SM is >3 → you’re in bubble country (the story is running the table faster than reality can catch up).
If SM is <0.5 → your hype is decaying; reality is about to pants you in public.
If SM hovers around 1 → belief is being priced rationally (rare, boring, unclickable).
Case Receipts
Trump’s Indictments → SM ≈ 3.4. Every charge came with a 2–3pt bump in polling and $47M in small-dollar donations. The prosecution narrative was the speculation, and the speculation became the campaign.
OpenAI’s GPT launches → SM ≈ 4.7. Valued at ~$157B off ~$3B revenue. Investors weren’t buying product—they were buying inevitability futures.
“Hawk Tuah” memecoin → SM = ∞. A sex joke went from viral clip to $490M market cap in under six months. No fundamentals, all narrative priced as destiny.
Test Your Own Speculation Multiplier
Forget spreadsheets, you already live this every week.
Concerts: Did you get a pre-sale code for $200, then watch resale hit $1,200 before the tickets even shipped? That’s speculation. The concert is months away. The narrative (“once-in-a-lifetime tour!”) got priced as destiny.
Politics: Remember when your candidate trended for a scandal? Everyone screamed, memes flew, cable news went 24/7… but donations didn’t move. That’s low SM: viral noise, no bets.
Hobbies: You buy a game on pre-order because the trailer slapped. Three months later you’re playing a glorified beta, but the publisher already banked billions in pre-sales. That’s you donating to the casino floor.
The equation is still simple but you don’t need a calculator. Just ask:
Did hype make people pay early, pay more, or pay twice? → High SM.
Did hype vanish at checkout? → Low SM.
Did hype and payment move together? → Balanced SM (rare, boring, borderline mythical).
Rule of Thumb
SM > 3 → You’re not a fan, you’re a futures trader in sequins.
SM < 0.5 → All bark, no bets. Viral, then vanished.
SM ≈ 1 → The unicorn of modern culture: sanity.
Hype is a promissory note; capital is whether the cheque clears.
Capital (C): The Slaughterhouse
Three layers of processing, one ugly output: resources change hands.
This is where attention becomes money, belief becomes votes, speculation becomes someone’s third home. Capital is consciousness that survived all three conversions and hardened into something you can actually deposit.
The trick? By the time you see it, the slaughter’s already happened. You’re looking at the steaks, not the cow. Capital is the harvest record; how much of the herd made it to pallets.
The Metric
Capital Realisation Efficiency (CRE) = Resources committed ÷ Minutes consumed
Think of it as your conversion rate from human time → hard cash.
High CRE = You’re running a cultural abattoir. Everything gets rendered into profit.
Low CRE = You threw a rave, everyone had fun, nobody paid.
Case Receipts
“Hawk Tuah” token: $490M extracted from six months of virality = ~$2.7M/day from a blowjob joke. High CRE, zero dignity.
$TRUMP coin: ~$100M in fees in two weeks = $7M/day during inauguration. The presidency as an ATM machine.
OnlyFans: $6.6B revenue in 2023, fined £1M by UK regulators. CRE = infinite. Fines are just a marketing expense.
Liver King: Built a $100M supplement empire on steroids and lies. The confession didn’t end the business; it boosted sales. That’s CRE so efficient even fraud is a growth hack.
Test Your Own Capital Conversion
Want to see how much of your life is ending up on someone else’s balance sheet?
Check your weekly screen time.
Multiply by your hourly wage.
Compare to how much money you actually saved that week.
If CRE < 0.1, you’re subsidising someone else’s slaughterhouse.
Everyone’s hyped, nobody’s paying. You built a bonfire, not a furnace. CNN+. Quibi. Google Glass. Your nephew’s NFT project.
Most operators fail in the gaps between layers; the graveyard is just a map of where the leaks are.
The Graveyard (Where Value Goes to Die)
A→N Failure – “The Fizz”
Ten million watched it. Nobody knows what it was. Pure attention, zero narrative.
Example: Quibi’s “quick bites” launch campaign. Billboards everywhere. Ask anyone what the shows were about. Exactly.
N→S Failure – “The Prayer Circle”
Beautiful story, no stakes. Narrative coherence without speculation — belief with no wallet attached.
Example: WeWork’s IPO prospectus. Adam Neumann’s messianic manifesto about “elevating the world’s consciousness.” Inspiring words. Zero investor confidence. Pulled within weeks.
S→C Failure – “The Edging”
Everyone’s horny, nobody’s paying. Speculation without conversion. Bets placed, but no harvest.
Example: The Metaverse. Zuck pumped billions, headlines screamed “future of work,” land prices in Sandbox/Decentraland spiked… then daily active users averaged in the dozens.
C Without N – “The Holmes”
You got the money but killed the trust. Capital without sustainable narrative.
Example: Theranos. Raised $700M on vaporware, torched credibility forever.
Bonus example: FTX. At peak: $32B valuation, stadium naming rights, Super Bowl spots. Then: collapse, fraud trial, orange jumpsuit.
The Universal Formula
If you remember nothing else, remember this: fix the leak at the current layer before you pour more attention in.
AL x NCI x SM = CRE
That’s the whole economy. Everything else is costume jewellery. The machine runs whether you understand it or not. But now you have the manual.
The question isn’t whether you’re in the machine. You’re reading this on the machine, through the machine, because of the machine. The question is whether you’re the operator or the ore.
Spoiler: check your screen time. You already know.
You’ve seen the stack; the laws are the physics that make it behave the same way across every domain.
The Ten Laws (The Physics You Can’t Escape)
Law 1: Attention is existence
Marketing stopped being downstream when distribution went infinite. If you don’t capture, you don’t exist. Your “business model,” “strategy,” “mission” — all of it is just plumbing for one metric: capture rate.
Law 2: Simple lies outperform complex truths
Brains process patterns, not facts. That’s why “they’re turning the frogs gay” (Alex Jones, 2015) racked up millions of impressions, while the actual EPA atrazine study that inspired the lie sat unread. Coherence beats correctness because evolution rewarded quick pattern recognition, not 80-page reports.
Law 3: Conflict propagates, resolution monetises
Conflict spikes AL (attention liquidity). Resolution cashes out CRE (capital efficiency). See Netflix: “Tiger King” went nuclear off conflict; the doc’s reunion/conclusion episodes monetised the spike. Most operators die in the chasm between drama and delivery.
Law 4: First story creates reality
Corrections are footnotes. The “narrative half-life” (t½-N) is the time it takes for detail to fade while the impression remains. First exposure sets neural pathways. That’s why 70% of initial misinformation on X/Twitter keeps circulating even after corrections are posted (MIT Media Lab, 2018).
Law 5: Platform tax is absolute
Facebook’s organic reach for brands hovers around ~1.6% in 2025; Instagram reaches ~3.5% on average. These figures affirm that organic posts reach a sliver of followers unless paid to extend.
Law 6: Everything prices before existing
Tesla, valued at ~$700B in 2024, surpassed the combined market caps of the traditional automakers—Toyota, Volkswagen, and Ford—despite far lower production volume. Markets price narrative-driven futures, not just current fundamentals. (Note: Tesla data across sources.)
Law 7: Coherence Debt compounds
Formula: CD = Current Belief-Delivered Proof(90-day rolling)
CD > 0.3 → trust wobble (early-stage hype fatigue).
CD > 0.5 → structural failure (falling sales, churn spikes).
CD > 0.7 → collapse event. Theranos, FTX, MoviePass.
Law 8: Negative attention has brutal physics
Negative content drives significantly more engagement but much less conversion. Bud Light’s backlash—from a single post—cost them around $1.4B in lost sales, proving that virality doesn’t mean value.
Law 9: Friction is memory
Ease kills retention and ultra-easy content evaporates fast. Instagram content has ~0.8s “half-life,” TikTok ~0.3s; yet, a handwritten letter can linger decades with recall at an entirely different scale.
Law 10: Attention has mass
In 2024, global data centre electricity consumption was around 415 TWh, or ~1.5% of world electricity use. By 2030, demand is projected to nearly double, approaching ~945 TWh—comparable to Japan’s total grid—highlighting that every digital click carries a visible carbon footprint.
Four Horsemen, One Playbook
Different industries, same operating system. OpenAI, MrBeast, Trump, Musk: four horsemen, one stack. Different costumes; identical physics.
OpenAI: The Inevitability Printer
The Stack
A: Demos on a drumbeat. Sora previewed in Feb 2024 (now Sora Turbo, Aug 2025), o3 rolled out Apr 2025, and GPT-5 launched 7 Aug 2025. All a high-cadence pipeline designed to keep AL spiking.
N: “AGI is inevitable.” The slogan writes itself and user usage is enormous: ~700m weekly ChatGPT users, per Reuters.
S: Pilots as futures. Guidance and reporting peg 2025 revenue run-rate ≈ $12–13bn; investors are literally pricing inevitability, with a secondary sale in talks at ~$500bn valuation. (Bloomberg rev. proj. · Reuters $12bn run-rate & $500bn talks · FT on $500bn talks)
C: Cash in, charts… also in. GPT-5’s launch briefly face-planted into “chart crime” before OpenAI corrected the visuals and apologised — a neat example of Coherence Debt accruing when hype outruns proof.
Why it fits the machine: OpenAI sells inevitability. Every demo is a futures contract; 2025–26 enterprise renewals are where speculation has to harden into capital.
MrBeast: The Attention Industrialist
The Stack
A: A firehose of audience. The most-subscribed individual channel on YouTube (400m+ by mid-2025).
N: “Spectacle that pays forward.” The thumbnails, the beats, the set-ups — engineered for repeatability (NCI catnip).
S: Uploads as pre-sales. Beast Industries split Content and Commerce at ≈$250m each in 2024; content often runs at or near a loss while Feastables monetises the spike.
C: Chocolate > YouTube. By Mar 2025, multiple outlets reported more money from Feastables than from videos, with scale ambitions to triple in the coming years.
Why it fits the machine: He turned YouTube analytics into a CPG growth engine. Spectacle inflation is the cost curve; candy is the cash curve.
Trump: The Conflict Perpetual-Motion Machine
The Stack
A: Controversy as content. Every legal beat becomes coverage, merch, memes.
N: “Persecution proves I’m winning.” A perfect, idiot-repeatable loop for conflict-driven belief.
S: Price the vibes. The official $TRUMP token launched 17 Jan 2025; by 20 Jan it hit >$10bn market value, then fees of ~$86–100m within two weeks, before falling ~two-thirds by 3 Feb. (Reuters – $10bn+ · Reuters – fees & slump)
C: Convert outrage to money/votes. Fundraising spikes on legal moments are on record: ~$53m in 24h post-verdict; $141m in May 2024 overall. (CBS – $52.8m in 24h · AP – $141m in May)
Why it fits the machine: Negative attention doesn’t just propagate — here it monetises. Polls are vibes; donations clear.
Musk: The Speculation Recursive Loop
The Stack
A: Founder-as-feed. Cross-posting across platforms keeps attention liquid while narratives hop companies.
N: “Mars / EVs / AGI are inevitable because I say so.” One voice, many timelines.
S: New chips on new tables. xAI raised ~$6bn (valued $24bn in May 2024; further rounds by year-end), while X’s ad revenues slumped hard post-acquisition. Volatility as a feature, not a bug. (Reuters – xAI $6bn @ $24bn · AP · WSJ – X revenue slide)
C: Market moves on mouth moves. The SEC’s 2018 settlement over “funding secured” is the canonical receipt: $20m fine for Musk, $20m for Tesla, chair role vacated for three years… because a tweet moved markets. (SEC press release)
Why it fits the machine: Narratives cross-load: SpaceX wins can mask Tesla wobbles; xAI hype can fog X’s ad drought. The story is the hedge.
Why This System Exists
The machine doesn’t care about truth, quality, or meaning. All that matters is conversion efficiency. Every optimisation makes the next optimisation mandatory. Every capture raises the cost of the next capture.
The old economy extracted labour, then ideas, then data. The attention economy extracts something more primitive: your ability to inhabit a coherent reality. Every refresh fractures your continuous present. Every notification splinters your narrative throughline. Every swipe deposits you somewhere with no memory of how you arrived.
The Bill (What’s Ahead)
Frictionless systems don’t erase friction as much as relocate it
to your brain,
to your relationships,
to the three hours you lost watching someone review water.
Part III will track what happens when Coherence Debt comes due at scale. The symptoms are already everywhere:
Time feels both fast and slow.
Weeks blur together; days feel eternal.
Everyone’s exhausted but nobody’s sleeping.
Meaning feels expensive while content is free.
You’re more connected and lonelier than ever.
When the machine runs out of raw attention, it doesn’t stop but starts strip-mining more expensive substrates:
Identity becomes brand.
Relationships become engagement.
Reality becomes negotiable.
Coming Next: Part III — Meaning Collapse
Where we tally the real bill:
Psychological: dreams you stopped having.
Ecological: energy grids bent to power infinite scroll.
Spiritual: lives performed instead of lived.
The machine that turned consciousness into capital is about to discover what happens when consciousness runs out.
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