wip thoughts on attention markets, memecoins, and hyperreality (originally published February 2025)

In the early 1920s, the A.C. Nielsen Company was founded to measure sales performance in the consumer market. In the 1930s, Nielsen began tracking radio audiences, and then TV audiences in the 1950s. Nielsen ratings became the de facto standard for live TV viewership metrics. These ratings didn’t just measure audiences, they shaped the burgeoning media landscape. Ad prices, programming decisions, even the fate of shows—whether they lived, died, or were relegated to unfavorable time slots—all hinged on Nielsen’s data. It was a system that, for decades, dictated the rhythms of an entire industry.

While this model has evolved with the rise of digital platforms, the underlying dynamic remains unchanged: the attention economy (a phrase coined in the 1960s) has been a central force in influencing mass culture since long before it was popularized by social media. Its evolution reveals not only the power of quantifying attention, but also the inherent tensions between capturing it and converting it into something meaningful.

People began questioning the accuracy of the Nielsen system as soon as the system was born. Nielsen’s data collection methods are often considered opaque and its relatively small sample sizes, especially for local markets, further undermine confidence. The meta-level criticism of the ratings system is that quantifying viewership does not account for quality of engagement. Imagine the thousands of establishments around the country that play TV simply for white noise; Nielsen ratings fail to distinguish between this kind of passive viewing and active viewing.

Today’s digital advertising marketplaces enable the buying and selling of attention at larger scales and faster speeds than ever before. The incremental units of attention on the internet are more discrete and granular. We are now technically able to track every click, view, and cursor movement with programmatic ease. While the practice of trading attention has experienced a leap in sophistication, the fundamental question still persists: how accurate are the metrics?

Almost 50% of web traffic is believed to be bots, and more than 50% of those bots are considered to be malicious. Meta is currently battling a $7B class action lawsuit alleging that it falsified ad metrics to advertisers. Further developments in AI and personalized recommendation algorithms only signal that these issues will become more prevalent.

A spiritual successor to previous iterations of attention markets is emerging: tokens. Tokens are quickly beginning to reshape how we measure and value attention, offering a distinct alternative to legacy systems like Nielsen ratings and Google Analytics. At their best, tokens go directly to users and actually reward them for their data contributions, provide real-time data access and liquidity, and create more transparent systems for data collection and processing.

While legacy tools seek to methodically convert proxy metrics for attention into economic value, tokens make this relationship 1:1 by giving each engagement a programmatic price. Mechanisms like prediction markets take this a step further by introducing a speculative layer to attention economics. These markets don’t just measure what’s happening, they forecast what will happen. By allowing participants to bet on the success of content, campaigns, or trends, they aggregate dispersed knowledge into real-time, dynamic signals. This isn’t just a theoretical improvement; it’s a practical one.

Decentralized attention markets also offer certain protections and rewards to users that legacy systems don’t. Compared to Nielsen’s reliance on a handful of households to extrapolate national TV ratings, or Google Analytics’ vulnerability to bot traffic and click fraud, decentralized systems provide a transparent ledger for these metrics. Tokens transform users from passive data points into active stakeholders, giving them a direct financial interest in the platforms they engage with.

However, decentralized attention markets come with their own unique challenges. Many are technical and/or mechanism-related, but I want to focus on a very specific subset of issues related to the commodification of attention itself.

The commodification of attention has transformed it into a frictionless, programmable asset that can be bought, sold, and traded in real-time, often with little more than a line of code. This stands in stark contrast to the slow, deliberate rituals of building social capital, where attention is not just captured but nurtured, and converted into something more durable: trust, loyalty, or influence. In the past, earning social capital required a kind of alchemy—attention-seeking that, if successful, might eventually translate into financial or cultural capital. While speed is usually considered positive, a dangerous side effect creeps in.

In his book about the digital advertising industry Subprime Attention Crisis, Tim Hwang argues that the extreme commodification of attention has made these subsequent markets irrevocably detached from the human attention they seek to represent. This detachment is not just a technical glitch but a broader societal shift, one that Jean Baudrillard would recognize as a hallmark of our hyperreal age.

Jean Baudrillard is a French philosopher best known for his concept of simulacra and hyperreality—the idea that in our modern world, representations of reality (signs, symbols, images) have come to replace reality itself, creating a self-referential system where the distinction between the real and the simulated collapses into a loop. For Baudrillard, the metrics of attention—likes, clicks, views—are not just measures of engagement and social capital, but total abstractions, floating signifiers. Baudrillard would argue that the more we commodify attention, the more we detach it from any real social or cultural foundation; it has become a simulacrum, a copy without an original. It becomes a kind of spectacle, a performance that mimics the forms of social capital but lacks its substance. We mistake the map for the territory, the metric for the meaning. In this sense, the gap between attention and social capital is not just a practical challenge—it’s a philosophical one, a reflection of a world where the real has been replaced by the hyperreal, and value has been reduced to visibility.

Yet, for all the innovations that promise to analyze and optimize attention—analytics, tokens, prediction markets—the fundamental challenge remains: attention alone is fleeting. The real work lies in holding onto it, shaping it into something meaningful, and forging the relationships that turn visibility into value. In his book, Hwang draws a parallel between the subprime attention crisis and the housing crisis of 2008. Both, he argues, are rooted in the creation of speculative bubbles built on unstable foundations. In the housing crisis, financial instruments like mortgage-backed securities were abstracted and traded far beyond their actual value, until the underlying reality—the ability of borrowers to repay their loans—collapsed. Similarly, in the attention economy, the metrics we use to quantify attention are abstractions, hyperreal constructs that often bear little connection to genuine engagement or lasting value. In the case of tokens, we see prices soar only for early adopters to pick a time to pull the rug, leaving latecomers as exit liquidity. Just as the housing bubble burst, Hwang warns that the attention economy risks collapse when the gap between simulated value and real value becomes too wide to ignore. The danger, as both Hwang and Baudrillard might argue, is that we mistake the spectacle for the substance, the metric for the meaning—and when the bubble pops, we’re left with nothing but the hollow shell of what we thought was real.

Capturing attention is no small feat in a landscape where attention is increasingly fragmented, transactional, and ephemeral. But the very mechanisms that make attention easy to capture also make it difficult to sustain, leaving a widening gap between the spectacle of visibility and the depth of genuine connection. As we move into an era of decentralized attention markets, the challenge will be to design systems that not only capture attention, but also cultivate the trust and loyalty needed to transform fleeting engagement into lasting value. In a world where attention is commodified, the gap between grabbing it and converting it into something meaningful has never been more pronounced—or more consequential.