the future is gambling on your attention
Our destiny is optimized but hollow.
By early March, Polymarket is planning on rolling out attention markets, where speculators can bid on how much “mindshare” ideas will have in the future.
The markets draw on social media data to quantify changes in public opinion, making it possible to bid on questions like “Crypto Twitter mindshare by March 31, 2026?” and “How high will Polymarket’s mindshare go by March 31, 2026?”
This development means that speculators now have an active financial incentive to manipulate public opinion. All you have to do is invest in an idea, spam it across your AI slop accounts, and pocket the profit. If social media was trading stocks on your attention, prediction markets are now trading options—and you can easily tilt the odds in your favor through information warfare.
We’ve already seen this kind of extractive practice in action. I’ve written about how memecoin investors will popularize racist memes to inflate the value of their cryptocurrencies, and we’ve clearly seen that people on Polymarket are willing to manipulate the internet for profit, like falsely editing the battle lines of Ukraine or tampering with existing prediction markets to cash out on derivatives.
The stated goal of these prediction markets is to “create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion,” and we’re clearly moving in that direction. Every word and idea will be wagered on. Within the next decade, we will see literal hedge funds emerge around memetic investments.
An uncomfortable fact about humans is that we have a tendency to blindly follow the structures set out for us. If Polymarket has a bet on whether a piece of misinformation will get more popular, and people are invested in that, more people have a reason to spread the misinformation. Then society will suffer.
From a linguistic standpoint, this means that even more of our words and memes will become pseudo-trends. Language is already so sensitive to the observer effect. The more we comment on something, the more it alters the “natural” course of how a word would evolve. So what happens when we have people sitting around desks trying to figure out which terms are about to get popular? And what happens when they inevitably try to “fix” the market? At the end of the day, your reality will be shaped by these financial actors.
Much like the rise of clip farming, attention markets are going to tie our tangible lives to the biased metrics of social media. The old rules of social interaction are going to dissolve into callous, transactional contentmaxxing. Nothing will matter other than internet success, especially when it’s synonymous with financial success.
In a way, this mirrors what private equity has already done to the American landscape. When a system is in place that exclusively rewards short-term profit, we will be left with a disintegrated husk of the internet that could’ve been. The map will consume the territory.
I wish we could all just touch grass, but that won’t be enough when our offline reality is culturally downstream of the algorithm. The “real world” and the internet are deeply intertwined, and we have to fight to preserve both at once.
What I’m consuming
I deeply enjoyed this deep dive into Wojak and Soyjak culture by Frankie Fey.
This “Corner Talk” series by abby.architecture changed how I look at buildings
This NYT article on desire paths by my friend Anna Kodé
Where I’m speaking
February 25: CU Boulder linguistics society
February 26: UC Berkeley discussion with Nicole Holliday
March 12: SXSW lecture on vibes and technology
As always, you can also support me by buying my book Algospeak.
bruh
"The map will consume the territory" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Borges would have appreciated this inversion — once we bet on mindshare, the measurement becomes the thing itself. There's no "natural" language evolution to observe anymore because the observation is now a financial instrument.
The linguistic observer effect was already a problem with trend pieces and word-of-the-year announcements. But at least those observers were trying to describe reality, however imperfectly. Attention markets create observers with active incentives to reshape it. That's a different beast entirely.