Gen Alpha Will Get What They Want

The "epidemic"

Survey after survey shows the same pattern: when you ask Gen Alpha what they want to be when they grow up, "YouTuber" and "TikToker" rank at the top. Higher than doctor. Higher than nurse. Higher than entrepreneur. Some of the more sensationalist articles claim over 50% of children aspire to be content creators.

The common framing is dismissive. These kids are delusional, the argument goes. Not everyone can be an influencer. Most will fail. They need to wake up to reality.

I think these kids will get what they want.

The supply of creators will explode

The dismissive framing assumes a fixed pie - a limited number of creator slots, a zero-sum competition for audience attention. But the pie is growing, and it will continue to grow.

In the near term, this happens through conventional means:

• Greater consumption of content per person per day - more screens, more hours, more formats
• Greater production of content - lower barriers to entry, better tools, faster iteration
• More personalized algorithms that help individuals meet their niches faster and more effectively

The role creates value in multiple markets

Content creators generate value across several interconnected markets:

• Data for the data markets - every piece of content is training data, preference signal, behavioral insight
• Eyeballs for the advertising markets - attention that can be monetized through ads
• Desire for the luxury markets - aspiration and taste-making that drives consumption
• Entertainment for the leisure markets - the raw product of human engagement

As long as these markets grow, the economic foundation for creators expands.

The medium term: computer attention

Here is where it gets interesting.

Right now, when machines pay attention to content, it's usually because someone paid for that attention directly. Crawlers, indexers, recommendation systems - these consume content as a means to serve human ends.

But we are entering an era of copious machine intelligence. Agents that browse, reason, and act. Systems that comb over content not just to index it, but to understand it, evaluate it, and make decisions based on it.

This creates a new form of attention: computer attention as a commodity in its own right.

When billions of agent instances are consuming content, evaluating creators, making recommendations, and taking actions - the ability to capture and hold that machine attention becomes valuable. Not because a human advertiser paid for it, but because the machines themselves are economic actors allocating resources based on what they observe.

The expansion of available attention

The zero-sum view of attention assumes each human has a fixed capacity - 24 hours, one pair of eyes, one stream of consciousness. But attention is becoming synthetic.

Algorithms are a proto-form of this expansion - a very crude one, a recommendation system that filters the firehose down to a feed. But this is just the beginning.

The future is less discrete, able to synthesize attention into smaller bytes. Personal AI - and to some extent, local AI - will expand the attention of the average individual across more domains. Machines that scrape through and pay attention to all aspects of one person's life, so that they may only attend to:

• The parts that have been concatenated by the machine
• The parts they specifically desire

This is a sort of ultimate control over one's environment. The ability to hand off the pruning of the mental environment to a machine that you can trust, one that you can rely upon, and one that is fundamentally democratic in nature.

What does 10x attention mean?

What does it mean in a world where the attention of the average individual is expanded by conservatively 10x? Let's claim that this expansion of technology enables people to pay attention to 10x more things. I would think that's conservative, but being conservative here is constructive for the case.

The average person spends a remarkable amount of time on their phone already. [TODO: Spend 10 minutes on Statista to get good stats on this.]

More to come...

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