The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 15 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Hayes: Attention capitalism is about to collapse from AI pollution
“I sort of think like the whole thing is about to collapse. I think there's just a huge pollution problem, and I think that, you know, the treatment of spam in the book is, you know, the sort of signature pollution of attention capitalism of the attention age.”
Hayes: AI attention optimization alienates users from what they actually care about
“It totally alienates you from what you want to pay attention to.”
Hayes: Audiences will eventually rebel against AI-generated content slop
“Fundamentally there's something irreducibly human and That people are going to just rebel, but basically will rebel against slop”
Hayes: Useful technology and lucrative technology are fundamentally distinct
“We tend to conflate, particularly in this era, like, useful tech and lucrative tech, and those are not, like, there's technologies that are incredibly useful that are not particularly lucrative, like penicillin right now, like antibiotics are not, it's not, no…”
Hayes: Cultural homogenization is erasing regional political differences across the US
“Increasingly, there is this kind of homogenization happening where, you know, all sort of rural folks of certain demographics more and more vote like each other and also kind of like listen to the same music and have the same kind of Omniculture.”
Hayes: Most internet advertising remains bad, schlocky, and ineffective
“For all of that being true, it's amazing how sort of bad schlocky and ineffective most internet advertising is.”
Hayes: VR headsets exist to mine every remaining waking second of attention
“And that's why VR is so important from that, because If you have it literally every second, you've just unlocked this enormous new landscape of, like, you've discovered these, like, new deep sea reserves, right? That, that no one had before the now, every, lit…”
Hayes: AI and growth incentives are collapsing the open web
“And in some ways with the use of AI, like, you know, the entire open web that was the basis for the first iteration of Google is collapsing underneath it.”
Hayes: Solar gets less hype than AI because it's less lucrative
“Partly because it's not that lucrative, I think in the end. But also it's not that intentionally salient in the way that AI is.”
Hayes: Automated spam inevitably follows wherever attention aggregates
“Where attention pulls and collects, there will be money. And to the extent that you can cheaply automate the extraction of that attention, even if it's done in a sort of, like, brute force, wasteful way, there's gonna be spam, right?”
Hayes: Online content success depends on total hits, not batting average
“Like one of the things about online success is that it's not a batting average. It's like your total number of hits.”
Hayes: Users are fleeing public feeds for private group chats
“The move from public posting to group chat is, I think, a hundred percent driven by that, right? So like, You know, more and more of all the traffic and Instagram talks about this all the time is happening in private messaging. Things are happening in private …”
Hayes: Football is the last remaining mass media phenomenon
“Football's really the only thing left that sort of everyone pays attention to together.”
Hayes: Gen Z culture is driven by algorithms, not broadcast media
“There is this really distinct argot of Gen Z, but they're getting it all not from mass culture, but from basically algorithmic social media.”
Hayes: AI screen time will follow one of three future trajectories
“My wonder if it produces a kind of brute force level of pollution that then actually becomes hard to manage for the platforms. Two, it produces, it gets so good that it kind of creates this kind of Surreal new genre of like pure attentional drug, like the slot…”