Inside Attention Factory: The Business of Manufacturing Momentum
Marketers used to buy ads. Now they buy conversations. Inside the growth operation turning obscure brands into things people can't stop talking about.
June Park
June covers artificial intelligence and the policy fights around it — training data, labor, and the regulatory vacuum where the industry operates.
AI Slop Is Strangling the Hobby Forums That Trained It
Moderators of woodworking, aquarium, and ham radio communities describe a losing war against generated posts designed to farm ad revenue.
An AI Grief Startup Scraped Obituaries to Build Chatbots of the Dead
Everlume trained 'memorial companions' on scraped obituaries and funeral home guestbooks — without asking the families.
Internal Docs: A Gig Platform A/B Tested Lower Pay on Its Most Loyal Couriers
Dasherly's 'earnings sensitivity' experiments quietly showed veteran couriers lower offers to find the floor of what they'd accept.
The Internet's Biggest Secret Isn't AI. It's Attention.
Everyone worried about bots and fake news. The real force shaping what billions of people see online is attention—and it has quietly become an industry.
The Internet's New Reality: Nothing Goes Viral by Accident Anymore
'It just went viral' sounds increasingly outdated. What looks like spontaneity is often the end stage of a system designed to manufacture visibility.
The Internet's Real Product Isn't Content—It's Belief
You think you're scrolling through content. You're scrolling through consensus being manufactured in real time—where repetition becomes reality.