Most of you reading this probably feel this sentiment in one way or another:
The world is changing, and it’s different this time
I write this essay in order to express my angle on this global sentiment that we are experiencing and investigate further into what seems like a “vibe shift” with statistics and facts. I plan to bring things that I’ve noticed from completely different aspects of the world and piece them together to explain where the world is going in this confusing point in time. People are more distracted than ever while having access to all knowledge needed to ground themselves in the status quo. It seems as though they would rather stay clueless while a new AI-driven attention economy drives the world into foreign territory.
COVID-19, The Long Looming Shadow
December 2019, what seemed like a headline that was going to be forgotten the next day evolved into a 1 week break from school. I was ecstatic. It seemed like the world gave all the students in the world a well-deserved break to scroll on the phone a bit, watch some Youtube, play video games with friends on Discord. But when the break was prolonged by a week, then a few more, then indefinitely, the whole world redefined this “break” into a fresh new definition: “quarantine”.
Quarantine was a completely different era that set off a new digital lifestyle forcibly adapted by children and parents alike. Ordinary people who barely consumed digital media found themselves with nothing to do at home and companies like Netflix, Tiktok, and Zoom found the perfect opportunity to cash in. Tiktok gained roughly 315 million downloads in the first quarter of 2020 and YouTube watch-time grew by 25% in the same quarter. The global pandemic ruptured open a new market, and everyone became the target demographic. Think of who watched YouTube during late 2010s, mostly kids and young adults. Pewdiepie was the most popular creator on the platform during the time. Fast forward to 2025, I find my grandparents scrolling through YouTube shorts and the statistics support it. Before the pandemic, only 38% of US adults age 65+ said they ever used Youtube. By 2021, the number jumped to 49%, a gain of 11% in just 2 years. Due to the pandemic, countless people were introduced to chronic online media consumption.
Now, combine constant content consumption with prolonged quarantine. Masses of people, including myself, felt further from physical life and more attached to this digital identity of ours. This led to several consequences. Without going outside and constantly looking at our devices, we became more vulnerable to what we now call “brainrot”. We started to curate what we show on social media to appeal to others online (think Hinge). While safely sheltered under our COVID-free roofs, we gained fast and easy access to all of our basic needs: social connection (Zoom), food delivery (Doordash), cure to boredom (Tiktok). COVID-19 set the scene for what was to come. It introduced the power of technology to the masses and got society addicted to quick and remote dopamine hits.
Attention War
Two years before COVID hit in 2017, eight scientists at Google tested their hypothesis that “Attention is All You Need”. This had almost nothing to do with the public until November 2022, when OpenAI released their groundbreaking app: ChatGPT. Society was already well-versed in the use of technology and platforms such as Tiktok and Youtube were already blasting viral trends that reached the corners of the world in hours. When popular creators started to post this new magical app that had the answers to all your questions, the public went crazy and OpenAI’s userbase skyrocketed. By Janurary 2023, the app had 100 million active users. We all know the rest of the story.
The introduction of LLMs to the masses and the race toward intelligence that followed turned tech companies upside down. Every tech giant started to push the scaling law to its limits to see who can train the smartest model. Attention, indeed, was all you needed for scalable intelligence and companies scrambled to find datasets to create bigger and more powerful models. The fuel for LLMs to get smarter was human output. Ironically, this human output was mined like minerals by companies that maximized human attention spent on their services.
Mid-2022, Elon Musk found a gold mine for human attention: Twitter. After a long struggle, he acquired the company for $44 billion in October of the year and shortly renamed the app in to “X, the everything app”. Many were baffled by this decision for a rocket-loving electric-car-making CEO to buy a social media app. Why spend 44 billion dollars on a glorified internet forum? The answer became clear after the release of Grok, the AI model created by XAI, the newly founded AI company by Elon Musk. By acquiring a platform where hundreds of millions of users interacted with each other, Elon took a step both in acquiring the social capital that can sway politics to his favor and the human data capital that can be used to train more models. By 2024, all major players were fighting in the attention war. Meanwhile, the post-COVID public was clouded by more and more distractions provided by the ever-advancing algorithm trained on their own subconscious desires.
To Those Who Escaped The Matrix
Another consequence of COVID-19 and social media is the growing online side-hustle culture that has been popularized among young adults. I, myself, also ran several side-hustles such as social media marketing during highschool and know many friends who have ran similar gigs such as reselling sneakers. This culture has only progressed. According to Intuit’s 2024 poll, 66% of 18-35 year olds run or plan to run a side hustle or their own business. With the rise of generative AI that automates mundane tasks in seconds, running a business is now a quick and “easy” way to get rich. Is it anyone’s dream now to work a 9-to-5? The youth is plugged into a content pool through platforms such as Twitch and Youtube that glamorizes the no-boss lifestyle and is even given the tools to start their own hustle at the price of $20/month. The algorithm spews content from content creators such as iShowSpeed, Kai Cenat, JasonTheWeen who depict a dream lifestyle of adventure, fun, and freedom. The youth watch this and grow to be disgusted with their “boring” life of going to school, playing with friends, getting better at a sport. Everyone wants to be free from the shackles of normality.
Now I’m not implying that no kid wants to become a teacher or a scientist anymore but the playground has noticeably changed. A poll by Adobe shows that one in three 18-to-30 year old dream of an influencer career and another teen study shows that the most popular dream job now is “professional streamer” with 11% of teens putting it as their top choice. This, in combination with the normalization of work-from-home culture from COVID, disrupted the 9-to-5 lifestyle, painting it like a prison for the poor. Now all would be good if everyone was allowed to live a life like Kai Cenat, we would then all be happy living our fullest life. But who then, will put the fries in the bag? For there to be one star, there has to be a thousand normal people who worship it.
This disalignment between obtainable reality and glamorized fiction leave the youth either unfulfilled at a mundane job or at a YC startup. Many of those who are “building”, while creating impressive applications, simply will not leave a measurable impact on society. If everyone’s consumer app succeeded, we would have a million apps on our phones and another million google chrome extensions that we actively use. It is the same with B2B SaaS, the supply heavily overweighs the demand and that is why pre-seed founders desperately try to find problems and inconveniences. Now, I am not trying to shame startup culture or creating your own business. I myself was a founder and I see myself going back to it in the future. The issue lies in the public sentiment growing further and further away from being satisfied with a normal life, which STATISTICALLY, most people will end up living (hence “normal”). There is no easier way to make society hate their life more than adopting a culture that shames the middle-of-the-bell-curve lifestyle. Smart individuals who think that they have “escaped the matrix” by dropping out of an Ivy-League school might be distracted by their AI startup from seeing the true state of the world unfolding in front of their eyes.
Where the Focus Lies
While the college students (or dropouts) are vibe coding on Cursor, the real players are looking at compute, and a lot of it. The crucial ingredient in controlling the power that fueled all the aforementioned chaos is compute, or in other words, chips. There is a reason why Taiwan is such an important piece of land for both the US and China and why Trump is fighting so hard to control exports of these chips and necessary materials to create them. Washington recently restricted Nvidia’s H20 accelerators from selling to China and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is running live-fire bloackade drills around Taiwan. The pressure is on from both sides.
Recently, the US has been building their own front line of chip soverignty in Phoenix, Arizona. TSMC’s first fab in the US has began producing 4nm wafers for Nvidia’s next-generation Blackwell GPUs. This is not just a manufacturing step but a significant move proving to the key players that it is possible to move the chip war to home ground. While the US is not completely free from Taiwan’s monopoly on chip nodes, it has found ways around potential checkmates from China that might destroy the US chip supply overnight.
Since most of us interact with LLMs through a web interface or an HTTP call, we might not realize the significance of chips and what it means for the global power dynamic. Scalable intelligence, which can only be obtained through these chips, has both the formless power to move citizens and the hard destructive power to strike the opposition. When technology is equally spread among leaders, intelligence is level, and so is the threat; however, a great imbalance in technology means the possibility of a quick and absolute destruction for the side that has to catch up.
Get Better or Die
So, the US and its allies are leaning into cutting-edge military technology with the help of private defense contractors and intelligence companies. NATO just bought Palantir’s AI-powered war system, MAVEN. Lockheed Martin is steadily growing in annual revenue. Anduril’s recent “Don’t work at Anduril” campaign is winning headlines and bringing in talent like never seen before. Compare these companies to the big players of the last decade. Unlike Google, these defense companies don’t need to color their logos rainbow during June to keep their customer-base happy and their revenues stable. Their mission is laser-focused on quality, not empathy.
The same shift is happening in online communities. Anyone who’s been keeping up with the startup community and the “SF scene” knows how the political landscape has shifted in the last couple years among founders and CEOs. One place that really shows the change in atmosphere is X, the public agora for founders. It has never been easier to gain attention on this app by acting abrasively and proudly if you can show that you have the skills. Take example X tech influencers such as yacine, Beff Jezos, and Roy Lee. Posters such as these have been taking advantage of the algorithm by building a personal brand of an egotistical genius. The influence they cultivate shift young learners and founders to embrace edgy and mission-driven “get better or die” culture which matches the current political and economic agenda. While this corner of the online world is only a small percentage of the population, it contains and influences a significant portion of the people who is pushing the world forward. The climate of this algorithmic echo chamber matters because the people inside it will push the important buttons.
Just like the oil boom of the 1860s, the AI explosion is spawning a rush of ambitious individuals aiming to become the modern-day Rockefeller. The sudden flooding of ambitious startups which aim to capture the entire digital ecosystem as their TAM (think Cursor, Cluely, Windsurf, Replit) is evidence supporting that the smartest founders are aggressively competing to take over the entire market. But rushed ambition brings greed and disorder. What we see on our X feeds today (ego, fraud, takedowns) mirrors the filth and violence that took place among early oil drillers in Titusville and Spindletop.
These are the trends lying right in front of our eyes that we can only see when we put the phone down and look outside the algorithm. Isn’t it ironic that the same technology that is shifting the world into madness is blinding us from the threat itself? The current state of affairs seems so plain in sight yet not talked about at all by even some of the most intelligent people I know. We are all too focused on chasing a certain lifestyle or simply stuck on our phones that we cannot just look around and see what is going on in the world.
We shift our attention from issue to issue and every new crisis has the same weight as the next Tiktok video behind a swipe. But the truth is that we cannot swipe past these issues. Since COVID, we have removed ourselves so far from reality that we are unable to even notice the forces that shape our future.
So What Can I Do?
There is no call to action in this essay. I am not protesting against the development of AI nor am I telling you to live like Thoreau while contemplating in the woods. I wrote this to reflect on what I’ve constantly noticed since recent years but could not put into words. I’m sure you can sense the frustration but it’s not toward any tech company or individual. Despite what I’ve wrote, I’ve been very happy, sticking to consistent progression of my journey in the gym and work in the military. While I don’t see myself at a position to give life advice, what has made me the most fulfilled has been staying consistent and giving everyday my fullest while trying to notice the world outside the screen.
I do not want to be an activist, especially an anti-technology one. Technology has brought immeasurable good in my life. It is unfortunate that the consequences of technologist capitalism include so many being taken advantage by big tech but all i can really say is that it’s “skill issue". I hope that this article helps in making the world a little more aware. I choose to accept reality as it is and will strive to take the actions that will continue to make me content. I truly hope that you, the reader, do the same.