So grateful to The Syllabus for naming this their hidden gem of the week. I really hope everyone out there struggling with brain rot gets to read this and understand the bigger picture.

Digital detox is a luxury good. Private schools ban phones. Affluent parents enforce screen limits while workers, platform-dependent students, content moderators, data labelers can't log off. The capacity to think clearly is becoming a class privilege. #BrainRot #AttentionEconomy #PlatformCapitalism

Jonathan Haidt’s Anxious Generation flagged what screens do to young minds. My NMS paper goes further from screen time to the financial architecture behind it. The valuation regime making cognitive extraction profitable is the mechanism. Design follows money. doi.org/10.1177/1461...

Oxford named "brain rot" its 2024 Word of the Year. Millions recognized the condition before any academic framework caught up. This paper takes that recognition seriously. doi.org/10.1177/1461...

Amazon reported $30B in net income last quarter. More than half came from revaluing its Anthropic stake on paper. Not revenue Not cash. A mark-to-market accounting gain. Alphabet $28.7B in similar unrealized gains. Nearly half its record profit came from updating the value of private company stakes

A scroll through someone’s chat queries may paint an incredibly intimate, hyper-personalized portrait of them and their world, from their daily activities to their inner life. For OpenAI, that's information they have users' tacit consent to collect, store, and share. futurism.com/artificial-i...

New piece out today in ProMarket (Stigler Center): Your 401(k) is an involuntary bet on AI. The top 10 S&P 500 companies—nearly all AI-adjacent—now account for ~40% of the index. When your retirement savings track the S&P, about forty cents of every dollar goes to these firms.

The CHIPS Act subsidized the core infrastructure for AI. This legislation promotes selling it abroad. The question nobody in Congress seems to be asking is whether the financial architecture underneath justifies either. buff.ly/93b1ggM

New piece out today in @americanprospect: "Subsidize, Build, Export, Repeat." America is selling the AI stack it built with public money — same companies, same national security framing. Nobody is asking whether the demand is real. 🧵 prospect.org/2026/05/01/s...

The same week: 8,000 layoffs. A new surveillance tool recording employee keystrokes to train AI replacements. Record executive compensation tied to a $9 trillion valuation target. The workers fund the infrastructure that replaces them.

Where does the $135 billion in AI infrastructure spending come from? From advertising revenue. And what generates advertising revenue? Your attention, captured, measured, and sold. This is a circuit and each cycle tightens the loop.

Users grew 4%. Ad impressions grew 19%. Ad prices grew 12%. Meta isn't growing by finding new people. It's growing by extracting more value from the cognitive time of the people it already has.

Meta just posted record earnings. Revenue up 33%. Net income $26.8 billion. The stock dropped 10%. Most coverage focused on the $135 billion capex. But there are three numbers in this report that tell a different story. 🧵