Five Things: OG Attention Economy, Creative Labor, American Media, Bibi, Classroom AI
It's Sunday. Read this now.
Hello and welcome back to Five Things!
The first week of summer vacation is over and so far it’s been raining every single day here in Hamburg. I am pretty sure that as soon as we have decided when and where we could go on vacation, we also know for sure when the rain is going to stop. It will stop exactly when we take off. As for vacation planning, my family is very un-German and we never plan ahead, but rather book spontaneously as soon as we know what we want to do during the summer and when we can do it and how much of it we can actually afford. Right now we’re still debating and anything is possible right now between Sweden and Italy. I personally would be fine by just sitting on a chair somewhere in the dunes on the Baltic coast in Denmark, occasionally sipping some Øl and reading a book, but I somehow got the gist that my family is looking for something a bit more exciting. We’ll figure something out and in the meantime we’ll learn a lot more about European geography and the various costs attached to it.
Have a great Sunday and read these Five Things now!
The Birth of the Attention Economy
The rise of the cheap, daily newspaper in the 19th century created the first true attention economy—an endless churn of spectacle and sensation that remade how Americans engaged with the world. Although bound by the physical limits of print, early newspaper readers’ habits were our habits: People craved novelty, skimmed for the latest, let their attention dart from story to story. And with the onset of this new way of being came its first critics.
Back then, gatekeepers were still a thing and oftentimes people think that journalists as gatekeepers were also a sort of quality control. Some where. But oftentimes it had been about getting the eyeballs, about being louder than the rest.
AI Should Help Fund Creative Labor
Instead of tightening copyright protections, as many propose, we should treat creative knowledge as a public good and collectively fund its production. Like roads, vaccines, and public broadcasting, it should be accessible to everyone and paid for by everyone.
The economics of the issue are well known. Information often functions as a public good, as it’s difficult to exclude people from accessing it, and the cost of copying has plunged to nearly zero. When a good cannot be easily fenced off, markets tend to fail because people prefer to free-ride on others’ investments rather than pay for access themselves. Given that digital distribution is harder to fence off than traditional media, online information is even more of a public good.
Interesting idea, but who will try to enforce that? Trump? The EU? China?
We are witnessing the silencing of American media
Friends, this is how democracy dies.
The silencing is happening across America because Trump cannot stand criticism, because he’s vindictive as hell, and because he’s willing and able to use every department and agency of the federal government to punish any media corporations or universities that allow criticism of him.
Shame on any media outlet or university that allows Trump to silence it.
Trump is a dangerous despot. America needs its Eduardo Porters, Stephen Colberts, and all others in the media and in academia who have helped the nation understand just how truly dangerous Trump is.
The playbook reminds me eerily of dictators who came to power in other countries…
How Netanyahu Played Trump for a Fool in Gaza
You may have noticed that this war has no generally accepted name — like the Six-Day War, the Sinai War or the October War. Well, I personally have always had a name for it. It’s the War of the Worst.
This is the first Israeli-Palestinian war where the worst leaders on both sides are calling all the shots. The moderate Israeli opposition parties and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank have no influence. And that is why I cannot tell you how or when it will end. Because Netanyahu still insists on “total victory” over Hamas, which he will never achieve, and the Hamas leadership still insists on surviving this war in order to still control Gaza the morning after, which it does not deserve.
Bibi continues to trick everyone and too many people have died because of him.
What Happened When I Tried to Replace Myself with ChatGPT in My English Classroom
I attempted the experiment in four sections of my class during the 2024-2025 academic year, with a total of 72 student writers. Rather than taking an “abstinence-only” approach to AI, I decided to put the central, existential question to them directly: was it still necessary or valuable to learn to write? The choice would be theirs. We would look at the evidence, and at the end of the semester, they would decide by vote whether A.I. could replace me.
What could go wrong?
Oh, wow, this is an interesting and insightful experiment. I use GenAI all the time, just not for this newsletter. You still get the rough uncut stuff I come up with all by myself…
That’s it. Have a great Sunday! If you missed last Sunday’s edition of Five Things, have a look here:
— Nico