This is an edited transcript of my YouTube video How MrBeast Broke the Economy1
It’s no secret that we live in the attention economy - you get to pay attention to everything, all of the time. Everything is a livestream, blurring the lines between actual life and the online (is there a difference?) in our consumption driven culture, shaped by algorithms and AI.
Plato’s Cave is (funnily enough) a great example of this.
The allegory walks us through the lives of prisoners who are trapped in a cave, and believe that the shadows dancing on the wall are ‘real’. One prisoner ends up escaping the cave and sees that there's a world beyond - there's a sun! The shadows weren’t ‘real’. Everything that they thought existed was not true. So he goes back down into the cave and he's says, “Guys, those shadows are not real, dude. You have to go outside!”
But when he gets into the cave, he stumbles around because his eyesight's messed up from the darkness. The other prisoners say “Why would we listen to y…
