At Daily Maverick's The Gathering, a panel on AI, crypto and capital unpacked how the attention economy is shaping value, inequality and the future itself.
At Daily Maverick's The Gathering 2025, journalist and panel moderator Lindsey Schutters posed the question: "What is the cost that society is paying for the attention economy?"
"The cost is pretty much everything," said Bronwyn Williams, a futurist and economist. "The cost is real progress. It is the real world that is being sort of subsumed and becoming more and more subservient to the gods of capital, which constantly promise more and more."
It was a blunt framing for a discussion that swung between optimism and alarm, tracing the fault lines of our digital age: machines as saviours or overlords, capital as liberator or casino chip.
On stage with Williams were Khadeeja Bassier, COO at Ninety One and Larry Cooke, Binance's head of legal for Africa, with Schutters steering the storm.
Utopias, dystopias and the poverty of attention
Bassier began by pointing out that society has split into two opposing camps.
"It's the 'AI will deliver us as our saviour', and then there's the other side that says 'dystopia, the machines will rule...
