🔮 Sunday edition #536: Agents over clicks. Youth on thin ice. When autocracy pays. Worlds you can walk through. A drug that slows the clock++
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Hi all,
Welcome to our Sunday edition, where we explore the latest developments, ideas, and questions shaping the exponential economy.
Enjoy the weekend reading!
Azeem
A new era of the Web
This week’s big news was the release of GPT-5 (my initial take here, quoted in the FT here), but something bigger is brewing beneath the surface: a fundamental transformation of how the Web itself operates.
A paper I read this week takes stock of the transition from the recommendation paradigm to the action paradigm – a shift toward an agentic Web with fundamentally different incentive structures.
Yang et al. outline three enablers of this change: intelligence, interaction and a nascent economy. The first two form a technical layer: agents that can reason and plan, and protocols that let them communicate. The intelligence pillar is progressing – models can handle longer tasks over time, although reliability remains a concern.
The interaction pillar has some firm foundations. Agents need a shared grammar to talk to websites, APIs and one another. Nascent protocols such as MCP (agents ⇄ tools) and A2A (agent ⇄ agent discovery) promise a common interaction layer. Security remains a worry (see the lethal trifecta), but protection is improving.
The economy pillar is by far the least developed. Attention (and money) flowed through search links and social feeds in the previous era. Now, in some cases, AI answers are swallowing up as much as half that traffic. Publishers have responded by blocking crawlers or charging for access. Cloudflare introduced ‘pay-to-crawl’ gates. While it’s a good experiment, it has some flaws, as we discussed a few weeks ago:
A $0.01 crawl fee might sound small, but it’s ~20x more than the average revenue a human visit generates. It can get much worse: an AI might need 10 pages to answer a question, making it 200x more expensive. So realistically, will AI companies pay that much per page? Probably not. More likely, they’ll keep striking licensing deals or stick to scraping public-domain content.
But the market will not settle until a standard primitive emerges. The paper envisions an Agent Attention market where the scarce resource is an agent’s choice of which API, tool, or external service to invoke when completing a task for a human user. And crucially…