From Attention to Agency: A Structural Failure of Digital Markets

The modern internet is commonly diagnosed as suffering from misinformation, polarisation, platform concentration and declining public trust, and these failures are typically attributed to behavioural bias, political extremism or algorithmic amplification. This paper argues instead that the dominant pathologies of digital discourse follow from an architectural constraint present at the system's origin: the early internet lacked native, low-friction, trust-minimised mechanisms for economic exchange. In the absence of viable transaction and settlement infrastructure, advertising emerged as a proxy monetisation layer, structurally coupling public meaning systems to engagement-maximising revenue cycles. That coupling made attention the primary economic substrate of the web, and produced volatility, polarisation and extractive amplification as predictable outcomes rather than aberrations. Advertising is therefore best understood as a compensatory structure rather than as a business model or a moral failing — it was not superior, it was compatible with the constraint that existed. The paper further argues that native digital settlement and autonomous machine agents have relaxed the constraint that made advertising dominant — which reframes contemporary dysfunction as architectural lock-in rather than technological inevitability. That is a claim about what no longer binds, not a claim that a replacement architecture exists or has been adopted. The contribution is diagnostic rather than prescriptive: the internet is presented not as a failed public sphere but as a pre-constitutional economic and meaning system whose governing architecture no longer matches its capabilities.