The New Yorker:

The attention economy has dominated the Internet for more than a decade now, but never before have its protagonists felt so central to American life—or had such direct access to the levers of power.

By Kyle Chayka

In early October, the No. 5 most popular podcast on Spotify, above the Times’ “The Daily” and just behind “The Joe Rogan Experience,” was a month-old show called “Talk Tuah.” Prior to this past summer, its host was an utterly anonymous Gen Z woman named Haliey Welch, a factory worker from Belfast, Tennessee. Welch achieved nearly instantaneous fame after she was captured, in June, in a street interview by the YouTubers Tim & Dee TV describing a sex tip with the memorable phrase “hawk tuah,” onomatopoeically evoking expectoration. The clip blew up on TikTok, and Welch, who took on the nickname Hawk Tuah Girl, became unavoidable online as a meme, a loop of her signature phrase on repeat. Real-life fame followed: she threw the first pitch at a Mets game, hosted parties at night clubs, signed with a management agency, and developed her podcast, which was released by a company co-founded by the YouTuber Jake Paul. The path from total obscurity to mainstream broadcast personality had been traversed in a matter of months.

In the past, we may have labelled Welch an influencer, a word that described, basically, someone who had accrued a lot of followers on social media. Welch did that, of course (she now has nearly two million TikTok followers), but she is not quite the same as the champion selfie-posters of a decade ago. These days, the favored term for an Internet powerhouse is “creator,” and in the course of this year a threshold of creatordom was passed. We don’t talk so much about podcasters, musicians, authors, or pundits anymore; they are simply creators, a catchall for people who are famous for making stuff across any number of platforms. What do creators create, exactly? Above all, they create digital content, and it doesn’t much matter where or which kind. They create the YouTube and TikTok videos we watch; they create the newsletters we read and the podcasts we listen to; and they create bits of text we consume on X, Threads, or Bluesky. Most likely they do all of the above at the same time. The attention economy has dominated the Internet for more than a decade now, but never before have its protagonists felt so central to American life–or had such direct access to the levers of power.

Go to link