The Pattern, Not the Platform: How the Attention Economy Hollows Out the Real One

Every modern Indonesia city contains a tale of two malls: the first mall – bejeweled with Zara, Uniqlo, H&M – is clad in real granite, perfumed with pleasant aromas, and comfortably climate controlled with ample air conditioning. The second mall – freckled with Mbak Rina, Pak Arif, and Kak Dewi – is framed by naked decaying masonry, smells subtly stale, and uncomfortably re-radiates the day's heat back into its cramped, barely-ventilated corridors.

The first mall is bright, energetic, and filled with stores and consumers – shoppers like Ibu Widya. The second mall is dark, sleepy, and conspicuously vacant. And yet the first mall is the winter of despair: although its shelves are in full bloom with pretty products, there is nothing worth buying. What remains in the second mall is not the spring of hope, but its memory: local wares, sold by local sellers, made by local makers. What happened?

The memory that lingers in the second mall is the memory of a cycle. A gradual but deliberate process transforms a blooming market into a rotten one. Spring begets summer, summer begets autumn, and autumn begets winter.

In the heyday of the second mall, buyers knew and understood what they needed, and how to shop for it. But just as the markets have emptied, so too have the minds of consumers. They can no longer perceive the difference between polyester rags destined for the trash and natural fiber heirloom garments. It's not because they are careless. It's because the habitat and ecosystems that supported educated consumers have been eroded and degraded.

The second mall has emptied out because of a roaming beast loosed upon the city: global capital has invaded the physical space the local vendors used to fill. The brands, rents, and supply chains it brings have outcompeted the makers and sellers street by street, floor by floor, and room by room. But the beast has also spread an equally dangerous yet less visible threat: the tiny fleas of short-form digital content carry with them a virulent mind-parasite. The parasite hijacks the brain's own dopaminergic incentive mechanism. It rewards what is quick, and buries what is careful. The slow knowledge that empowers a person to recognize quality has atrophied beyond the point of usefulness.

The malls are emptied of function-forward products and instead filled with pretty but useless garbage. The mind of the consumer is emptied of critical understanding and instead filled with aesthetic but shallow (or worse – deceptive) content. These two processes – the hollowing-out of the physical marketplace, and the shallowing of the consumer mind – have the same source, and a compounding effect.

Cory Doctorow described the three stages of digital marketplace decay which he termed enshittification [[1]]. First, platforms ensnare consumers with low prices by selling at a loss (this practice is possible because it is subsidized by capital markets betting their money on a potential future monopoly); next, platforms lure vendors at the expense of consumers; finally, platforms mistreat both consumers and vendors to extract value. When the degradation becomes severe enough for consumers and vendors to reach for alternatives, their grasps come up empty – they are shocked to realize no alternatives remain. Digital marketplaces work toward monopoly capture through this systematic cycle of dismantled alternatives. In its final season, a once useful thing becomes – to paraphrase Doctorow – a useless pile of excrement [[2]].

The prime example is Amazon: in the spring of its youth, consumers effortlessly gathered a cornucopia of products at rock bottom prices. But in the summer of its adolescence, Amazon began letting a few poisonous mushrooms find their way into the baskets of consumers as they foraged. The no-nonsense search algorithms were quietly replaced with pay-to-play mechanics. Amazon began auctioning off the top listings to the highest bidders. One study found top results were an average of 29% more expensive than identical but lower ranked search results [[3]]. Although Doctorow's model explained digital marketplaces, he also applied it to the physical world – most notably to John Deere tractors in his piece "The reason you can't buy a car is the same reason your health insurer let hackers dox you" [[4]]. His examples highlighted how tech-connected physical products also fit the framework. Farming equipment manufacturers sewed proverbial salt into the fields, degrading the very ecosystem they exist to serve. Their digital locks and draconian intellectual property rights hold guns to farmers heads until – tragically, driven by the trauma of financial destruction – an increasing number of farmers turn the gun on themselves [[5]].

But your shoes have no software and your clothing comes without a copyright clause. At least for now.

Yet the same beast that hollowed out the malls learned a new trick. Though the malls are filled with pretty but useless junk, the beast learned to sell it. The platforms whose enshittification Doctorow first named didn't collapse in their winter; instead, they adapted. Once the consumers were captured, their vendors squeezed, and their shareholders served, the platforms mutated into something new. They became engines for the extraction of attention at scale. The business model of a late-stage digital platform is no longer being useful. Instead, the business model is to compete for attention – just enough attention to monetize it – with whatever content best holds that attention.

Content that bypasses the slow faculties tends to hold attention best – this is what the algorithms have learned. It reaches the dopaminergic areas of the brain directly. Content that is comparative, analytical, and patient does not. An enviably beautiful woman unboxes a dress and mews guys this is so cute before a long-form reviewer has even located the label to check the fabric content.

That is not a flaw of the format; it is the format's competitive advantage. The information that would support a viewer to actually evaluate the dress is absent because content that includes evaluative information tends to be slower, denser, and less instantly rewarding to the brain's dopaminergic system. It gets outcompeted in the attention economy. It gets buried beneath the drifting snow dunes of the digital platform winter. And it gets forgotten.

Consider Ibu Widya (not her real name). She is a retired PNS (civil servant) I have known for over ten years. We first met towards the end of her career, she has since retired, and she is now living on her modest government pension. She is choosing an outfit for hari raya (the big holiday). She has been watching her favorite influencer for months: she trusts the woman's taste, she recognizes the woman's family, and she regularly sees the woman's recommendations in her feed each week. The influencer has been promoting a new brand – and the brand is suddenly everywhere. Ibu Widya orders her baju hari raya (holiday clothing) in time for the holiday, pays the shipping fee, and waits for the package. When it arrives, she opens it in her bedroom. But what she takes out is not what she imagined to have purchased. The fabric is thinner and feels cheap. The cut is wrong and unflattering. The seams pucker and threaten to rip at next wear. But there is no time to find something else. She wears it, she is photographed in it, and the photographs preserve this memory for many years into the future.

Ibu Widya is not careless – far from it. Before purchasing, she prolongs the decision for weeks, because this purchase is a non-trivial one. She is also not naïve – she's aware that Indonesian ecommerce carries a high risk of fraud. She makes a perfectly reasonable decision based on the best information she has available to her. She does what the system has instructed everyone to do. Her criteria for choosing clothing are based on the reputation of the person recommending. And in Indonesia, reputation is usually stronger than contracts or courts, because social consequences arrive faster and more reliably than institutional justice.

But cruelly, the recommendation was not actually a recommendation – it was a position auctioned to the highest bidder to whichever brand was willing to pay the influencer the most. Ibu Widya's criteria for evaluating good clothing versus bad clothing have been alienated from clothing's physical reality. Her decision was sold before she made it. She does not know it was sold, and she cannot know her decision could be anything else. In the old mall, her mother showed her how to feel the cloth, inspect the seam, and ask the maker. But these evaluation mechanisms are no longer available to Ibu Widya. They have been supplanted by criteria the platform has trained.

Thinkers documenting the downward curve of clothing's quality haven't used Doctorow's word per se, but they've each documented different biomes that are all part of the same degrading environment – all ravaged by the same beast to be named. Dana Thomas' work traces the offshoring of American garment manufacturing [[6]]. Tansy Hoskins' work explains the supply chain through a Marxist lens [[7]]. Aja Barber identifies the consumer side of the alienation [[8]]. Sofi Thanhauser traces specific cloth through their material histories [[9]]. Kate Fletcher and Mathilda Tham build a vocabulary for the slow knowledge of garment use [[10]].

Despite its lack of a distinctly digital silhouette, the clothing industry has run Doctorow's curve through four seasons of its own. Spring lured consumers with bargain prices as domestic manufacturing was uprooted, and the system was good to its users. Summer accelerated the trend-cycle and rewarded manufacturers with disposability — consumers still bought cheaply, but bought more often, and the surplus shifted to the trend system itself. Autumn is the convergence we are in now: the consumer's decisions are sold to whichever brand pays an influencer the most this quarter, consumer literacy has collapsed, and the platforms and the industry have merged in their distribution logic. Winter is what we found in the first mall — pretty products on the shelves, but nothing worth buying. The brands that fill the first mall are merely names divorced from their factories, and the literacy that once allowed shoppers to see that difference has atrophied beyond usefulness.

Ibu Widya will choose another outfit next Hari Raya. She will be a year older. The influencer she trusts may still be in her feed, or she may have been replaced by a different woman. The brand will almost certainly be different. But the structure that delivered last year's regret will still be in place to deliver regret again this year. She will order, she will wait, and she will open the package in her bedroom. Whether she again unboxes disappointment depends on whether people other than her have undertaken the work this essay now turns its attention towards.

Ibu Widya's experience is the natural product of a convergence of market forces that work against consumers with compounding effects. The two arms of the beast – the hollowing of the marketplace and the shallowing of the consumer mind — meet in one body, in one bedroom, on one morning of the most important holiday of the year. Her disappointment is private, but her photographs are public. And the system that produced both has already sold her next decision to the next brand. Ibu Widya is not careless, and she is not unusual. She is what the system produces. The rest of this essay asks what real change actually requires, and where it could begin from within Indonesia's existing institutional landscape. The convergence is not an Indonesian phenomenon – this is happening in Lagos, Los Angeles, Manchester, and Manila – but perhaps Indonesia still holds the hope of restoring what was lost from memory back to the marketplace.

The warung, tukang besi, penjahit, toko kampung, and bengkel – these are not historical reconstructions, they are working systems under pressure. Developed nations desperately try to recreate what Indonesia still has in relative abundance. The slow-fashion movements in Europe and the United States are attempts to recover what was already lost two generations ago. Indonesia has a unique chance to defend rather than rebuild. And encouragingly, the seedlings of Indonesian political will clearly exist. But what does preservation actually require to take root?

The first essential component is to defend the marketplace. To that end, several institutional programs exist in Indonesia. Bank Indonesia's macroprudential inclusive financing ratio (RPIM) requires banks to allocate 30% of their lending to UMKM. This is a structural mandate aimed at exactly the producers this essay contemplates. Alongside this, the government's Kredit Usaha Rakyat (KUR) program subsidizes credit at 6% (3% for the smallest "super-mikro" tier) and guarantees it against default. The recently re-established Ministry of Creative Economy also aims to provide adjacent training and promotion. BI also actively curates UMKM through Karya Kreatif Indonesia, its flagship annual expo, and through the regional showcases hosted by its provincial offices throughout the year. The booths fill with wastra, kriya, coffee, and food. As an aside, the author has spoken at two of these events — one in Surabaya, one in Jakarta – and notes with bemusement that a great number of attendees can be observed wearing machine-produced, imitation batik that directly undermine the the very craft ecosystem and maker livelihoods that such events purport to support.

Moreover, this type of architecture still struggles with attributes that makes heritage producers different and imbue their products with an intrinsically artistic value. A high-end batik tulis atelier may spend three to six months on a single cloth. Months of skilled artisan labor and material costs are invested before the sale. There is no weekly inventory turning over. Conventional credit prices such a difference as risk: long tenor, soft collateral, and intangible value the bank cannot score. The producer either under-utilizes financing, or consignes their production cheaply to intermediaries that advance cash the bank will not. Islamic finance tradition contains a vehicle built for exactly this shape: salam, the pre-paid forward sale, in which a buyer advances the full price for goods to be delivered at a specified future date. Salam was developed centuries ago for the capital needs of farmers across a growing season. It maps cleanly onto a batik tulis maker across a wax-and-dye cycle. Salam could give heritage textile producers a financing vehicle that recognizes their actual production rhythm.

But financing for small enterprise mean nothing if those makers are physically relegated to crumbling and forgotten malls. The planning permission for new malls in Jakarta and Surabaya should be conditional on a meaningful percent of floor space reserved for UMKM (micro, small, and medium sized business) at protected rents. Mandates for small-vendor space in commercial development approvals help protect consumer physical access, but also restore consumer perception of products built for purpose, not merely for profit extraction. Next year, Ibu Widya buys her outfit from UMKM in part because of the psychological prestige conveyed by the maker's booth being in the same building as Hugo Boss, and also because she can feel the fabric, chat with the tailor, and find what fits. In doing so, she reclaims the knowledge required to contextualize her choices. She begins to intuitively understand that a logo printed on polyester has no objective value – at least not for her.

The second essential component is the gradual but methodical work of removing impediments upstream in production. Structural corruption that hides inside the legal framework – like a fungus threatening a copse of healthy saplings – is not easily fixed by protective legislation.

In my discussions with a founder of one of Indonesia's high-quality leather footwear brands – renowned worldwide for quality, durability, and repairability – he recounted a dark and yet strangely hopeful irony. As manufacturers, technically, their imports of high quality European leather should be duty-free. But the investment required to formally demand proper treatment under the official rules was simply too heavy a burden for a small company to shoulder (instead, they've invested that time and capital into building for Indonesian domestic tannery capacity). For a large multi-national conglomerate, informal payments to lubricate the Indonesian import/export machinery are barely a rounding error. The unglamorous but essential infrastructure of transparency in customs processes, improved accountability mechanisms, and public audit trails determine whether UMKM can barely survive or truly thrive. Protection without enforcement is theater. Small producers need both legal status and efficient enforcement of that status.

The third essential component is the active restoration of consumer literacy. But to be effective, it must be structural not merely aspirational.

Batik is a keen example: it is arguably one of Indonesia's most recognizable elements of cultural heritage. Wearing batik as formal office dress is widespread and, in some cases, an formally institutionalized practice. But a consumer survey showed that a meager 20% of Jabodetabek residents can identify authentic batik versus printed reproductions of motifs. This gap is not surprising. The Indonesian government's own definitions are somewhat inconsistent [[11]]. Consumers need truth-in-advertising for cloth and craft: mandatory labelling to distinguish real batik tulis and batik cap from printed reproductions.

This is the consistent thread towards which my conversations with batik artists inevitably turn. They need the market to grow, and they understand that to grow the market, consumers must be educated. How can a cloth that takes three months to draw, mask, dye, and finish compete with a machine printed imitation in the mind of a consumer with no ability to perceive the difference?

The France's AOC model for protected wine, cheese, and other regional crafts is highly instructive here. France has been successfully coupling product designation to geography and production methods for nearly a century. Indonesia already has the legal mechanism: indikasi geografis administered by DJKI (director general of intellectual property). What is desperately needed is the expansion of this regime to include heritage textile crafts, with serious enforcement muscle backing it up. The place to start is in the big box department stores of the first mall. Levying heavy fines on publicly-traded retail conglomerates represents both an administratively feasible and media savvy strategy. The headlines enforcement generates serve as an educating mechanism to restore consumer literacy. Batik Pekalongan, songket Palembang, tenun ikat Sumba, and tenun Bali Endek should all be protected with at least as much care and pride as Champagne and Roquefort are. This is not protectionism, it is the productive infrastructure of consumer literacy.

The final essential component is the work of telling the story. Structural reform is critical but not sufficient, because a culture that values knowing what you are looking at has a strong cognitive defense and innate resistance to compulsive junk-purchasing. And that defense is not easily breached – not even by digital platforms in the peak wintery fury of their extractive blizzard. Journalism, education, and public visibility of craft play a role here. Writing about cloth, naming the batik artist, and describing the mechanics of clothing are not hobbyist concerns. These build the cognitive infrastructure the system is depleting.

What expression will Ibu Widya's face wear next year? Will her scheduled disappointment arrive on time? Or will she regain the ability to perceive a different choice? And when she does, her tailor will be waiting for her – but in which mall will she find him? These depend not on whether the work is finished, but on whether it has genuinely begun.

References

[[1]] Doctorow, C. (2023, January 21). Pluralistic: Tiktok's enshittification. Pluralistic. https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/. Republished as "The 'Enshittification' of TikTok," Wired, January 23, 2023.

[[2]] Doctorow, C. (2025). Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

[[3]] Van Loo, R., & Aggarwal, N. (2023). Amazon's Pricing Paradox. Harvard Journal of Law & Technology, 37(1). The 29% figure for first-result vs. best-deal price difference originates here; cited and popularized in Doctorow (2025).

[[4]] Doctorow, C. (2024, June 28). Pluralistic: The reason you can't buy a car is the same reason that your health insurer let hackers dox you. Pluralistic. https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/28/dealer-management-software/

[[5]] Peterson, C., Sussell, A., Li, J., Schumacher, P. K., Yeoman, K., & Stone, D. M. (2020). Suicide Rates by Industry and Occupation — National Violent Death Reporting System, 32 States, 2016. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, 69(3), 57–62. Atlanta: U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. CDC analysis finds farming, fishing, and forestry occupations among the highest suicide rates of all U.S. occupational groups; for the link between agricultural-equipment monopolies and farmer financial distress, see also Farm Action's "Farm Machinery: Monopoly and the Right to Repair" (https://farmaction.us/farm-machinery-monopoly-and-the-right-to-repair/) and U.S. PIRG's Service Obstructor report (2023).

[[6]] Thomas, D. (2019). Fashionopolis: The Price of Fast Fashion and the Future of Clothes. New York: Penguin Press.

[[7]] Hoskins, T. E. (2014). Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion. London: Pluto Press.

[[8]] Barber, A. (2021). Consumed: The Need for Collective Change — Colonialism, Climate Change, and Consumerism. London: Brazen (Octopus); New York: Balance (Hachette).

[[9]] Thanhauser, S. (2022). Worn: A People's History of Clothing. New York: Pantheon Books.

[[10]] Fletcher, K., & Tham, M. (2019). Earth Logic: Fashion Action Research Plan. London: JJ Charitable Trust. Available at https://earthlogic.info.

[[11]] Standar Nasional Indonesia (SNI) 0239:2014, Batik – Definisi dan Istilah. Jakarta: Badan Standardisasi Nasional. SNI 0239:2014 defines batik as wax-resist dyeing on cloth — a process-based definition — yet trade-classification language and government promotional material in widespread circulation continue to treat batik as motif-based, creating definitional inconsistency.