In 2002, philosopher Geydar Dzhemal foresaw a future where money disappears and attention becomes the new economy. A vision of the digital world, control, and the coming collapse of democracy.
In this prophetic 2002 lecture, philosopher Geydar Dzhemal sketches the coming transformation of economy, power, and human existence.
He imagines a world without money — where a person earns not by labor, but by attention: by engaging with digital flows, games, and interactive systems.
Those who disconnect from the network lose access to consumption itself.
Dzhemal calls this new order the economy of projects, run by technocrats and controlled through informational streams rather than material production.
He foresees the end of democracy, the shrinking of freedoms, and the rise of an oligarchic global system, in which humanity is divided into two castes:
the connected and the excluded.
From the crisis of oil to the exhaustion of Marxism, from the fall of the working class to the reign of surveillance — Dzhemal reads the digital age as the final mutation of capitalism, where meaning, not labor, becomes the ultimate currency.
Who Spoke Before Dzhemal — and Why He Was Still Ahead of Everyone
Geydar Dzhemal’s 2002 lecture “The Digital Future” sounds prophetic today because it articulated the logic of the attention economy, surveillance capitalism, and post-human transformation — fifteen years before those ideas went mainstream.
Here’s what he foresaw and how it compares to those who came before him.
🕯️ What Dzhemal Said Before Anyone Else
- Money will disappear — attention will replace it.
He imagined a world where people “earn” not through labor but through time spent online, feeding and interacting with information flows.
Today’s social media, streaming platforms, and gamified apps are precisely that system — monetized attention as labor. -
Technocrats will replace the working class.
Dzhemal foresaw a “self-reproducing system controlled by a narrow elite,”
a description that now perfectly fits data capitalism and the algorithmic oligarchy. -
Democracy will fade as digital control expands.
“The rise of the information society coincides with the disappearance of freedoms,” he said —
long before surveillance, social scoring, and behavioral monetization became daily reality.
🧩 Who Came Before Him
🧠 1960s–1980s — Early Prophets of Media and Spectacle
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Marshall McLuhan (Understanding Media, 1964): said that attention is the real commodity and media reshape human perception.
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Guy Debord (The Society of the Spectacle, 1967): showed that capitalism turns life into imagery and spectatorship.
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Jean Baudrillard (1970s–80s): described the world of simulacra — where we exchange not goods, but signs of attention.
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Italian post-Marxists (Negri, Virno, Lazzarato): theorized cognitive labor, where thinking and communication become sites of exploitation.
🧮 1990s — The Network Thinkers
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Richard Barbrook & Andy Cameron (1998, The Californian Ideology): warned that the internet wouldn’t liberate humanity but reproduce capitalism in digital form.
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Manuel Castells (The Information Age, 1996–1998): mapped the new structure of network power — control over informational flows.
Yet all of them spoke in sociological or technological terms.
Dzhemal went further — he made it metaphysical.
He saw the digital shift not as a new economy, but as a mutation of the human condition.
🔥 Where Dzhemal Went Beyond Everyone
No one before him said so explicitly that:
“In the future, a person will gain access to life only through the interface.”
He recognized that digitalization is not a tool — it’s a new ontology,
a world where man is replaced by his attention,
and existence itself becomes interaction.
This was not futurism — it was eschatology.