Part Two: How Nuisance Streamers and Rage-Baiting Ate the Internet

October 22, 2026

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5 min read

Part Two: How Nuisance Streamers and Rage-Baiting Ate the Internet

In 1971, decades before the internet existed as most people know it, psychologist and economist Herbert Simon predicted that the growing gap between available information and our limited ability to process it would create a "poverty of attention." What was scarce, he argued, would become valuable. By the 1990s, former physicist Michael Goldhaber took this further, describing online spaces as places where "we will increasingly live our lives" and where attention itself would become "the most enduring kind of wealth." These predictions, as host Robert Evans and guest Jason Pargin discuss in the second part of this series, have proven eerily accurate—and they form the foundation for understanding why nuisance streaming and rage-baiting have become such profitable, self-perpetuating phenomena.

The Attention Economy and Its Winners

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What you'll learn

1 Part Two: How Nuisance Streamers and Rage-Baiting Ate the Internet
2 (04:30) **The Attention Economy as Foundation** - Robert and Jason establish the theoretical framework for understanding nuisance streaming
3 (08:48) **Elon Musk and Trump as Attention Economy Proof** - The wealthiest man and the president are products of attention, not traditional business success
4 (11:09) **Adam Todd Brown's Prescient Prediction** - Robert credits the first person who saw Trump's strategy clearly
5 (12:31) **Trump as the First Nuisance President** - The connection between political trolling and nuisance streaming is direct
6 (14:49) **The Irony-to-Racism Pipeline** - What starts as trolling for shock value becomes genuine bigotry
7 (17:44) **The Bandura Bobo Doll Experiment** - A 1961 psychology study explains how this behavior spreads

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Guests on this episode

Robert Evans Jason Pargin

Show Notes

Robert explains how live streamers went from pranks, to acts of insane violence and public cruelty, and eventually turned them into a lucrative industry.

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