Every system breaks when it becomes too good at what it’s built to do. Marketing, media, and politics all tuned themselves to maximise engagement — and succeeded so completely that engagement has stopped meaning anything. The graphs are still going up, but the signal is gone. We’ve filled the world with noise so efficiently that nobody’s actually listening anymore.This is what happens when a system perfects itself into uselessness. Everyone learned the same tricks — provoke, flatter, moralise, repeat — until the advantage disappeared. Outrage still sells, but it’s starting to exhaust its audience. The feed hasn’t fallen, but it’s beginning to creak — stretched between a population that’s tired of shouting and an economy that can’t function without the noise.AI didn’t start that collapse; it just sped it up. It’s the booster shot we didn’t ask for — flooding the market with flawless counterfeits, perfectly engineered sincerity, and infinite outrage on demand. And in doing so, it made authenticity scarce again. After years of trying to make digital life feel real, we’re watching reality regain its value.You can already see it happening at the edges. Vinyl sales are up. Independent bookstores are thriving. People are paying for live experiences they could just as easily stream. Even brands that built their empires online are opening physical spaces again. They’ve realised what the platforms still can’t: that presence, not reach, is what people crave. When everything is available everywhere, scarcity — real or symbolic — becomes valuable. The same logic will apply to news and marketing alike. The product that cuts through will be the one you can touch, attend, or trust.In marketing, this won’t mean abandoning AI, but learning where it belongs. The novelty of machine-made everything will wear off — like the hangover after a binge. We’ll still use it, of course, but selectively. The future isn’t human versus artificial; it’s about knowing when to automate and when to show up in person. The brands and creators that get this balance right — mixing precision with presence — will earn the only kind of attention that lasts: voluntary attention.The same goes for journalism. The audience no longer trusts the polished voice-of-God delivery, and for good reason. People don’t want omniscient narrators anymore; they want to see the receipts. The newsrooms that survive will be the ones that open the shutters: publish the source documents, admit what they don’t know yet, and show the edits that were made along the way. Trust will replace engagement as the core currency — a slower, less profitable, but far more sustainable metric.The Fork in the FeedWhat comes next — whether the web becomes more honest, more local, or just more fragmented — will depend on the world we build around it. The economic system shaping these platforms won’t stay static. AI is already starting to make parts of the workforce redundant, and how society responds will decide what kind of internet we get. Either we reconfigure our economies so people can afford to live well without endless work — or we double down on the current cycle of anxiety, overproduction, and digital noise. One path leads to balance; the other to burnout.And maybe — for the first time in decades — we have a chance to build something different. The end of engagement as we know it doesn’t have to mean the end of connection. It might be the beginning of a quieter, more direct internet — one that remembers what it was like before algorithms became the landlords of our attention. The tools to bypass them already exist: decentralised networks, peer-to-peer communication, and community-hosted spaces.When this social-media wave finally ebbs, the question isn’t whether there will be another — it’s who will control the tide. Will Big Tech manage to build a new model of dependence, or will we create something that feels more like the early internet — chaotic, human, unsponsored, and alive? Maybe the next phase looks less like an algorithm and more like a forum: chronological, imperfect, and refreshingly quiet.Because if our online lives change, our real ones will too. For two decades we’ve been living as if the rules of the feed applied offline — optimising ourselves, curating our choices, tracking our own performance metrics. But what happens when we stop? If we learn to value slower, smaller, more authentic interactions online, does that spill over into our cities, our friendships, our ambitions? Does life become less of a race to be seen and more of an effort to be present?There’s another way to see this transition: as an escape from technofeudalism. For years, a handful of corporations have owned and privatised not just the content but the very roads we travel on — the infrastructure of connection itself. We don’t rent space in their malls; we live there. Our economy, our culture, even our attention cycles have been absorbed into platforms that function like private nations with their own laws and currencies. Yet paradoxically, we now possess the tools to break free. The question is whether we’ll use them — or wait for the next empire to rise.Because if we stop living inside the feed, everything changes — including the economy that depends on us staying plugged in. What happens to global consumption when we’re no longer trapped in an infinite shopping mall disguised as a social network? What happens to our sense of worth when the metrics disappear? When attention stops being the engine of capitalism, what replaces it?In Malta, the same closeness that made outrage contagious could become an advantage. Authenticity isn’t a campaign here — it’s a side effect of proximity. If a brand fakes it, people will know. If a newsroom gets it wrong, the journalist will hear about it at the bar. The line between audience and author, consumer and brand, is paper-thin. If that intimacy became a model rather than a problem, could Malta become a prototype for a post-feed culture — local first, human first, algorithm optional?After the NoiseThat’s not to say social media will disappear — it’ll just stop being the centre of gravity. The future is likely to be messier and more fragmented. Think of a world where we each have a personal digital gatekeeper — an AI agent trained on our tastes, values, and tolerance for noise — filtering everything that tries to reach us. Your agent negotiates with brands and newsrooms directly. It knows what you want to read and what you’re tired of hearing about. It cuts out the outrage bait before it hits your eyes. The algorithm becomes personal again — a tool rather than a master.For journalism, this might finally be the reset it needs. Imagine publishing not to the mob, but to individuals — to feeds shaped by trust instead of outrage. Instead of competing for clicks, news could compete for credibility. In a million micro-feeds, truth might once again have a fighting chance.The future probably won’t be cleaner or calmer — just different. Less centralised, more uneven, sometimes slower, often stranger. But it might also be freer. And in that looseness, there’s hope.In the end, what comes after engagement won’t be a platform or a product — it’ll be a phase shift. A slow recalibration of what we value, what we share, and how we spend our finite attention. The feed may remain, but its power will fade. And if we’re lucky, we’ll learn to look up again — not for validation, but for each other.We’ve climbed this digital hill as far as it goes. The only way forward is down — through the noise, back into the real world. Whether we build another hill or something entirely new will depend on how ready we are to stop mistaking stimulation for meaning.•