We are now living in a new world where the cheque does not always follow the certificate and where the shortest distance between a young person and an income isn’t often now a resume, but a camera lens. 

Today, content is currency, attention is collateral and algorithms, not admissions offices, are increasingly deciding who gets seen, who gets booked, and who gets paid

Before someone says, ‘Creatives have always been doing this,” let us concede it plainly: Yes. Jamaica, for example, like many other countries around the world, has been a factory of hustle and cultural enterprise for decades.

The sound system culture was an attention economy before Silicon Valley gave it a name. Dancehall, comedy, street fashion, street photography, and even corner storytellers are illustrations of how performance has historically been transformed into livelihoods.

What has changed, however, is the earning infrastructure: The gatekeepers moved from promoters, studios, editors, and programme managers to feeds, platforms, and ranking systems, systems that scale a “moment” in days, not years. And the content volume is now beyond anything we have ever had to compete inside: YouTube says 20+ million videos are uploaded daily, and over 20+ billion videos have been uploaded as of January 1, 2026.  

So, when the Jamaican artistes sing songs glorifying “dunce”, and the country debates whether is celebrating ignorance or simply reflecting reality, many listeners hear the surface: the swagger, the shock value, the “dunce” as badge. But that is the easy reading. A deeper interpretation suggests the song simply reflects the culture we’ve created. Because “dunce” in Jamaica has never only been an insult.

It has been a social verdict, often delivered on young men from communities many Jamaicans have decided are “behind”. Yet the digital era has created a twist in the story as some of those same young men and women are not traditionally literate in the old sense, but they are digitally literate in a way that embarrasses many traditional gatekeepers of the creative spaces. Not just in Jamaica but also all over the world. Today, the so-called “dunce” understands platforms and virality and, more importantly, they understand that performance, raw, loud, unfiltered, (and everything else formal education systems teach us not to be) travels farther than perfection. Consequently, today, the digital world often rewards what the classroom punished.

The old rulebook told you to be measured, polished, and “proper”. The new rulebook says be noticeable, early, consistent and outrageous if you must. There’s no need for me to offer examples of this reality; it’s something we witness every day.  We desire it. Today, speaking boldly, sometimes aggressively, sometimes embarrassingly, sometimes inarticulately, can be a pathway for opportunity. Not because society suddenly became more enlightened, but because the marker for attention expanded beyond old standards of legitimacy. 

Look around Jamaica, and you will see the pattern in motion. Many artistes routinely stereotyped by society as “uneducated” amass audiences through nothing but a phone, a beat, and unapologetic expression. They did not wait for the validation. They manufactured it. 

And it is not only music. TikTok creators armed with comedy skits, street commentary, dance trends, and micro-drama are earning brand partnerships while entire institutions are still “planning a social media strategy” or teaching students about curated backgrounds and the right attire. Meanwhile, young men and women running WhatsApp business, sneaker drops, barbering showcases, bike-life videos, and small hustle pages are building microbrands, with more engagement than companies with full marketing teams. 

However, it’s important to note that influencing and being creative are not the same. A musician makes a song, a comedian writes a set, a filmmaker crafts a story. The influencer, at the highest level, is something closer to a distribution channel with a dace, a micro media company built on relationship, trust, habit, and repeat attention.

Brands do not invest solely in “talent”; rather, they pay for access to audiences that are engaged, trusting, and responsive. Consequently, influencer marketing has evolved into a structured commercial practice, defined as collaborations between prominent social media users and brands to promote products or services. And that is why money keeps following it. Global influencing is now a $32.55B industry (2025)and still climbing, part of a broader creator economy projected to approach approximately $480B by 2027, so it’s no surprise that influencing now sits among the most sought-after careers, with about 1 in 5 Gen Z adults saying they aspire to be full-time content creators.

This is where the “Dunce Cheque” moment becomes more than just entertainment. It turns into a public debate, delivered through rhythm and persona, about the transformation of status. In the old pre-COVID-19 world, literacy signalled competence, and competence signalled economic mobility. In the new GenAI world, visibility can simulate competence, and visibility itself becomes monetizable. Speaking about GenAI, today, this is an everyday assistant on WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok, everywhere. Faster than us, broader than us, scaling ideas instantly.

GenAI are the little helpers that can now write, edit, design, translate, caption, storyboard, schedule, optimise and generate variations in minutes. The tool does not care whether the user came from an elite university or the back bench of a corner. It only cares whether the user can prompt, iterate and publish. This is simple these days, especially with AIs that speak to you or just automatically adjust to desires based on the positioning of the mouth, like CANVA. 

Perhaps the real “dunce cheque” is not the glorification of ignorance. Perhaps it is a mirror held up to a society that still measures intelligence by the old yardstick, while the marketplace has already switched instruments. The truth is, we can learn from the very people we casually label as “dunce,” because many of them have mastered the one skill institutions keep underestimating: distribution. They know how to package a feeling, a phrase, a moment, how to turn ordinary life into a story, turn that story into an identity, and transform that identity into demand. That is sales. And that is exactly where the modern world is moving. 

The truth is, in the end, the future will not reward the “dunce” or the “scholar” by label. It will reward the people and the countries who can convert attention into value, convert value into trust, and convert trust into real demand. We are already in an attention economy where human attention is treated as a scarce commodity and can be accumulated and exchanged like currency. So, the real homework now is to learn the new literacy, GenAI, digital distribution, audience trust, and the tools that help you publish and iterate, because the market only pays when attention is turned into action through a clear, specific next step. Master that, and you can sell Jamaica’s stories, products, and services to the world; ignore it, and you risk becoming invisible while others cash the cheque.

Lloyd Waller is Professor of Digital Transformation Policy and Governance and Director of the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute for Social and Economic Studies