Whenever I see sentiments like this, or when I hear people with comfortable jobs in the tech industry talk about how money is imaginary, etc., it just comes across as being detached from reality to me.
It's easy to fall into this trap when money is abstracted away to being just a number you see on your smartphone, but money is very real, and if you don't have it, you can't pay rent or for heat in winter.
Reminds me of how my friend, who has a mogul of a father, and his now wife, who has a mogul of a father, are looking to buy a house. The moguls put a cap on the amount the house can cost, and my friend said to me about how the ones they want are out of that range, "I don't care about money, man. You know that."
I don't think he understands exactly what the sentiment behind "I don't care about money" is.
When we were young in our marriage, my wife and I would argue constructively about money things, and when I would tell her that we can't afford something (I am the accountant in the relationship) and try to talk to her about being content within our means, she would take offense saying something like, "I feel like you're trying to say I'm greedy, but it's not about the money to me!"
And I wasn't trying to imply that she was greedy, and I very much believe it wasn't about the money. The thing was she just grew up the youngest child (and a daughter at that) in an upper-middle-class family and she was pretty sheltered from cost, while I grew up in a working class family where money was tight. It was an odd disconnect.
The opposite is also weird when one person in the relationship came from nothing, and now you share comfortable finances: Conversations like "yes plane tickets will cost $500 more than bus tickets but we'll also have two more days of vacation", or "we don't have to shop around for the very best deal".
Yep, we've been there too. It's taken me a while to come around to spending more on things now that we have comfortable finances. That said, I'm pretty proud that we rigorously optimize our spending for the things that make us the happiest, and we save a lot for early retirement.
"It may not be about money to you, but it's definitely about money to the bank."
I grew up with fairly frugal parents. I mean, my dad had a great job as a software engineer, but we still wouldn't spend money we didn't have to. My mom often made our clothes (to our horror), we didn't waste any food, reused everything, and my favourite stuffed toy came from the trash.
I'm trying to instil similar frugal values on my kids, but it doesn't stick. My wife and I both have excellent jobs, and we really can afford to waste a lot of money, but I just don't think that's a healthy way to raise our kids. Unfortunately, our kids don't care. It's hard to instil these sort of values when money isn't tight.
Yeah, I didn't learn money management from my parents, I learned financial anxiety from our parents. I learned to fear scarcity. I didn't learn how to use money efficiently, I learned that I needed to figure out how to use money efficiently[^1]. If you are financially secure, I think the best bet for financially-secure parents who are trying to raise frugal kids is to teach gratitude and contentment. Teach them to look with compassion at people who are lower on the social ladder rather than looking up with envy. Maybe try to help them understand how precarious and insecure you feel when you're poor, but also how happiness is divorced from wealth--deep joy comes from relationships, the natural world, etc. The happiness from purchased things is fleeting and superficial. To summarize, before parents can teach kids how to manage money, I think parents need to build the emotional connection around "why they should manage money". At least that's sort of how it worked for me.
[^1]: This sort of contextualizes how I feel about student loan forgiveness--it's ostensibly there to help people in need, but I lived frugally and worked my way through my engineering degree to minimize the amount of loan money I needed to take out, while the overwhelming majority of my peers partied, skipped class, lived in the dorms, paid for meal plans and then ate out at restaurants all the time, and majored in unmarketable programs. They didn't work and they got money from their parents every week. I never resented them for being able to afford their lifestyle or anything, but loan forgiveness feels like it's mostly bailing out those spoiled kids in the name of helping poor kids (although I'm sure there are some poor kids who will benefit). Lots of poor kids didn't even go to school in the first place, and many who did were frugal. If this really were about helping poor kids, there are so many significantly better approaches.
And mind you, I benefit from loan forgiveness because frankly my wife was one of those spoiled kids (with lots of debt and an unmarketable degree) and we didn't pay off her loans because the interest rates were so low it was better to use the money for other investments, especially during deferment (which is why it also irks me when people refer to student loan interest rates as "predatory"--there's lots of predation in higher education, but it's not interest rates). But (and seems to blow a lot of minds) just because it benefits me doesn't make it right.
I’ve heard this statement used frequently in business. I think this statement is incomplete… what if instead you said something like “I don’t care about money as long as you get it done before the deadline”, wouldn’t that sound as reasonable? Think of money as a tool, when used responsibly could do good things. I see a lot of people being cuffed not spend money just because it sounds “expensive” but really if you 2x’d that spend then it’s money well spent.
Money is politics by other means. It's real to the extent that a certain kind of politics is real.
If you don't have enough to pay your bills it's not because there isn't enough energy for you to heat your home. It's because making sure you can heat your home /pay rent/eat isn't a priority for the people with the political power to make those decisions.
Isn’t it? The vast majority of people in the developed world have enough money for food and housing, and the powers that be work fiercely - if ineptly - to protect that. I’m not writing off the influence of power and wealth, but this sentiment just doesn’t seem empirical to me.
Not in the UK it isn't. The government expect people to use food banks (run by charities, mostly churches) to make ends meet. They recently implemented a tax cut for the highest income decile in the country at a rate disproportionately larger than the tax relief for other income bands. The poorest barely got anything.
The complaint is that by reducing taxes for highest incomes there are fewer resources for the state to address the wellbeing of its citizens. It is not that the poorest pay less tax, it is whether social services and other government programs like education, environment, etc. are cut as a consequence of lower taxes on the rich (note the difference from raising taxes - where the wealthiest have greater capital mobility and access to professional services to shield incomes from taxation, so increasing taxes can fail to raise anticipated revenues when things go the other way.)
The only difference between an argument against a tax reduction and an argument in favour of a tax raise is what you consider to be the status quo.
The situation is more symmetric than you think.
Greater capital mobility cuts both ways: when you lower taxes you can also attract more rich people and their capital.
(I am not saying that this effect will necessarily occur, only that capital mobility comes into play both when raising and when lowering taxes.)
Oh, of course, the real solution to these problems is to tax land and not income nor capital: you can't hide land nor can it leave the country. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax
At my age my father supported a wife and two kids on one salary and was able to purchase a home. With 2 salaries and no kids my wife and I cannot purchase a home.
Coming at this another way, money is only valuable because society and the world says it has value.
Money doesn’t do anything on its own. If I’m cold in the middle of nowhere, a pack of matches and block of wood have value to me at that moment, but my Canada plastic money doesn’t even make good kindling.
If the world seriously falls apart, what are your dollars worth?
This is nonsense. Money is very real because it’s an abstraction for materials, goods, services, etc. If governments fail and currencies collapse yeah sure that money can’t do anything for you, but idk about you but my USD is good just about anywhere and it does a lot for me.
You might make arguments that when the world falls apart you’ll be glad you outsmarted us by buying gold or some other thing society decided has value. But if the world falls apart I wouldn’t bet on gold being the best thing to trade with. I’d rather have a stockpile of medicine, ammunition, livestock, and a seed bank. Those things are hard to store until you need them for an apocalypse. I can assure you that if you tried to give me gold for ammunition in this scenario you’d be leaving with gold.
You could also argue that gold/silver would and is a good currency abstraction and I’d agree with you. In the absurd scenario that the world falls apart I wouldn’t count on merchants coming around that actually want gold/silver. So many useful things become useless in an end of the world scenario that it’s not worth worrying about.
Money is an abstraction for other people owing you a favour. If the world falls apart, more than a stockpile of any particular good, what I'd want is neighbours who were willing to help me out. And for that purpose, "stockpiling" social relationships - attention - seems like a better bet than stockpiling gold or USD.
Money is definitely an intersubjective reality - valuable only because people believe it to be so.
It might be a very stable concept in most instances, but various very real and extreme edge cases exist. (Regular inflation, Hyperinflation, local disaster, global disaster, bank runs, etc)
I quite liked the description of the invention of currency and beaurocracy in "Sapiens".
If the world falls apart your net worth will be composed only of things you can actually protect and defend, because everything else will just be taken away from you. The rule of law isn’t around to save you.
But that’s why if the world falls apart, the most valuable resource will be attention. If you have a lot of true followers, and they believe you know what you’re doing and that life could be better if they follow you rather than go it alone, then you will have many people to protect you and bring you resources, and in this way you can build your dominion in the post apocalyptic world.
If you’re a true prepper, you should be hoarding influence and attention. This will give you the best life possible at the end of the world.
I thought 'apocalypse world' had very good archetypes for the types of people who'd do okay in such a setting. 'cult leader' is one of the standard types.
When all this started going down I bought industrial engineering technologies I wanted to teach myself to use better - and got to work doing useful things with them. I'm unsurprised that these tools keep climbing in value. I feel like we are entering a world thats going to separate those who use technology to their advantage and those who are just being used by it - and it does not look good for the latter.
It’s not real in the sense that you shouldn’t need to have to worry about paying for heat in the winter.
Our rate of technological improvement has outpaced the ability of our existing economic paradigm to keep up, which is why we’ve ended up in this strange late stage pre post-scarcity landscape.
While I agree that we could probably support the entire human species comfortably given our current level of tech development, I don't think that can happen without a revolutionary change of the economic/social system, away from capitalism.
The problem is that that won't happen in a nice way, if at all. Systemic changes come about after cataclysms, not incrementally.
I think the nuance is that money is made up, not that it is imaginary. It is an abstraction that lets you live in a society that will let people be cold and hungry without feeling too bad about it.
Society is also made up. As are countries, corporations, laws, rights, and nearly everything that distinguishes a civilised society from barbarism. It's all made up, and yet it works.
Before money, people were also cold and hungry. I think money makes it easier to do something about it.
Agree, I just think the modern version of money makes it easier to hold the two ideas in your head that "I'm a good humanitarian" and "they can't afford a house because they are bad with money". Back in the old days they just plain thought poor people were inferior so they deserved poor treatment because of that.
This is just people not understanding databases (see: crypto as an extreme example)
Money is very real, it's just abstract in the sense that it's a unit in a database more than it's an object (it used to be both).
So sure, there are other units in databases that can be converted into money at a predictable exchange rate (often via code written by thousands of people sitting in information silos), but that doesn't mean that those units replace money in any holistic sense.
It's like saying money doesn't matter for TV networks, commercials viewership does (when ofc commercials matter b/c they lead to money).
It is the opposite. Money is confidence in an idea, go back and evolving over millennium with massive buy in. Working hard for pieces of paper or digits on a HDD would otherwise make no sense! Money is a more successful religion than the big religions.
Specifically the idea that the issuing government either won’t default on its debts any time soon, or that it’s big enough to dominate the world order enough that it can run up its debts without somebody taking a shot at the king. It sounds less religious and more like a game of king of the hill from this perspective.
I know Yuval Harari’s perspective is that money is the “first religion of man”, and I think it’s useful in the context of discussing how mankind evolved, but considering the modern world I prefer Ray Dalio’s perspective: “money is (are?) the house chips in the casino of whoever dominates the current world order.”
At the end of the day, it’s weapons and businesses that give value to money.
I want to respectfully disagree. Being present in the moment is not a result of valuing attention, but instead about letting the conversation about the past and the future go. About dropping the fears that were created in the past; the same fears that have us worry about the future. It's about letting go of fears and expectations. Letting go of the meaning we assign to the past and future. About really choosing the perspective that we wish to view the present through, rather than being at the effect of the stories we make up about the past and future.
You're describing the what, but if you ask a (meditating) buddhist how to this, they'll tell you to observe your breath (or some other concentration technique), which is an exercise to train your ability to manage your attention. Being (in the) present is a skill.
You are correct, but the parent is also correct. Meditation was a tool utilises by Buddhists (amongst others) to develop stable attention and focus (sans the spirituality of higher "levels" in meditation).
The book "The Mind Illuminated" goes into great detail about this
Being present and in the moment is meant to allow you to observe your feelings and thoughts. If you are present when feeling and thoughts arise you realise they were not there previously so logically they will pass. This allows you to stop clinging to them as if they are you and not some external phenomenon.
Neil Postman is the sort of public intellectual that no longer exists. Classically educated and proud of it, conservative in spirit, tolerant in disposition. The closest we have now is obnoxious dark web trolls whose attachment to liberality is mere affectation.
In the current political climate, Postman would have become an "obnoxious dark web troll" too.
Evidence of that is Rex Murphy, who shares many characteristics with Postman, including a similar reputation, who in these latter years, is in danger of being branded a "right wing troll", as a consequence of contemporary developments compelling him to write articles like this:
Thank you for sharing. I suppose you're right, maybe it's the nature of internet discourse that just pushes everybody, no matter how measured or nuanced, into a box.
Yeah I read that one, Irresistible, and a couple others. There was a new one called "Stolen Focus" but it looked like a best seller than something insightful.
Also the classic "Flow" talks about this problem of how people are being robbed of insight by never being able to get into the flow state.
> “Control of consciousness determines the quality of life.”
Ludwig Von Mises might want to introduce us to the idea that value is quite relative. As exemplified in the fact that many people definitely value money/things over attention even though it's one of the scarcest resource along with time. It's constantly devalued through our marketing even though everything rests upon it. The Achilles heel of marketing and public relations.
Attention is enabled by a complex process definitely not reduced to time and consciousness(diet, nutrients, randomness, conditions, psychology, etc)
This idea that there is a measuring ruler and if you are not measuring your life by it your are a zombie is propaganda from the so called Buddhists or the new age crowd who didn't know to leave the boat after they crossed the water.
Herbert Simon, "Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World", 1971:
> "In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention."
Thank you for the link. Another Simon quote from the panel discussion:
> In an information-rich world, most of the cost of information is the
cost incurred by the recipient. It is not enough to know how much it costs
to produce and transmit information; we must also know how much it
costs, in terms of scarce attention, to receive it.
This quote should be mandatory in handbook for how to write good emails.
Maybe it's me but my tolerance for long, unwieldy and directionless emails that require unecessary mental strain to untangle has diminished to the point where I pretty much ignore unless from high above.
I wish it were actually information people were consuming, instead it’s really crass entertainment. It think Andy Grove nailed it, it’s about capturing eyeballs.
The dichotomy between attention and money (in this context) is forced and not necessarily true. While it is true that attention is valuable, it is valuable primarily because there is an expectation that it can be monetized (either now or in the future). There can be some other minor use cases for attention being valuable for its own sake but those are a minority. The primary goal is to leverage attention (eyeballs) for some kind of advertising.
Attention , when it is hard to monetize it, is less valuable (again in the majority case). A case in point would be messaging apps such as Snapchat or WhatsApp compared to something like Pinterest or FB newsfeed. Attention in one of those systems is more economically valuable than others. It's true that WhatsApp was valued high because of usage/attention despite having no monetization but that was more of a strategic play to thwart competitive threat as well as the belief that they could monetize it in the future (as evident in the current direction that the messaging apps are going in)
There is the assumption that it can be monetised, but at some point it feels like wishful thinking: get billions of users then figure out a path to monetisation.
In reality, the right path is to establish a strong monopoly and enforce a toll road on everyone. Everyone buys through Amazon, but only sponsored listings sell. Everyone buys in-app, and there's a 30% cut for the app store. Everyone dates on Tinder, but only boosted profiles get dates. You get the idea.
Unfortunately, I think this is the future. We already had one reality TV star president. We have a TV "doctor," and a football player running for senate this year. I wouldn't be at all surprised if a lot of social media influencers end up in office. This is, of course, if the internet platforms remain relatively open.
The other scenario (and I think more likely) is that the internet media platforms will use the political power that their gatekeeper status confers on them to promote their own narrow interests. They will form their own content arms which will be algorithmically favored, and cut the old legacy media gatekeepers out entirely.
Not just the future, more like the status quo. There is a centuries long history of business tycoons buying media outlets for their own purposes. Social media platforms and influencers are just a new flavor.
To some extent but the unprecedented reach and real time factor of social media, along with the precise targeting and personal data archives from Stasi’s wet dreams makes this really a new era rather than simply more of the same, in my opinion.
Been happening long before the present century and long before Trump. Reagan, Schwarzenegger, Bill Bradley, Jack Kemp, Jesse Ventura, Al Franken, Sonny Bono.
But attention has been much more monetizable than thought in the 1990s. Nearly all forms of attention find some way of getting monetized, and this near-fungibility is surprising.
Otherwise, it's tautologically true that "the currency of the new economy is X, to the extent X can be monetized" for all values of X.
You're not wrong. But that's not how the headline pitches the article. It specifically says 'the currency of the new economy won't be money'; hence my comment.
Hmm your right that the headline says that. But I think to read the article generously, "money" means explicit money, like pay per read, or microtransactions, or pay per app.
To that extent, it is surprising how few explicit payments I make per week on the Internet (Amazon, Instacart, Uber?) yet hundreds of companies get cents of my attention (Google, Facebook, TikTok, the tons of content marketing companies Google sends traffic to, etc).
it is valuable primarily because there is an expectation that it can be monetized
your argument is circular. you are defining the value of attention in terms of money, then you dismiss defining it as a currency because (my interpretation) it is an asset or a good. it's like saying that the value of an apple lies in it's monetisation, if nobody buys it it means it has no value
attention has value because it's a resource. there's only number-of-people-on-earth quantity of attention at each moment to extract. if you don't extract it it's gone. you also need to compete for it because there's not enough for everybody.
the good news is attention is probably the less discriminating resource on earth. every human has exactly the same amount of it*
*caveat : the fact you have an equal amount of attention does not imply you can manage it optimally.
It's not always about being monetized. Politicians command attention in order to win votes, and as most people running for office were already rich and are doing it more for ego than to get even richer, I don't believe money is often the motivation. Sports teams seem like another possible counterexample, where being in a larger market with a more prestigious history and larger fanbase can attract better players in free agency, which may lead to more money, but may not, and I again don't believe many of the owners, who were already rich well before they ever bought a team, are necessarily in it to get even richer. They just really like winning and also have enormous egos. Some celebrities will command attention even to the point of losing money. Witness what Kanye is doing right now, though you can argue in his case and probably others what we're seeing is mental illness, but pathological motivations still count as motivations.
You might say these are a minority of cases compared to businesses trying to command eyeballs so they can sell you stuff, but I'm really not sure that proportionality stays the same when you take the entire human experience into account. My keenest memories of people trying to command lots of attention are from primary school, and kids weren't interested in being class clown or the most popular because they expected to be able to sell you anything. Popularity was its own reward. Commanding attention is plenty intoxicating all on its own.
And you're making the mistake of equating money and power. Power gets you money, but money doesn't necessarily get you power. It can take generations for New Money to be treated as a peer in some very important circles.
For all the titanically, record-setting dumb stuff Trump has said, he was right about one thing. Filing for bankruptcy (three times?) didn't make him poor. He just needed to collect more favors denominated in cash than he gave out in order to get back on his feet. Influence is not taxed, and for all the noise we make about taxing the rich fairly, that will only slow them down a little.
There is an exchange rate between attention and influence. Yes those systems are fueled by money, but in the same way a heat pump is fueled by electricity - highly leveraged.
There was a comment here by a throwaway account pointing out attention has always been a currency (think courtship rituals in nature and the "world's oldest profession"). Wasn't mine, and got flagged to death presumably for being too crass, but I thought it kind of provoked thought from an unexpected angle.
This is why a good physics education is important... Under certain conditions the standard model includes several spontaneous transformations from eyeballs -> cash. The trick is getting a critical mass of eyeballs for the conversions to be frequent enough to pay the bills.
I hope an RPG designer read your joke. I'd love to see a "transmute eyeballs to gold" alchemical recipe show up. Would be hilarious. Especially in an MMORPG where it's crucial to their bottom line to keep players' attention for as long as possible.
When you have enough eyeballs they will collapse into a plasma state from their own mass and then you can harvest that into work or electricity then sell that for money
I'm talking about literal eyeballs transmuting to cash as if it's the result of particle physics. I don't think you should read anything more than "its a joke" into my comment.
Facebook and Instagram showed that eyeballs can be very lucrative . The old web 1.0 sites simply didn't have good ways to monetize it , unlike today. Mobile advertising didn't exist, neither did tracking and big data.
This may sound like a tautology, but those eyeballs were only "lucrative" because they could be converted to money. As the person you were responding to implied.
I remember people talking about internal rivalries at IBM and Microsoft over user's eyeballs. Every app wants to be the main productivity app., king of the eyeballs!
That's an oversimplification of Google's business model vs something like Facebook. Facebook is selling pure eyeballs because their ads are intrusive and unsolicited, with the somewhat flawed assumption that just because someone talked about something, they are keen to buy it. Google is selling purchase intent. When someone specifically asks Google where to find something, they have far higher purchase intent than if they simply talked about it on their page.
Right as I was reading this title on the front page, I got an amazon prime video push notification popup (that I don't recall permitting before) to tell me about an upcoming sports event I could watch live.
The article is a (correct) premonition. Advertising companies have already more than half of our day with smartphones and TV, when we will use smart glasses and self drive cars the circle will be closed.
Ultimately, it is more about influence than attention itself.
You can see how some thoughts and new expressions spread like viruses nowadays. The term "Quiet quitting" being one recent example as it seems like every LinkedIn influencer and OpEd are talking about this thing as it's widespread and the "new reality".
> You can see how some thoughts and new expressions spread like viruses nowadays. The term "Quiet quitting" being one recent example as it seems like every LinkedIn influencer and OpEd are talking about this thing as it's widespread and the "new reality".
One way you could characterize our current information environment is as an Eden for memes like this. There are few predators, and the necessities of life are abundant.
This was the first approach to measure the Economics of Attention, quantitatively. To do so, we define a new type of utility function, that can be measured with a new type of experiment that you can run via large-scale A/B tests, and lets you say things like "The new UI for Facebook is 6¢ per second worse than the old one!"
When swarms of bots are more valuable than human visitors, and control capital, then the "attention economy" will look very different.
Unlimited swarms of Bots can already make "helpful and constructive comments" that are upvoted by other people, thanks to GPT-3. 99% of comment interactions are passive, not an interactive Turing test. And the bots can be trained to never cuss or pick fights with people. Mission was fucking accomplished: https://xkcd.com/810/
You won't see it coming, but the bot accounts will start to outnumber people online until 10 years from now humans represent a vanishingly small amount of content and "social capital". Just like on wall street, the bots have replaced human traders. It happens gradually.
And eventually, they'll control the money online, too, for various tasks. You'll be working for a DAO maybe, but it'll be some menial job -- the way rich people hired peasants throughout history to do menial works. Until those are replaced, too, in a race to the bottom.
That is what humanity is constructing for itself. Because AI innovation cannot be stopped.
AI innovation cannot be stopped. But the assumption that we just have to hand over all the world's wealth to whoever controls the AI is far from a given. In a world where human labor accounts for a vanishingly small portion of what it takes to support an individual, why should we structure the economy around pretending that 100% employment is still necessary, or even desirable?
Capitalism gets uglier and uglier the more the supply of human labor outmatches the demand. In a world run by machines, it would be very hard to argue that Capitalism's value out weighs its cost.
On Halloween Day in 1517 Martin Luther put up his 95 Thesis on the door of Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany. He expected an academic debate among clergy. At that time the Roman Catholic Church had such a stranglehold on the courts, media, education, and financial and political power that there was no way that a revolution of ideas could even be imagined to succeed.
But thanks to the printing press this all changed as Martin Luther’s 95 Theses spread across Europe making Luther the first widely recognized public figure in history. We call that period the Reformation today and it was the beginning of the end to the Catholic Church’s dominance.
In a similar fashion, the NWO has a stranglehold over courts, media, education, financial and political power and we have entered a new Digital Reformation that just as it was inevitable for the Catholic Church to lose its power during the previous Reformation, it is also inevitable that the NWO will lose their power in the new digital Reformation that is currently happening. Only this time, the Reformation is global and it’s happening a lot faster.
This is a shorter version of Goldhaber's full argument, from "The attention economy and the Net"[1]l, written for a popular audience. Goldhaber wasn't saying that money won't be real, but that there will be those who can command attention in ways that are, but need not be, convertible to money in the ordinary sense. It's definitely a driver behind ad-supported Internet services and mobile devices. The companies working off this are converting the attention of their users, enticed by clickbait or algorithmically-generated recommendations, to audiences delivered to advertisers and sellers, who then exchange money for the attention brought to them.
At first it seems like the author got this prediction horribly wrong, except almost everyone does have one or more social media accounts which is the modern equivalent.
It seems as if the idea is quite literal - that attention may become what you need in order to support yourself, a currency, not just something you can exchange for money somehow if you're lucky. Unless I'm missing something, there's no physical mechanism suggested by which this could work - who maintains you, who feeds you, who feeds them, etc. I wonder what the author imagined?
Doubt. Attention is definitely important but as I keep saying; the value of your contribution is not based in opportunity cost but rather the dependency structure. If many people are providing you with attention then that is making you an important dependency in some sense but someone who maintains critical infrastructure is also worth alot, even if no one pays attention.
I posted this on a different topic recently and it's apropos again: I'm currently reading Tim Wu's "The Attention Merchants" about the history of advertising and can't recommend it enough. It's informative, thoughtful, and well-written, but not a happy or encouraging story, alas.
This becomes interesting only when we discuss ways of quantifying attention. It's not money until you can define a unit of attention that is interchangeable with other units. Until then it's something we know has value... But it's not money.
Also, so many companies steal extra cash by tricking us into not fully cancelling our subscriptions...I would love to see a class action lawsuit using website analytics to reprimand companies using these dark UX patterns. This is attention criminality and we already have the data to prove it!
Isn't that datapoint an exception that proves the rule? I note that a homeless person receiving acclaim and the issue of homelessness receiving attention are orders apart.
The problem here is that Netflix / Disney / Youtube won, but politicians aren't worrying about Netflix. They barely worry about Youtube because it is less overtly political.
The currency of the future is the currency of the past - the prevailing story, the mental model that people hold and fit their evidence in.
That mental model varies hugely - it provides the difference between Republicans and Democrats, between Autocracy and Liberty. Polls show the biggest divide based on college education - the models picked up or more likely challenged and discarded in higher education provide a stark differentiator for modern voting trends.
Control the mental model, and the facts hardly matter.
Money is attention though, and the reverse. Companies spend tons of money to get the attention of customers. More content/stuff means that getting attention is harder.
OT but does anyone else find that pages from Condé Nast publications such as Wired and Ars Technica constantly crash on iOS Safari? I have a few ad-blocking and QoL extensions such as AdGuard and StoptheMadness installed, and also use NextDNS, but disabling these doesn’t seem to help. Just me?
It's easy to fall into this trap when money is abstracted away to being just a number you see on your smartphone, but money is very real, and if you don't have it, you can't pay rent or for heat in winter.