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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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".
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?
[+] [-] booleandilemma|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] andirk|3 years ago|reply
I don't think he understands exactly what the sentiment behind "I don't care about money" is.
[+] [-] TheOtherHobbes|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] throwyawayyyy|3 years ago|reply
I remember a few years ago taking Ubers and thinking: "so cheap! But, well, this can't possibly last". And it didn't.
[+] [-] doubled112|3 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] lawrenceyan|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] thenerdhead|3 years ago|reply
Way more valuable than time or money. This is why people(especially buddhists) say to "be present in the moment".
Attention management is crucial in being able to find meaning in today's society. Neil Postman did a good job regarding Huxley's warning to the world.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/74034.Amusing_Ourselves_...
There's even some unique ideas like Zombies in Western Culture which talk about our lack of meaning and insatiability of consuming others "brains":
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35523766-zombies-in-west...
[+] [-] rg2004|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trgn|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ludwigindahouse|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] karaterobot|3 years ago|reply
> "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."
[+] [-] shanusmagnus|3 years ago|reply
link: https://veryinteractive.net/pdfs/simon_designing-organizatio...
[+] [-] thenerdhead|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abyssin|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] monkeydust|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] oars|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mc32|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neosat|3 years ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] nicbou|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] metacritic12|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] slim|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nonameiguess|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] hinkley|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rkagerer|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justlikethenazi|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] siavosh|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ElfinTrousers|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Finnucane|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sophacles|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulpauper|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MonkeyMalarky|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amelius|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mysterydip|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CatWChainsaw|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] giuliomagnifico|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] remir|3 years ago|reply
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".
[+] [-] toomim|3 years ago|reply
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!"
[+] [-] EGreg|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mistermann|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gammabetadelta|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] OkayPhysicist|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jscipione|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] scyzoryk_xyz|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] csdvrx|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cratermoon|3 years ago|reply
1 https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/download/51...
[+] [-] kloch|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] silisili|3 years ago|reply
Just ask you can't pay for most things with time, you can't with attention, either. But both can be converted to money, via real cash or subsidies...
[+] [-] heldrida|3 years ago|reply
Very good article!
[+] [-] cannam|3 years ago|reply
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?