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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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?
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!"
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.
155 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 189 ms ] threadI do not think it means what you think it means.
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.
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.
> "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."
link: https://veryinteractive.net/pdfs/simon_designing-organizatio...
> 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.
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.
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)
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.
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).
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.
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.
Pick your poison.
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.
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.
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.
Any evidence of this?
https://archive.ph/RkwhK
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.
money, OTOH, has a near unlimited supply. and when you come close to have it all you can persuade the Fed to print some more.
attention != money
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...
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...
The book "The Mind Illuminated" goes into great detail about this
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.
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.”
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:
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/rex-murphy-the-yaniv-outrag...
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".
Ah, the OG definition of meme
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.
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?
Unfortunately, the way you exchange attention for actual currency you can use to buy fuel or build buildings or pay staff is via advertising.
In the process we gave immense power to the largest advertising companies, Google and Facebook/Meta.
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!"
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.