I'll take the opportunity to drop one of my favorite quotes from Herb Simon (Turing award and Nobel prize winner, artificial intelligence pioneer, father of behavioral economics, founder of CMU's Computer Science department):<p>"""
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 and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it. (Simon 1971.)
"""
It seems like there's something darker and more perverse at play here. I'm not saying it's necessarily organized, but it's a dangerous dynamic.<p>It like everything is done to prevent people's mind to be at peace and to relax. The constant noise and audio/visual pollution we see everywhere is deeply troubling.<p>You cannot go to a simple store without some music being played, often very loudly for no reason.<p>I went to my parent's house the other day and the TV was on. I had to turn it off so we could have a normal conversation like normal people do. The TV was constantly pulling our attention on some stupid crap like ads or some garbage program that tries to polarize people.
Attention > Time > Energy > Money<p>There's always a cost when it's our attention. We've been in a war for our attention for many years. What I don't understand is why everyone puts emphasis on social media and not digital media in general? Television held the crown for many years and still does.<p>Read Jerry Mander and his thoughts about advertisements. You'll never think about them the same when you realize they are implanting into your head and you can never get them out.
In UI design, the user's attention is limited and valuable. I'm always doing things to minimize distractions and emphasize key information. The common problem is that there's so much information/data/content to offer that most people want to show everything.<p>However, revealing everything spreads the user's attention in every little area. There is no concentrated focus on any one thing. As a result, the user doesn't really absorb what they're reading deeply. They don't absorb information in a detailed way because there's something else they have to click around the corner.<p>To improve human attention designers have to say no to displaying certain things and focus on the few that's essential. This is easier said than done, but needs to be done.
I find the arguments under "But how is this different from traditional advertising?" very unconvincing. They provide examples as to what is different about social media advertising, but no convincing reason why traditional advertising wasn't also treating attention as a commodity.
Talk about being late to the party.
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_economy" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_economy</a>
> three seconds of the time of a 25- to 28-year-old male with a Bachelors degree in a STEM subject from a state college, an interest in travel to the Baltic countries, centre-right political leanings, and a credit score between 650-720. Facebook can also ensure that those three seconds are sandwiched between a message from his mom and a holiday photo from a potential love interest<p>Haven't there been a number of studies/articles written about how Facebook/Google sometimes really suck at delivering ads to the correct people that ad-buyer's ask for? Anecdotally, I've gotten ads for burger shops in Chicago while living in California.<p>The above fear mongering, worst case claim, makes it real hard for me to take this guys philosophical /ethical break down seriously.
The Marxist definition of "commodity" is a useful one, but doesn't do full justice to the nature of the problem. Attention is a commodity in the same way that corn and other raw materials are commodities: it's subdivided into <i>abstract units</i> for sale (and speculation), entirely divorced from the underlying asset (Joe Schmoe on Facebook) until the moment of redemption.<p>Commoditization is (arguably) a very good thing: it allows the market to make stable pricing decisions (at various risk levels) without having to worry about the <i>exact</i> load of corn (or human attention units) showing up right when needed. But it's also a fundamentally obfuscative force: the commoditizing party is incentivized to lie about the underlying asset's value. Advertising exemplifies this to a greater extent than agriculture: we don't really know what attention <i>is</i>, and so it's much easier (and more profitable) to misrepresent to buyers.<p>Subprime Attention Crisis[1] is a really fantastic analysis of the attention market, this specific sort of commoditization, and its latent risks.<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.fsgoriginals.com/books/subprime-attention-crisis" rel="nofollow">https://www.fsgoriginals.com/books/subprime-attention-crisis</a>
This is an old and tired take -<p>The more interesting thought (and equally as unoriginal) is 'The Internet' has effectively commoditized human attention. The commoditization happens because most knowledge easily accessible. This changes your attentive value from raw ability to gather information, the old regime, to the ability to create and synthesize across domains.<p>I'm interested to see if this means we see fewer 'great entrepreneurs' and more bootstrapped businesses in the $10-500m revenue range built by people who can learn to be a solo-developer/mercenary leader with ruthless business sense.
While I agree with the authors sentiment, I do not think there is a difference in kind between TV advertising and social media advertising. I think it is a difference in scale. With the amount of data points a program can collect on user behaviour and identity, it becomes much easier to tune advertisements. This happens in TV as well (polling, viewership stats, demographics, focus groups) but obviously nowhere near to the same level of breadth and depth someone like Facebook can achieve.
I was about to engage with this article seriously... Until I read 'metal health crisis'. Really hope Polyphia and Jamie Christopherson make it out OK. Thoughts and prayers.
World After Capital by Albert Wenger (USV) reaches a similar conclusion:<p><a href="https://worldaftercapital.org/" rel="nofollow">https://worldaftercapital.org/</a>
Title should be updated to "Marxist commodity".<p>Any Renascence courtesan (or tribal leader) could have told you that human attention is valuable. The difference now is that attention is quite nearby fungible, and near-readily exchangeable for dollars and cents. Just wait until eye-tracked advertising takes off.
Which is why one block yourself from most MSM and social media which is the primary harvesting system. Just say no to all of it! Ration it if you must use it at all - like having a brandy from time to time but never every day.
My attention is a commodity and I should be able to set the price. Attention theft is legal and rampant.<p>Instead of advertisers setting targeting me, I should be able to target them (when I deign to pay for something with my attention).
A related post and discussion: “User Engagement” Is Code for “Addiction”<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26153331" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26153331</a><p>archive of OP: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20210216125517/https://craigwritescode.medium.com/user-engagement-is-code-for-addiction-a2f50d36d7ac" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20210216125517/https://craigwrit...</a>
>The existence of social media companies has made two changes to society's ethics here: first, they have convinced people that connections with people “they otherwise wouldn’t be able to connect with” is a product that can only be produced by for-profit corporations.<p>I'd donate to a non-profit (or benefit corp) version of facecrook. Without paying their industrial psychologists to figure out how to steal more of my attention, the costs to run would be reasonably affordable for a world that is getting sick of FB.
"Has become"? It has been a commodity ever since we became tribal. It's just we've gone from a 1:1 "give your attention to my idea and work together with me and you'll benefit in these ways" to a 1:10-50 "I am the tribe's leader" to 1:* "I am a megacorporate entity"
As has been the case since the first tribe had that first fateful discussion about the best methods for hunting or fire making or whatever, in a cave, many moons ago
I think the idea of attention being commodity is mostly looked at through a pejorative lens but I wonder if it's the beginning of the next stage of human evolution were boredom no longer has value and maybe thats a good thing?<p>I haven't thought about this alot and I'm very curious shat other on here might think about this idea.
We were just discussing this at work. Attention and time are worth more than money. Just ask all of us who are running the daily operations while execs are too busy to talk to us. If you want to send an email that is longer than a tweet, then it's not going to be read.
my old take is that money as such is a long-tailed weighted average between physical energy & mental energy (energy needed to modify belief structure & spring action). Attention is just the 'write head' to direct that energy. The interesting thing is that if physical energy becomes cheap as in we went from animals->wood->coal->petroleum->(maybe)solar->(possibly)fusion then its reasonable that money as a representation of change/energy only leans heavier on the human side.<p>I dont see this as inherently bad but actually a sign of progress. the things I detest are basically perversions of attention related to some hack in our attention mechanism, for instance businesses that exploit peoples gambling addiction (or addiction of any kind).
human attention has always been a commodity. Look at historical FM, AM, broadcast TV advertising.<p>companies like nielsen made attempts to quantify and measure actual viewership, hard to do in the 1-way-analog-broadcast era.<p>Big difference now is that every social media thing has its own app that can specifically track ever click, every scroll, every like, viewing time per image and page, on an extremely granular basis.<p>Look at why reddit is trying <i>so hard</i> to steer people into using their app rather than use it through a browser.<p>ultimately the revenue stream for these app based social media things comes from the company selling advertising to you, of course. it's just much more targeted now than in the analog broadcast era.
> No one asked for or choose those changes. There wasn’t a town hall meeting where Mark Zuckerburg asked people if they wanted to know what their 3rd grade friends now think of Donald Trump; no one took a vote and decided "yeah, that’d be neat!". These changes were thrust upon society by new technologies and economic forces without anyone’s consent or forethought.<p>They weren't thrust on us, and we did choose those changes. The information and the implications of that information were available to everyone from the beginning. I quit Facebook and Twitter in 2007ish because it was obvious where social media was going, and I'm not particularly smart, prescient, or well-informed. Nor was I alone in coming to that conclusion: many people were saying and writing this from the beginning. People didn't listen, because they liked it at the time. Even now, when so much has happened, billions of people still continue to choose to use social media, claiming they don't have a choice in the matter. I'm not saying they're bad for making a different choice than me, but it is <i>obviously</i> a choice.
It's funny how the comment section here is already prime example of people having v̵e̵r̵y̵ ̵p̵o̵o̵r̵ no attention management skill. How about we stop lamenting the obvious and start thinking about how we could solve the problem? Theoretically it should be a non-issue since (in theory) every disturbance can be overcome by applying adequate willpower (and abundance of information is probably much harder to create then abundance of willpower - or so I think but i don't see any obvious reason for why it would be any other way; took us about 5000 years to create the internet, but the will to do something great clearly came first - otherwise there wouldn't be a internet, duh!). I see a general conflict here with how our society functions as a whole. Our institutions, everything per default is already designed around stealing our attention. Other than eastern religions, abrahamism is less concerned with letting it's adherent find balance and inner peace in a tumultuous world, it's more concerned with keeping you entangled in a constant struggle within, with yourself, and with god or something. With corporations it's the same, except it's about consuming products now. If we delete this, we will probably revert back into the stone age and if we let it be and add too much willpower there is a chance that our civilisation becomes uncontrollable.<p>Psychology knows these concepts: Volition and executive functions.
To fix the lack of the former Wikipedia suggests: Nothing, and for the lack of the latter it suggests CBT ( cock and b.., I mean cognitive behavior therapy) a.k.a nothing again, since cognitive behaviour therapy is a pseudoscientific scam that does not work. Also: "More research is required to develop interventions that can improve executive functions and help people generalize those skills to daily activities and settings." Wow, yeah, that is totally the reason for why there are no solutions for this! We just haven't done enough SCIENCE-ing, that's it folks! S C I E N C E!<p>So, I'm pretty open for new ideas here. Maybe an actual neuroscientist could chime in and lecture us about how our neuronal circuits work together to create attention, how the SAS works or something and how we could improve it. But I suspect my attention span is to short and I wouldn't be able to follow along anyway. Welp...
Marxist here; I wrote a book about this in 2018 after having written essays about it for years. In my book Custom Reality and You, I asserted that "attention is currency," and that it exists in a sort of abstract market (which has gradually become more formalized through the years as social metrics become more standard). Marx also posited money as "the ultimate commodity," and I very much agree with this article.
there's a lot of pieces like this but one thing that always stands out to me is the sort of 'half-Marxist' nature of the critique<p><i>"But this business model is not inevitable, nor is Marx correct about there being one and only one ethical system that results from a given mode of production. If we, as a society, made a conscious decision on how we wanted to live, in particular, if we decided that we valued new and more interpersonal connections without our local communities, then we could use those same market forces to encourage lots of such connections to happen"</i><p>If you're already starting with Marx you ought to take him seriously. The author owes us an explanation as to why Marx is wrong when he recognized that our values are the product of our material relations, and that we do not just wish them into existence as we please. You can't go pre social media any more than you can go pre-industrial. In Marxist analysis, the market forces use you.<p>If you're going to keep one aspect of Marxism stick with the materialism, not his theory of value.