[HN Gopher] The currency of the new economy won't be money, but ... ___________________________________________________________________ The currency of the new economy won't be money, but attention (1997) Author : skaldic Score : 219 points Date : 2022-10-26 16:20 UTC (6 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.wired.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.wired.com) | EGreg wrote: | 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. | gammabetadelta wrote: | welcome to the new dystopia, it just like the old dystopia but | with bots | OkayPhysicist wrote: | 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. | svachalek wrote: | Have to, no. But who would stop it? Corporations are | basically the beta prototype for AI overlords, and there's | practically no complaint. | mistermann wrote: | In a very real sense, human beings themselves are bot-like, | from a scientific perspective anyways. | paulpauper wrote: | 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. | karaterobot wrote: | 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." | thenerdhead wrote: | To add onto this. The poverty of attention means not paying | enough attention to oneself. Which is a modern | "meaning/identity crisis". | [deleted] | oars wrote: | Great quote, thank you. | mc32 wrote: | 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. | shanusmagnus wrote: | Thank you so much for this quote! The paper it's from is | exactly what I needed right now. | | link: https://veryinteractive.net/pdfs/simon_designing- | organizatio... | monkeydust wrote: | 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. | abyssin wrote: | This is such a stimulating quote! It sounds like a promise that | it's possible to regain some peace in the middle of a deluge. | neosat wrote: | 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) | slim wrote: | 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. | extantproject wrote: | > every human has exactly the same amount of it | | Any evidence of this? | | https://archive.ph/RkwhK | nicbou wrote: | 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. | Swenrekcah wrote: | Also if you've got enough attention then forget about direct | monetisation and go straight for political power. | fallingknife wrote: | 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. | | Pick your poison. | merely-unlikely wrote: | > Unfortunately, I think this is the future. | | 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. | Swenrekcah wrote: | 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. | listenallyall wrote: | Been happening long before the present century and long | before Trump. Reagan, Schwarzenegger, Bill Bradley, Jack | Kemp, Jesse Ventura, Al Franken, Sonny Bono. | metacritic12 wrote: | 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. | neosat wrote: | 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. | metacritic12 wrote: | 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). | cptnapalm wrote: | Perhaps the dotcom crash altered some opinions with respect | to the need to monetize? | nonameiguess wrote: | 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. | hinkley wrote: | 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. | darkteflon wrote: | OT but does anyone else find that pages from Conde 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? | heldrida wrote: | Wrote in 1997? This is happening today, I see this everyday on | twitters, linkedins, etc. | | Very good article! | narag wrote: | I guess that's the original article where this meme was born. | | Edit: actually it mentions a book that was published one year | before. | | I had never known where the expression originated, but surely I | heard about _the economy of attention_. | xkcd1963 wrote: | Maslow pyramid. Money is somewhere down at essential needs and | security, whilst attention starts at the social level | cies wrote: | you can only have 24h of attention in a day, and not many days | consecutively before you have to pay attention to your dreams | (sleep). | | 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 | cies wrote: | if you can somehow harvest other's attention; then the | comparison works again. you've upgraded from wage laborer to | capitalist :) | lifeisstillgood wrote: | 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. | mjfl wrote: | > por que no los dos? | blehblahdoopy wrote: | mbank wrote: | I prefer Andrew D. Huberman's idea: Dopamine is the real currency | jscipione wrote: | 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. | cannam wrote: | What an interesting article! | | 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? | toomim wrote: | In 2010, I was a PhD student inspired by Herb Simon, Goldhaber, | and others, and decided to focus my dissertation on this topic: | https://invisible.college/attention/dissertation.html | | 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 6C/ per second | worse than the old one!" | denimnerd42 wrote: | people with ADHD are screwed | mjevans wrote: | Adblock and similar tools are legitimate medical needs. | sneak wrote: | You can't pay bills with attention. | | 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. | 1234letshaveatw wrote: | Isn't this like when someone with 100 followers on insta wants a | free hotel room in exchange for exposure bux? | rkagerer wrote: | 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. | justlikethenazi wrote: | t3e wrote: | 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. | csdvrx wrote: | It seems to have mostly come true, with one caveat: attention | requires measuring, so surveillance is equally important as | attention | giuliomagnifico wrote: | 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. | silisili wrote: | Doesn't sound much different than the traditional 'time is | money.' Attention is time. | | 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... | ElfinTrousers wrote: | I guess this sounds better in many ways than "the funding model | of the Web will be advertising". | gowld wrote: | thenerdhead wrote: | Attention = Time + Consciousness | | 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... | trgn wrote: | 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. | thenerdhead wrote: | I don't know of any modern equivalent. Do you have any | suggestions or books to read? | rg2004 wrote: | 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. | thenerdhead wrote: | I don't disagree with anything you said. I'd just summarize | it as "mindfulness". Which is present-focused attention in my | eyes. | [deleted] | dbtc wrote: | 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. | spoiler wrote: | 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 | [deleted] | ludwigindahouse wrote: | Finnucane wrote: | I remember hearing people say things like "it's not about | profits, it's about eyeballs," and thinking, you can't pay the | rent with eyeballs. | paulpauper wrote: | 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. | rmah wrote: | 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. | danenania wrote: | I think that was always the plan. Eyeballs in the short | term, profits in the long term. | amelius wrote: | I bet even the founders of Google didn't even know at first how | much eyeballs are worth. | sophacles wrote: | 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. | wishfish wrote: | 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. | mistermann wrote: | I think you mean metaphysics? | toxicFork wrote: | 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 | klyrs wrote: | obligatory https://what-if.xkcd.com/4/ | mistermann wrote: | How to invoke unseriousness in humans: mention | metaphysics. | xdavidliu wrote: | > the standard model | | I do not think it means what you think it means. | sophacles wrote: | 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. | MonkeyMalarky wrote: | 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! | imtringued wrote: | Those who are wrong about money will be wrong about everything | else. | openfuture wrote: | 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. | booleandilemma wrote: | 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. | swayvil wrote: | Money is basically software. Meaningless without a machine to | run it. | salty_biscuits wrote: | 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. | TheOtherHobbes wrote: | 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. | doubled112 wrote: | 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? | duncan-donuts wrote: | 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. | xwdv wrote: | 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. | coldtea wrote: | > _This is nonsense. Money is very real because it's an | abstraction for materials, goods, services, etc._ | | Abstractions are by definition not real. | | What's real about the money is the political and legal | power (enforced by actual people) that allows you to | exchange it with goods. | mysterydip wrote: | 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. | siavosh wrote: | If anyone has a Buddhist bent, attention is somewhat synonymous | (I think) with consciousness. So there are some profound | implications. | ElfinTrousers wrote: | It was Wired magazine in 1997. I think it's safe to assume that | most or all of them had a Buddhist bent, or at least affected | one. | remir wrote: | 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". | klabb3 wrote: | Influence is just the potential energy of attention. | threads2 wrote: | is the internet bad for me? should I just quit it? kind of | sounds like "intrusive thought" | airstrike wrote: | > 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 | ElevenLathe wrote: | 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. | wslh wrote: | It depends... if you are poor or not. Just to give a gross | grouping. | jonny_eh wrote: | The right kind of attention can lift people out of | homelessness, e.g. | https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/2021/04/23/ted-golden-vo... | | One could argue homelessness remains a growing problem because | it does not receive sufficient attention. | wslh wrote: | Seems like you can replace attention with zillions of | placeholders like: the same right kind of intelligence can | lift people out of homelessness. | cwmoore wrote: | 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. | scyzoryk_xyz wrote: | If that is the case, HN definitely takes a relatively big chunk | in my case. | kloch wrote: | > Almost everyone will have a personal Web site. | | 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. | JohnJamesRambo wrote: | I'm imagining a future where we got the former and it is such a | cooler (and more harmonious) future. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-10-26 23:00 UTC)