The currency of the new economy won't be money, but attention (1997)
wired.com
wired.com
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.
Before money, people were also cold and hungry. I think money makes it easier to do something about it.
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.
You can't cut the taxes of the poor as much as for the rich, because there's not as much to cut for the former.
I have no idea whether the UK policy is any good or not. But your complaint is a weird one to make.
The situation is more symmetric than you think.
Greater capital mobility cuts both ways: when you lower taxes you can also attract more rich people and their capital.
(I am not saying that this effect will necessarily occur, only that capital mobility comes into play both when raising and when lowering taxes.)
Oh, of course, the real solution to these problems is to tax land and not income nor capital: you can't hide land nor can it leave the country. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax
Of course, rich people pay more VAT than poor people. In absolute terms.
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?
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.
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.
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.
It exists in this consensual story.
It might be a very stable concept in most instances, but various very real and extreme edge cases exist. (Regular inflation, Hyperinflation, local disaster, global disaster, bank runs, etc)
I quite liked the description of the invention of currency and beaurocracy in "Sapiens".
Specifically the idea that the issuing government either won’t default on its debts any time soon, or that it’s big enough to dominate the world order enough that it can run up its debts without somebody taking a shot at the king. It sounds less religious and more like a game of king of the hill from this perspective.
I know Yuval Harari’s perspective is that money is the “first religion of man”, and I think it’s useful in the context of discussing how mankind evolved, but considering the modern world I prefer Ray Dalio’s perspective: “money is (are?) the house chips in the casino of whoever dominates the current world order.”
At the end of the day, it’s weapons and businesses that give value to money.
I remember a few years ago taking Ubers and thinking: "so cheap! But, well, this can't possibly last". And it didn't.
Money is very real, it's just abstract in the sense that it's a unit in a database more than it's an object (it used to be both).
So sure, there are other units in databases that can be converted into money at a predictable exchange rate (often via code written by thousands of people sitting in information silos), but that doesn't mean that those units replace money in any holistic sense.
It's like saying money doesn't matter for TV networks, commercials viewership does (when ofc commercials matter b/c they lead to money).
Guess one thing that menaces that stability?
Inflation!
I don't think he understands exactly what the sentiment behind "I don't care about money" is.
And I wasn't trying to imply that she was greedy, and I very much believe it wasn't about the money. The thing was she just grew up the youngest child (and a daughter at that) in an upper-middle-class family and she was pretty sheltered from cost, while I grew up in a working class family where money was tight. It was an odd disconnect.
I grew up with fairly frugal parents. I mean, my dad had a great job as a software engineer, but we still wouldn't spend money we didn't have to. My mom often made our clothes (to our horror), we didn't waste any food, reused everything, and my favourite stuffed toy came from the trash.
I'm trying to instil similar frugal values on my kids, but it doesn't stick. My wife and I both have excellent jobs, and we really can afford to waste a lot of money, but I just don't think that's a healthy way to raise our kids. Unfortunately, our kids don't care. It's hard to instil these sort of values when money isn't tight.
[^1]: This sort of contextualizes how I feel about student loan forgiveness--it's ostensibly there to help people in need, but I lived frugally and worked my way through my engineering degree to minimize the amount of loan money I needed to take out, while the overwhelming majority of my peers partied, skipped class, lived in the dorms, paid for meal plans and then ate out at restaurants all the time, and majored in unmarketable programs. They didn't work and they got money from their parents every week. I never resented them for being able to afford their lifestyle or anything, but loan forgiveness feels like it's mostly bailing out those spoiled kids in the name of helping poor kids (although I'm sure there are some poor kids who will benefit). Lots of poor kids didn't even go to school in the first place, and many who did were frugal. If this really were about helping poor kids, there are so many significantly better approaches.
And mind you, I benefit from loan forgiveness because frankly my wife was one of those spoiled kids (with lots of debt and an unmarketable degree) and we didn't pay off her loans because the interest rates were so low it was better to use the money for other investments, especially during deferment (which is why it also irks me when people refer to student loan interest rates as "predatory"--there's lots of predation in higher education, but it's not interest rates). But (and seems to blow a lot of minds) just because it benefits me doesn't make it right.
I’ve heard this statement used frequently in business. I think this statement is incomplete… what if instead you said something like “I don’t care about money as long as you get it done before the deadline”, wouldn’t that sound as reasonable? Think of money as a tool, when used responsibly could do good things. I see a lot of people being cuffed not spend money just because it sounds “expensive” but really if you 2x’d that spend then it’s money well spent.
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.
The problem is that that won't happen in a nice way, if at all. Systemic changes come about after cataclysms, not incrementally.
Alas, cataclysms may be due soon...
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...
> "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.
it is valuable primarily because there is an expectation that it can be monetized
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?
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.
I do not think it means what you think it means.
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
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!"
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.
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.
1 https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/download/51...
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.
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...
Very good article!
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.
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.
One could argue homelessness remains a growing problem because it does not receive sufficient attention.
The currency of the future is the currency of the past - the prevailing story, the mental model that people hold and fit their evidence in.
That mental model varies hugely - it provides the difference between Republicans and Democrats, between Autocracy and Liberty. Polls show the biggest divide based on college education - the models picked up or more likely challenged and discarded in higher education provide a stark differentiator for modern voting trends.
Control the mental model, and the facts hardly matter.
money, 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