You can now buy personally Human Attention for $5 | Hacker News Reader

You can now buy personally Human Attention for $5

momentarily.online

Attention used to be personal property. Now feeds scalp it and resell it by the pixel. I got tired of donating mine, so I built Momentarily.

What it is: a calendar with 30-second slots.

Price: $5 flat, paid once.

What you get: during your slot I think only about you or whatever you specify. No phone, no tabs, no idle Spotify.

What you don’t get: follow-up emails, analytics, or an upsell. When the timer hits 00:30 it’s over.

Call it reverse capitalism. Instead of stealing attention I sell mine at retail.

Link: https://momentarily.example (booking + source).

AMA: performance art, protest, or tiny utility?

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Thought I'd answer all of you — I'm the creator.

Momentarily is created as a art piece against how large corporations use your data and sell it on for attention to advertisers. The role of Momentarily is atleast personally a joke, to say F'you to big tech, and I'm taking back control over my own time and what or who I sell my attention to.

Most people who have actually bought know and understand it's a joke, and understand that they don't recieve "feedback" or "advice" They recieve 30 seconds of my time where I just sit and think about them. And I give them raw thoughts I'm having at that time in email form.

That could be a response to something they said, my thoughts on them, or just a fun little shitpost as a joke to lighten their day.

Although it says no refunds allowed, if anyone wants to get a refund they can literally just ask. Life's not that deep, you can make light of a shit situation, and make art.

Peace and Love, Seeds in soil. My attention is mine to give.

The sounds a lot like a plot device in an old sci Fi book: with everyone under constant surveillance, the state set up photo booths you could pay a $1 to watch 10 min of random clips.

You "won" if you saw yourself...

Incredibly dystopian.

There's got to be a way to scale this.

There is, It's call everyone getting off the internet and talking to eachother.

I mean, like, with an app.

Why scale, when you can descale the current systems.

I'd like to think the latter is more disruptive.

wow, sounds worthless.

unless you are a celebrity or something why in the world would I value you at 300$ an hour.

If I HAD to pay someone a few bucks to listen I would much rather give it to some homeless person who can stretch that money way further than anyone doing _this_

anyway that was my initial reaction, if you want more attention I charge 10 euros per intentional comment

$5/30 secs is $10/minute, or $600/hour, but that's not his hourly price.

I'm sure if you hire him as a consultant at bulk, you'll get a discount.

You have to remember that taking 30 seconds out of your day is unproportionally expensive cognitively in terms of context switch. So get a bulk deal or enjoy the fun experiment, either by trying it or from the sideline like most of us. ;-)

Damn, I wish I was making $ 600 per hour.

I wouldn't be struggling to pay my student loans

Why not wish for $600,000 per hour, OP doesn’t make either.

That sounds unethical and exploitative

Really? Sounds more like a joke and/or Art to me.

It sounds more mindful and intentional than ads at least.

I will agree that you could say that, at $5, he's ripping people off by taking advantage of people who are desperate for even one minute of human interaction. If he priced it at $1, would he still be unethical and exploitative? Does everything have to be free? At even that price, is it still a ripoff? For me, the answer would be determined by the value of his feedback to people.

I will answer this question for only slightly less than $600/hr. :)

Drop me your twitter, I'll add it to the website as a testimonial tomorrow. (No joke)

Title: Momentarily

Every narcissist will love this, and I'm not kidding. This is their catnip: attention itself.

You'd be surprised, most of the people who actually signed up so far have been lovely folk just looking to pick my brain about what they're building, ask about what I've been thinking about, tell me about their kids birthdays, and all round just be nice humans interacting with (a questionable) human (me)

I'm the real narsassist here pretending my opinion or thoughts mean jacksh't

A Kafkaesque subset of Fiverr.

Nailed it.

Everybody is talking about how dystopian this is, which... well, yeah. That's kind of the point, no?

But at first seeing this, I unironically felt joy at the idea of being able to directly communicate with somebody real on the internet about anything I like. Like... yeah, back in the day.

Then, the reality sinks in and I realise my social skills are so atrophied post-Covid that I don't even know what I'd say. (half-joking.)

And yet I can rattle off to ChatGPT freely about any old thing...

It's a clever art project and makes you think. Hopefully the creator wakes up to a surprise little nest egg of cash out of $5 bills.

I appreciate that bud, Thats exactly the point.

It's dystopian, but actually we do that every single day with going to work, with who we choose to use as service or media providers, the cookies we leave behind. Everything is data and our data is being sold by big tech for our attention.

The point of momentarily is to take back control over my own time and say, I get to choose who I give my attention to and for others choose who they choose to spend time with them.

Can't make art without pissing some people off.

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