288 karma · joined December 21, 2024
Every scaled up platforms then gets trapped into collecting/selling personal data and flooding the field with Ads (and obviously in these ad auctions the 10% can outbid the majority so Ad prices keep rising).
Big salaries thrown at young people are bait. They don't need wild animals, but circus animals that are obedient, dependent and consistently perform tricks without too much thinking about why. Over time this involves such animals to loose all sense of self. Naturally this won't work on everyone and causes all kinds issues for both sides.
The first time I was shown a case study of Amul (cooperative model of food production), it was a really eye opening moment, cause they had reached massive scale, profitable, invested in quality/innovation, really super creative (on the marketing side without any great budget) and most importantly Sustainable.
Like me if you have studied Dominoes, KFC and McDonalds this is not supposed to be possible. It shows how constraints in the local environment lead to innovation and totally different models that work.
Anyone getting thrown into the deep end of the Indian market, equipped with Western models are quickly confronted by assumptions that don't hold, and then they come up with stuff we don't see in the west.
Just look at their Dabbawalas (decentralized supply-chains/logistics), UPI (disintermediating Mastercard and Visa), IPL (no one thought cricket could compete when literally less than 10 countries playing the sport) etc
Western companies built their scalable models by optimizing for capital-heavy, consumption-driven economiess, but that doesn’t mean those models are the only viable ones. India (and other low-consumption economies) often find more sustainable ways to solve the same problems because there’s no safety net of endless VC funding, mass credit, or impulse spending to prop things up. Most Western companies operate in winner-takes-all mode (Amazon crushes small retailers, Uber kills taxis). But Indian models like UPI, Amul, Kirana networks show models of growth in a more cooperative manner.
Imho the world needs more Amuls than McDonalds.
In the Attention Economy, that social media platforms create, he knows how to capture Attention. The question is not Elon but about why we tolerate these platforms that prop up people like Elon or what the alternatives are.
Michael Goldharber pointed out at the dawn of the Internet => info explodes but Attention does not + ppl have a limited capacity to pay attention but unlimited capacity to receive attention.
The truth is Everyone needs a bit of Attention (it is a source of self esteem), that's why sites like HN work because people feel they are seen or heard even if its one upvote.
But then there are Elon and Trump types who are born with a need to be loved and respected by everyone. Plant them in the social media environment, where attention capture is rewarded, and is the main source of profit for the platforms, and we get the abnormal fruits we sow.
This is why experiments like ONDC[1] (being pushed by the Indian Govt) are interesting. They want an alternative path between producer and consumer with out a middleman (Platform). Similar to how email works based on open protocols. Or UPI which has reduced dependence on Mastercard/Visa.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_economy [1] https://ondc.org/learn-about-ondc/
But either way Govt is not magic. It has to react to a very complex uncontrollable ever changing reality. There will be oscillations between periods of calm and chaos.
Limits that in the past 2 decades (of scaling) the people who built these Platforms didn't have to think about. Now they do. And they are coming under serious pressure because they have built out more Supply than there is Demand.
For example, we got the explosive growth of Netflix. Everyone sees that and piles into streaming. When growth slows in one country they immediately move into another and they keep growing until they run out of countries to expand into. So Netflix has been in India (a country advertised as having zillions of consumers) for nearly 10 years now but they haven't found more than 25 million paying subscribers. Learning takes time. And everyone is learning there are limits to growth based purely on the online model.
There is no magic obvious path for countries like Germany, Japan, South Korea or Taiwan as the influence of US, over everything they did in the last 70 years recedes. It will take time to work out. In the meantime thousands of articles will be written about how they don't know what they are doing and that what they should do is obvious. All worth throwing in a dustbin.
No one paid Attention.
My grandparents all have iPhones. They hardly use any of these features. Why do they have it then? Cuz that's what the rest of the fam buys them. Why does the rest of the fam buy it, when most of the fam can't even list the features? Cuz that is how good modern Marketing(Demand Engineering) is.
Its a textbook example of runaway Involution.
Great engineers, designers and marketers are all doing what they are good at and love doing. Great combo. Upto a point.
You can be good at something and love doing what you do, but assuming Everyone in the world needs it is a recipe for Involution.
The default position is to quote Jobs or Ford and say but I know what people need. Beyond a point its not about others needs.
Too much Content chasing limited human Attention is causing very very similar issues.
It took centuries to connect the fact that increasing or decreasing the money supply at a faster or slower rate than goods arriving in the market causes all kinds of chaos. The chaos made it hard to see the connection.
Central banks finally emerged to manage money supply and target a healthy inflation rate.
Handing Attention management off to the platforms is very similar to the state of affair when Kings and individual Banks printed their own money. That provided funding for wars. And created panics, bubbles, bank failures all the time which lead to the reluctant handing over of money printing to Central Banks world wide.
Today thanks to similar dynamics in the Attention Economy we are probably in a hyperinflationary state. As content keeps exploding, it gets harder and harder to be seen or heard unless you "buy more ads", win ad bidding wars, or "pay for visibility".
And guess what?
China can easily "buy more ads", win ad bidding wars, or "pay for visibility" to make things worse. They can/will also just flood the platforms with content via GenAI. Business will be pushed to spend more, Politicians have to raise more and individuals will struggle to focus on anything. Everyone will get exhausted or loose their minds. China or whoever won't have to fire a single shot to trigger collapse.
It doesn't matter who owns platforms if the way platforms manage Attention does not change.
We either need a Central Attention Bank that measures and targets healthy Attention extraction/consumption rates across different content types or Regulation placed on platforms on how Attention is managed (time limits, limits on ads volume, limits on marketing budgets all broken down by different content types (long term value/short term value/no value ie entertainment with individuals deciding the breakup just like they do with money - investments/savings/current etc etc).
Social Media itself can be replaced if ChatGPT or what ever just takes everyone's chat history and connects us directly to people who care about similar interests.
I don't give a shit about getting the worlds Attention if only 6 people in the world actually care about the things I care about. Social Media's current architecture is pure shit.
Lot of people's survival is dependent on control of others. And inversely lot of people who are controlled are dependent on their masters to sustain whatever lifestyle they have. We are already used to this dynamic.
But Hegel shows us consciousness emerges through this interaction. He argues its a requirement for Consciousness emergence. As soon as you control others for whatever reason you also become conscious of your dependency on them.
The human pool of Attention is slow growing and finite (the limit being number of minutes in a day*people). Yet Content keeps exploding to infinity.
Just like inflation devalues money, content inflation devalues individual Attention.
In traditional economics, more money chasing the same goods = inflation. In the Attention Economy, more content chasing the same attention = engagement inflation (harder to get noticed, costs more to be seen).
The real winners - Platforms, since they act like central banks controlling both supply (content) and demand (attention via algorithm).
The Attention Economy behaves like a manipulated market where demand is fixed but distorted, and supply keeps increasing, benefiting the gatekeepers (platforms) while exhausting the participants (creators, advertisers, businesses, users).
History teaches us where the story goes.
Tech Opportunists could coast taking advantage of Moore's Law, outsourcing and low interest rates for decades. As the environment changes, we will see new types of leadership.