I have to admit, I'm kind of scared of the internet now. It's been so long since I've actually tried to engage with it. You know like when you're trying to jump rope and you're watching the rope to see when you should jump in? Yeah, kind of that, except there are like five million ropes going in all directions at once...
Somewhere in this merry journey of capitalism, we seem to have shifted our focus from actually acquiring capital, or labor, to simply acquiring attention. I guess it was when Elon Musk bought Twitter for way more than it was worth - in terms of actual capital value, at least.
We've always had models in the world that sell attention. The Byron Echo gets delivered to my house once a week, as it does to every resident in the shire, and I don't have to pay for it. The team at the Echo know that they are going to lose money on every paper. What they are is an attention merchant. They have people reading their free newspaper, so they can sell column space to people who want to use that for their own benefit. In most cases (although sometimes Byron is a bit weird) you can usually tell why they wanted it. It's to promote their business, or do something that in some way benefits them (or occasionally some genuinely altruistic good thing that benefits the community) Any community value from local journalism exists as a by-product of this.
Apart from the paralyzing fear of staring global irrelevance in the face, the other thing that puzzles me in this whole attention economy is this: What are you going to do with all this attention? Why do they want me to look at them?
Attention is a weird commodity, because a single person's attention is not really worth very much at all - it's only when you get a groundswell of thousands or millions of people paying attention that it starts to amass any value. And I guess that the value there is in being responsible for controlling what people are thinking about and reacting to.
As somebody who's always been prone to showing off, I get that. I get that people like it when people pay attention to them. And I assume there are instances where indulging that impulse is fun, both for the audience and the performer - it's kind of foundational in human nature that there are people who perform.
But the commodification of attention, this notion that it has some kind of innate value, this is new. It's more important to be performing than ever.
And that's the modern internet. Everybody's talking, nobody's listening - it's a series of competitions and tweaks to try to figure out what the algorithm will serve to everybody. Mr Beast made hundreds of terrible videos in a quest to crack open viral fame. (The first one that did it? Counting out loud to 150,000 over 9 hours.)
But that guy's been able to make a multi-million dollar empire out of just collecting attention. Trump won a whole election doing it.
It's like we're all Bart Simpson, with the pot on his head, banging another pot with a spoon and yelling "I am so great!"...
It's kind of exhausting to even comprehend.
I think I'm going to sit here and watch the ropes spin for a bit.
Comments
Post a Comment