4 ms·

"Moving from scarcity of capital to scarcity of attention" is where my bullshit filter lead me to stop reading.

• myhf 6y ago
  It's not cited properly, but that is a reference to Herb Simon's original description of the "attention economy."
• webmaven 6y ago
  > "Moving from scarcity of capital to scarcity of attention" is where my bullshit filter lead me to stop reading. "Scarcity" is perhaps the wrong word, but we don't really have a better one. Perhaps aggregation? Regardless, we can see that there are problems (and not just in the form of bubbles) being created by a lot of capital in very large piles sloshing around chasing opportunities for investment around the globe (even though capital still isn't exactly not-scarce), and that the current big winners in 'tech' are mostly purveyors of attention of various sorts.
• dredmorbius 6y ago
  Attention scarcity is real. "When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive." James Gleick, paraphrasing others earlier. An abundance of information makes scaarce what information consumes: attention. There are only 24 hours, or 1,440 minutes, or 86,400 seconds, in a day. Whether it's individual humans or groups, our capacity to assimilate information is profoundly finite. No matter how many stories there are, there are only ten top-ten slots. Attention is inextricably rivalrous. I'm not convinced that true capital abundance is possible, but that's a different argument. I will argue that attention scarity and capital scarcity are simultaneously possible.