12 ms·

Human attention has become a commodity

221 points by mebassett 4y ago

petercoffin 4y ago
Marxist here; I wrote a book about this in 2018 after having written essays about it for years. In my book Custom Reality and You, I asserted that "attention is currency," and that it exists in a sort of abstract market (which has gradually become more formalized through the years as social metrics become more standard). Marx also posited money as "the ultimate commodity," and I very much agree with this article.
- amw 4y ago
  For the unfamiliar, dialectical materialism tends to do this a lot (that is, understand and explain exploitative facets of our economy long before mainstream press gives the particular problem in question any notice).
msarrel 4y ago
We were just discussing this at work. Attention and time are worth more than money. Just ask all of us who are running the daily operations while execs are too busy to talk to us. If you want to send an email that is longer than a tweet, then it's not going to be read.
fennecfoxy 4y ago
"Has become"? It has been a commodity ever since we became tribal. It's just we've gone from a 1:1 "give your attention to my idea and work together with me and you'll benefit in these ways" to a 1:10-50 "I am the tribe's leader" to 1:* "I am a megacorporate entity"
humanistbot 4y ago
This seems to basically be restating the main thesis of Zuboff's 2019 book In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.
- dubswithus 4y ago
  I tried to read that book. I listened to the podcasts. Just couldn't get into it unfortunately.
FredPret 4y ago
As has been the case since the first tribe had that first fateful discussion about the best methods for hunting or fire making or whatever, in a cave, many moons ago
whimsicalism 4y ago
I find the arguments under "But how is this different from traditional advertising?" very unconvincing. They provide examples as to what is different about social media advertising, but no convincing reason why traditional advertising wasn't also treating attention as a commodity.
- EchoAce 4y ago
  I strongly agree, in addition statements like "Before social media advertising would have to hitch a ride with some content produced for something else. Billboards, newspapers, television shows, and magazines all tried to provide a use value to their customers and audiences" are pretty incorrect. As bad as many people agree Facebook is for mental health, it was clearly created for and does provide value. The author does a fairly poor job of carrying out the argument without form-fitting irrelevant details to their desired narrative.
  - andrenotgiant 4y ago
    Yeah 100%. This article reads like the reddit.com/r/im14andthisisdeep/ version of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_economy > Traditional advertising could never get your attention. Are you serious? > Before social media advertising would have to hitch a ride with some content produced for something else. This is exactly what social media advertising does. >Billboards, newspapers, television shows, and magazines all tried to provide a use value to their customers and audiences What does that even mean? Advertising was effectively getting attention and subverting behavior long before the internet. Watch the Century of the Self for some prime examples.
thenerdhead 4y ago
Attention > Time > Energy > Money There's always a cost when it's our attention. We've been in a war for our attention for many years. What I don't understand is why everyone puts emphasis on social media and not digital media in general? Television held the crown for many years and still does. Read Jerry Mander and his thoughts about advertisements. You'll never think about them the same when you realize they are implanting into your head and you can never get them out.
- carabiner 4y ago
  With machine learning and digital breadcrumbs, "adtech" has evolved into a beast akin to WMD. It's devastatingly effective paired against radio, TV ads, billboards and other forms of non-interactive media. The deep surveillance that adtech deploys gives unparalleled information on consumers. This is why tech companies have become the wealthiest corporations in human history, and radio station conglomerates have not.
  - lmpdev 4y ago
    I'm nitpicking here but wasn't the Dutch East India Company worth substantially more than today's tech companies?
    - sandworm101 4y ago
      Comparing valuations across the years never really works. Of course they were worth more. The East India basically owned the Indian subcontinent, which today or then was incalculable wealth.
      - mangamadaiyan 4y ago
        Parent is referring to the Dutch VOC, not the British East India Company. The entity that eventually "owned" the Indian Subcontinent was the British East India Company. The VOC ended up with Indonesia, swaths of land in South America, South Africa, Sri Lanka, and so on.
jmole 4y ago
Title should be updated to "Marxist commodity". Any Renascence courtesan (or tribal leader) could have told you that human attention is valuable. The difference now is that attention is quite nearby fungible, and near-readily exchangeable for dollars and cents. Just wait until eye-tracked advertising takes off.
- tzs 4y ago
  For those who are downvoting him without having read the article, he is suggesting the title update because that is what the actual title of the article says. Either the submitter edited the title to remove "Marxist" when they submitted, or for some reason "Marxist" is one of the words HN automatically removes from titles.
  - trevcanhuman 4y ago
    Or the article's author just changed the title. Happens often with big news outlets where the HTML title tag is different than the title displayed on the webpage.
  - dang 4y ago
    The submitter took the word 'Marxist' out of the title when submitting it, but I think this was a good move, in keeping with the site guidelines: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html The problem is that you can't say "Marx" without instantly triggering some people into ideological flamewar. That's boring and we don't need that. The current title seems like a fair balance because it doesn't fundamentally change the point, and when you go to the article itself you can learn that it means "commodity in the Marxist sense", or something along those lines.
throwawayarnty 4y ago
Attention has been commoditised even since the radio and television days. Before that, through mass print media and newspapers.
- tresqotheq 4y ago
  Yes, but the problem here is the introduction of smartphone, which is a gadget that is with you 24/7.
anigbrowl 4y ago
Talk about being late to the party. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_economy
philip1209 4y ago
World After Capital by Albert Wenger (USV) reaches a similar conclusion: https://worldaftercapital.org/ https://worldaftercapital.org/
anonymouse008 4y ago
This is an old and tired take - The more interesting thought (and equally as unoriginal) is 'The Internet' has effectively commoditized human attention. The commoditization happens because most knowledge easily accessible. This changes your attentive value from raw ability to gather information, the old regime, to the ability to create and synthesize across domains. I'm interested to see if this means we see fewer 'great entrepreneurs' and more bootstrapped businesses in the $10-500m revenue range built by people who can learn to be a solo-developer/mercenary leader with ruthless business sense.
- tresqotheq 4y ago
  >I'm interested to see if this means we see fewer 'great entrepreneurs' It is really interesting to see that you specify "enterpreneurs", instead of concerned about losing potential great artists, scientists, philosophers. I mean, where would we be, if the past Shakespeare, Einstien and Newtons were perpetually distracted and preventing them from making works of art and discoveries we now value most?
  - lmm 4y ago
    Shakespeare and Einstein both benefitted greatly from synthesizing existing work; if they'd had more and easier access to what others were writing that seems likely to improve rather than diminish what they produced.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - tresqotheq 4y ago
      I think you were distracted, and this ^ comment was written without much thought. Oh wait. You are on HN. No surprise!
karaterobot 4y ago
> No one asked for or choose those changes. There wasn’t a town hall meeting where Mark Zuckerburg asked people if they wanted to know what their 3rd grade friends now think of Donald Trump; no one took a vote and decided "yeah, that’d be neat!". These changes were thrust upon society by new technologies and economic forces without anyone’s consent or forethought. They weren't thrust on us, and we did choose those changes. The information and the implications of that information were available to everyone from the beginning. I quit Facebook and Twitter in 2007ish because it was obvious where social media was going, and I'm not particularly smart, prescient, or well-informed. Nor was I alone in coming to that conclusion: many people were saying and writing this from the beginning. People didn't listen, because they liked it at the time. Even now, when so much has happened, billions of people still continue to choose to use social media, claiming they don't have a choice in the matter. I'm not saying they're bad for making a different choice than me, but it is obviously a choice.
walrus01 4y ago
human attention has always been a commodity. Look at historical FM, AM, broadcast TV advertising. companies like nielsen made attempts to quantify and measure actual viewership, hard to do in the 1-way-analog-broadcast era. Big difference now is that every social media thing has its own app that can specifically track ever click, every scroll, every like, viewing time per image and page, on an extremely granular basis. Look at why reddit is trying so hard to steer people into using their app rather than use it through a browser. ultimately the revenue stream for these app based social media things comes from the company selling advertising to you, of course. it's just much more targeted now than in the analog broadcast era.
- tresqotheq 4y ago
  > Look at historical FM, AM, broadcast TV advertising. The issue is the introduction of smartphone, which is a device that is with you 24x7.
chargingmarmot 4y ago
I'll take the opportunity to drop one of my favorite quotes from Herb Simon (Turing award and Nobel prize winner, artificial intelligence pioneer, father of behavioral economics, founder of CMU's Computer Science department): """ 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 and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it. (Simon 1971.) """
- reubenswartz 4y ago
  One of my favorite (perhaps that's the wrong word?) quotes, that explains so much.
- Balgair 4y ago
  A few of the other sub-commentors here are talking about a good bookshelf as a solution to Herb's problem. I think it's a great idea. But, as always, determining what is on that bookshelf is a tough one. The Harvard Classics was a great attempt about a century ago [0]. 'Dr. Elliot's 5 foot shelf of books' was what an undergraduate degree at Harvard in 1909 included. Harvard University President Charles W. Eliot put together about all of the great books that those Gilded Age scions were supposed to digest. Personally speaking, the greatest thing about the Harvard Classics was the 15-minute-a-day Reading Guide to the corpus. I went through it all a few years ago, and man, that was a really good idea. Like, I like Shakespeare now; he's really good! And I read through that philosophy finally, and that was really good too! And, lord, the poetry; I never really liked poems, but now I really love them. Most days were like that for me. I'll fully admit though, there were some real stinkers in there. But only once in a while. If you'd like to read along too, you can download scanned versions of the books here: https://www.myharvardclassics.com/categories/20120212 https://www.myharvardclassics.com/categories/20120212 . For example, today's reading is: Vol. 2, pp. 31-43 : Plato's Crito -- Socrates unceasingly strove for beauty, truth, and perfection. Sentenced to death on a false charge, he refused to escape from the death cell, even when opportunity was offered. As an aside, I'd love for an updated version of the Harvard Classics complete with 15-minute-a-day type readings or other media. I really did look forward to that dose of mind-training every day when I went through it. Does anyone know of a good place for daily mind training that is like this? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Classics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Classics
spencerchubb 4y ago
It didn't become a commodity, it always was
woodruffw 4y ago
The Marxist definition of "commodity" is a useful one, but doesn't do full justice to the nature of the problem. Attention is a commodity in the same way that corn and other raw materials are commodities: it's subdivided into abstract units for sale (and speculation), entirely divorced from the underlying asset (Joe Schmoe on Facebook) until the moment of redemption. Commoditization is (arguably) a very good thing: it allows the market to make stable pricing decisions (at various risk levels) without having to worry about the exact load of corn (or human attention units) showing up right when needed. But it's also a fundamentally obfuscative force: the commoditizing party is incentivized to lie about the underlying asset's value. Advertising exemplifies this to a greater extent than agriculture: we don't really know what attention is, and so it's much easier (and more profitable) to misrepresent to buyers. Subprime Attention Crisis[1] is a really fantastic analysis of the attention market, this specific sort of commoditization, and its latent risks. [1]: https://www.fsgoriginals.com/books/subprime-attention-crisis https://www.fsgoriginals.com/books/subprime-attention-crisis
- walrus01 4y ago
  see also, Marx's theory of Alienation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation The theoretical basis of alienation is that the worker invariably loses the ability to determine life and destiny when deprived of the right to think (conceive) of themselves as the director of their own actions; to determine the character of said actions; to define relationships with other people; and to own those items of value from goods and services, produced by their own labour. Although the worker is an autonomous, self-realized human being, as an economic entity this worker is directed to goals and diverted to activities that are dictated by the bourgeoisie—who own the means of production—in order to extract from the worker the maximum amount of surplus value in the course of business competition among industrialists. that sure sounds like a paycheck-to-paycheck, permanent renter class person that's become trapped in a debt-laden advertising-driven consumer lifestyle to me.
  - woodruffw 4y ago
    People have accused Marx of all sorts of ridiculous things, but a lack of prescience isn't one of them :-)
its_ethan 4y ago
> three seconds of the time of a 25- to 28-year-old male with a Bachelors degree in a STEM subject from a state college, an interest in travel to the Baltic countries, centre-right political leanings, and a credit score between 650-720. Facebook can also ensure that those three seconds are sandwiched between a message from his mom and a holiday photo from a potential love interest Haven't there been a number of studies/articles written about how Facebook/Google sometimes really suck at delivering ads to the correct people that ad-buyer's ask for? Anecdotally, I've gotten ads for burger shops in Chicago while living in California. The above fear mongering, worst case claim, makes it real hard for me to take this guys philosophical /ethical break down seriously.
- walrus01 4y ago
  You may not be the sort of person who fills out their Facebook profile with details like age, marital status, what high school you went to, hometown, but there are hundreds of millions who do. just be correlating details like IP space geolocation, nevermind GPS/location API permission on a phone, with what pages a person likes, their biographical details, their friend network and the location data from those friends, advertising can get extremely targeted.
- andrenotgiant 4y ago
  Yeah when I read that sentence, it's a big red flag that the author has no idea what they're talking about. They're likely just rehashing something a friend told them after watching a TED Talk. If you set an advertising campaign that specific, you're going to get no impressions. Researchers keep using these examples of "disturbing levels of specificity" of Facebook targeting. No advertisers actually do this. They're too lazy and they want volume. They do plenty of other disturbing things but this is not one of them.
  - tresqotheq 4y ago
    > They do plenty of other disturbing things but this is not one of them. I think some kind of AI employed here, would end up doing things like this and more, may be not right now but in very near future.
DesiLurker 4y ago
my old take is that money as such is a long-tailed weighted average between physical energy & mental energy (energy needed to modify belief structure & spring action). Attention is just the 'write head' to direct that energy. The interesting thing is that if physical energy becomes cheap as in we went from animals->wood->coal->petroleum->(maybe)solar->(possibly)fusion then its reasonable that money as a representation of change/energy only leans heavier on the human side. I dont see this as inherently bad but actually a sign of progress. the things I detest are basically perversions of attention related to some hack in our attention mechanism, for instance businesses that exploit peoples gambling addiction (or addiction of any kind).
mrsmee89 4y ago
I think the idea of attention being commodity is mostly looked at through a pejorative lens but I wonder if it's the beginning of the next stage of human evolution were boredom no longer has value and maybe thats a good thing? I haven't thought about this alot and I'm very curious shat other on here might think about this idea.
remir 4y ago
It seems like there's something darker and more perverse at play here. I'm not saying it's necessarily organized, but it's a dangerous dynamic. It like everything is done to prevent people's mind to be at peace and to relax. The constant noise and audio/visual pollution we see everywhere is deeply troubling. You cannot go to a simple store without some music being played, often very loudly for no reason. I went to my parent's house the other day and the TV was on. I had to turn it off so we could have a normal conversation like normal people do. The TV was constantly pulling our attention on some stupid crap like ads or some garbage program that tries to polarize people.
- tremon 4y ago
  My personal biggest gripe: music being played in-between points in tennis and volleyball matches (and I'm sure other sports, but I used to watch those). It's not just that the type of music being played offends my sensibilities, but the entire idea that people can't even be trusted to have ten seconds to themselves deeply saddens me. For me, it's one of the reasons why I no longer go to such events.
  - prometheus76 4y ago
    They all just instantly pull out their phones and zombiescroll every time the action lulls for more than three seconds whether the facility blasts music or not. I think the loss of boredom tolerance is a huge issue in our culture.
- 62951413 4y ago
  I have seen a particular flavor of it mentioned a few times. There are people who like having noise in the background. Typically in older generations and lower classes it's not music or intentionally selected podcasts. Instead, they keep their TV on at all times. I'll not be surprised if it turns out to be a major vector for government propaganda.
- roeles 4y ago
  > It like everything is done to prevent people's mind to be at peace and to relax. I think that our human nature is the source of this. Having spare time often means being bored (initially an unpleasant sensation) and potentially coming to terms with your own life, behavior and intentions. Only after a while of discomfort do you get the gains: creativity and growth. I have introduced people around me to meditation, and some just cannot bear to be idle. They start to ruminate and feel like they can handle it.
boringg 4y ago
Isn't this incredibly olds news?
antux 4y ago
In UI design, the user's attention is limited and valuable. I'm always doing things to minimize distractions and emphasize key information. The common problem is that there's so much information/data/content to offer that most people want to show everything. However, revealing everything spreads the user's attention in every little area. There is no concentrated focus on any one thing. As a result, the user doesn't really absorb what they're reading deeply. They don't absorb information in a detailed way because there's something else they have to click around the corner. To improve human attention designers have to say no to displaying certain things and focus on the few that's essential. This is easier said than done, but needs to be done.
plaguepilled 4y ago
I was about to engage with this article seriously... Until I read 'metal health crisis'. Really hope Polyphia and Jamie Christopherson make it out OK. Thoughts and prayers.
- yeetard 4y ago
  I laughed
wintermutestwin 4y ago
My attention is a commodity and I should be able to set the price. Attention theft is legal and rampant. Instead of advertisers setting targeting me, I should be able to target them (when I deign to pay for something with my attention).
- tremon 4y ago
  There's an idea. Microdebits for buying my attention! That'd be a worthwhile feature for uBlock.
- matheusmoreira 4y ago
  Not just theft... Mind rape. They violate the sanctity of our minds by implanting information whether we want it or not. We didn't ask for it, we didn't consent to it. If we complain about it, they act as if they were entitled to our attention, as if it was "payment" for free stuff.
  - smitblz 4y ago
- nprateem 4y ago
  You can. They're called ad blockers and Google.
wintermutestwin 4y ago
>The existence of social media companies has made two changes to society's ethics here: first, they have convinced people that connections with people “they otherwise wouldn’t be able to connect with” is a product that can only be produced by for-profit corporations. I'd donate to a non-profit (or benefit corp) version of facecrook. Without paying their industrial psychologists to figure out how to steal more of my attention, the costs to run would be reasonably affordable for a world that is getting sick of FB.
Barrin92 4y ago
there's a lot of pieces like this but one thing that always stands out to me is the sort of 'half-Marxist' nature of the critique "But this business model is not inevitable, nor is Marx correct about there being one and only one ethical system that results from a given mode of production. If we, as a society, made a conscious decision on how we wanted to live, in particular, if we decided that we valued new and more interpersonal connections without our local communities, then we could use those same market forces to encourage lots of such connections to happen" If you're already starting with Marx you ought to take him seriously. The author owes us an explanation as to why Marx is wrong when he recognized that our values are the product of our material relations, and that we do not just wish them into existence as we please. You can't go pre social media any more than you can go pre-industrial. In Marxist analysis, the market forces use you. If you're going to keep one aspect of Marxism stick with the materialism, not his theory of value.
yeetard 4y ago
It's funny how the comment section here is already prime example of people having v̵e̵r̵y̵ ̵p̵o̵o̵r̵ no attention management skill. How about we stop lamenting the obvious and start thinking about how we could solve the problem? Theoretically it should be a non-issue since (in theory) every disturbance can be overcome by applying adequate willpower (and abundance of information is probably much harder to create then abundance of willpower - or so I think but i don't see any obvious reason for why it would be any other way; took us about 5000 years to create the internet, but the will to do something great clearly came first - otherwise there wouldn't be a internet, duh!). I see a general conflict here with how our society functions as a whole. Our institutions, everything per default is already designed around stealing our attention. Other than eastern religions, abrahamism is less concerned with letting it's adherent find balance and inner peace in a tumultuous world, it's more concerned with keeping you entangled in a constant struggle within, with yourself, and with god or something. With corporations it's the same, except it's about consuming products now. If we delete this, we will probably revert back into the stone age and if we let it be and add too much willpower there is a chance that our civilisation becomes uncontrollable. Psychology knows these concepts: Volition and executive functions. To fix the lack of the former Wikipedia suggests: Nothing, and for the lack of the latter it suggests CBT ( cock and b.., I mean cognitive behavior therapy) a.k.a nothing again, since cognitive behaviour therapy is a pseudoscientific scam that does not work. Also: "More research is required to develop interventions that can improve executive functions and help people generalize those skills to daily activities and settings." Wow, yeah, that is totally the reason for why there are no solutions for this! We just haven't done enough SCIENCE-ing, that's it folks! S C I E N C E! So, I'm pretty open for new ideas here. Maybe an actual neuroscientist could chime in and lecture us about how our neuronal circuits work together to create attention, how the SAS works or something and how we could improve it. But I suspect my attention span is to short and I wouldn't be able to follow along anyway. Welp...
m463 4y ago
Sounds like time to think will become an extravagant luxury.
johnwheeler 4y ago
Does this make procrastination the futures market?
bsedlm 4y ago
and consuming something is labor... netflix should have to pay ME if they want me to gobble up the content they put out...
LargoLasskhyfv 4y ago
Older, but related: http://www.sutjhally.com/articles/advertisingattheed/ http://www.sutjhally.com/articles/advertisingattheed/ https://www.mediaed.org/advertising-at-the-edge/ https://www.mediaed.org/advertising-at-the-edge/
devonallie 4y ago
While I agree with the authors sentiment, I do not think there is a difference in kind between TV advertising and social media advertising. I think it is a difference in scale. With the amount of data points a program can collect on user behaviour and identity, it becomes much easier to tune advertisements. This happens in TV as well (polling, viewership stats, demographics, focus groups) but obviously nowhere near to the same level of breadth and depth someone like Facebook can achieve.
eevilspock 4y ago
A related post and discussion: “User Engagement” Is Code for “Addiction” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26153331 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26153331 archive of OP: https://web.archive.org/web/20210216125517/https://craigwritescode.medium.com/user-engagement-is-code-for-addiction-a2f50d36d7ac https://web.archive.org/web/20210216125517/https://craigwrit...
FunnyBadger 4y ago
Which is why one block yourself from most MSM and social media which is the primary harvesting system. Just say no to all of it! Ration it if you must use it at all - like having a brandy from time to time but never every day.
- SnowHill9902 4y ago
  Block yourself from most men who have sex with men?

221 points by mebassett 4y ago

Marxist here; I wrote a book about this in 2018 after having written essays about it for years. In my book Custom Reality and You, I asserted that "attention is currency," and that it exists in a sort of abstract market (which has gradually become more formalized through the years as social metrics become more standard). Marx also posited money as "the ultimate commodity," and I very much agree with this article.

amw 4y ago
For the unfamiliar, dialectical materialism tends to do this a lot (that is, understand and explain exploitative facets of our economy long before mainstream press gives the particular problem in question any notice).

msarrel 4y ago

We were just discussing this at work. Attention and time are worth more than money. Just ask all of us who are running the daily operations while execs are too busy to talk to us. If you want to send an email that is longer than a tweet, then it's not going to be read.

fennecfoxy 4y ago

"Has become"? It has been a commodity ever since we became tribal. It's just we've gone from a 1:1 "give your attention to my idea and work together with me and you'll benefit in these ways" to a 1:10-50 "I am the tribe's leader" to 1:* "I am a megacorporate entity"

humanistbot 4y ago

This seems to basically be restating the main thesis of Zuboff's 2019 book In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.

dubswithus 4y ago
I tried to read that book. I listened to the podcasts. Just couldn't get into it unfortunately.

FredPret 4y ago

As has been the case since the first tribe had that first fateful discussion about the best methods for hunting or fire making or whatever, in a cave, many moons ago

whimsicalism 4y ago

I find the arguments under "But how is this different from traditional advertising?" very unconvincing. They provide examples as to what is different about social media advertising, but no convincing reason why traditional advertising wasn't also treating attention as a commodity.

EchoAce 4y ago
I strongly agree, in addition statements like "Before social media advertising would have to hitch a ride with some content produced for something else. Billboards, newspapers, television shows, and magazines all tried to provide a use value to their customers and audiences" are pretty incorrect. As bad as many people agree Facebook is for mental health, it was clearly created for and does provide value. The author does a fairly poor job of carrying out the argument without form-fitting irrelevant details to their desired narrative.
- andrenotgiant 4y ago
  Yeah 100%. This article reads like the reddit.com/r/im14andthisisdeep/ version of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_economy > Traditional advertising could never get your attention. Are you serious? > Before social media advertising would have to hitch a ride with some content produced for something else. This is exactly what social media advertising does. >Billboards, newspapers, television shows, and magazines all tried to provide a use value to their customers and audiences What does that even mean? Advertising was effectively getting attention and subverting behavior long before the internet. Watch the Century of the Self for some prime examples.

thenerdhead 4y ago

Attention > Time > Energy > Money There's always a cost when it's our attention. We've been in a war for our attention for many years. What I don't understand is why everyone puts emphasis on social media and not digital media in general? Television held the crown for many years and still does. Read Jerry Mander and his thoughts about advertisements. You'll never think about them the same when you realize they are implanting into your head and you can never get them out.

carabiner 4y ago
With machine learning and digital breadcrumbs, "adtech" has evolved into a beast akin to WMD. It's devastatingly effective paired against radio, TV ads, billboards and other forms of non-interactive media. The deep surveillance that adtech deploys gives unparalleled information on consumers. This is why tech companies have become the wealthiest corporations in human history, and radio station conglomerates have not.
- lmpdev 4y ago
  I'm nitpicking here but wasn't the Dutch East India Company worth substantially more than today's tech companies?
  - sandworm101 4y ago
    Comparing valuations across the years never really works. Of course they were worth more. The East India basically owned the Indian subcontinent, which today or then was incalculable wealth.
    - mangamadaiyan 4y ago
      Parent is referring to the Dutch VOC, not the British East India Company. The entity that eventually "owned" the Indian Subcontinent was the British East India Company. The VOC ended up with Indonesia, swaths of land in South America, South Africa, Sri Lanka, and so on.

jmole 4y ago

Title should be updated to "Marxist commodity". Any Renascence courtesan (or tribal leader) could have told you that human attention is valuable. The difference now is that attention is quite nearby fungible, and near-readily exchangeable for dollars and cents. Just wait until eye-tracked advertising takes off.

tzs 4y ago
For those who are downvoting him without having read the article, he is suggesting the title update because that is what the actual title of the article says. Either the submitter edited the title to remove "Marxist" when they submitted, or for some reason "Marxist" is one of the words HN automatically removes from titles.
- trevcanhuman 4y ago
  Or the article's author just changed the title. Happens often with big news outlets where the HTML title tag is different than the title displayed on the webpage.
- dang 4y ago
  The submitter took the word 'Marxist' out of the title when submitting it, but I think this was a good move, in keeping with the site guidelines: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html The problem is that you can't say "Marx" without instantly triggering some people into ideological flamewar. That's boring and we don't need that. The current title seems like a fair balance because it doesn't fundamentally change the point, and when you go to the article itself you can learn that it means "commodity in the Marxist sense", or something along those lines.

throwawayarnty 4y ago

Attention has been commoditised even since the radio and television days. Before that, through mass print media and newspapers.

tresqotheq 4y ago
Yes, but the problem here is the introduction of smartphone, which is a gadget that is with you 24/7.

anigbrowl 4y ago

Talk about being late to the party. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_economy

philip1209 4y ago

World After Capital by Albert Wenger (USV) reaches a similar conclusion: https://worldaftercapital.org/ https://worldaftercapital.org/

anonymouse008 4y ago

This is an old and tired take - The more interesting thought (and equally as unoriginal) is 'The Internet' has effectively commoditized human attention. The commoditization happens because most knowledge easily accessible. This changes your attentive value from raw ability to gather information, the old regime, to the ability to create and synthesize across domains. I'm interested to see if this means we see fewer 'great entrepreneurs' and more bootstrapped businesses in the $10-500m revenue range built by people who can learn to be a solo-developer/mercenary leader with ruthless business sense.

tresqotheq 4y ago
>I'm interested to see if this means we see fewer 'great entrepreneurs' It is really interesting to see that you specify "enterpreneurs", instead of concerned about losing potential great artists, scientists, philosophers. I mean, where would we be, if the past Shakespeare, Einstien and Newtons were perpetually distracted and preventing them from making works of art and discoveries we now value most?
- lmm 4y ago
  Shakespeare and Einstein both benefitted greatly from synthesizing existing work; if they'd had more and easier access to what others were writing that seems likely to improve rather than diminish what they produced.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - tresqotheq 4y ago
    I think you were distracted, and this ^ comment was written without much thought. Oh wait. You are on HN. No surprise!

karaterobot 4y ago

> No one asked for or choose those changes. There wasn’t a town hall meeting where Mark Zuckerburg asked people if they wanted to know what their 3rd grade friends now think of Donald Trump; no one took a vote and decided "yeah, that’d be neat!". These changes were thrust upon society by new technologies and economic forces without anyone’s consent or forethought. They weren't thrust on us, and we did choose those changes. The information and the implications of that information were available to everyone from the beginning. I quit Facebook and Twitter in 2007ish because it was obvious where social media was going, and I'm not particularly smart, prescient, or well-informed. Nor was I alone in coming to that conclusion: many people were saying and writing this from the beginning. People didn't listen, because they liked it at the time. Even now, when so much has happened, billions of people still continue to choose to use social media, claiming they don't have a choice in the matter. I'm not saying they're bad for making a different choice than me, but it is obviously a choice.

walrus01 4y ago

human attention has always been a commodity. Look at historical FM, AM, broadcast TV advertising. companies like nielsen made attempts to quantify and measure actual viewership, hard to do in the 1-way-analog-broadcast era. Big difference now is that every social media thing has its own app that can specifically track ever click, every scroll, every like, viewing time per image and page, on an extremely granular basis. Look at why reddit is trying so hard to steer people into using their app rather than use it through a browser. ultimately the revenue stream for these app based social media things comes from the company selling advertising to you, of course. it's just much more targeted now than in the analog broadcast era.

tresqotheq 4y ago
> Look at historical FM, AM, broadcast TV advertising. The issue is the introduction of smartphone, which is a device that is with you 24x7.

chargingmarmot 4y ago

I'll take the opportunity to drop one of my favorite quotes from Herb Simon (Turing award and Nobel prize winner, artificial intelligence pioneer, father of behavioral economics, founder of CMU's Computer Science department): """ 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 and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it. (Simon 1971.) """

reubenswartz 4y ago
One of my favorite (perhaps that's the wrong word?) quotes, that explains so much.
Balgair 4y ago
A few of the other sub-commentors here are talking about a good bookshelf as a solution to Herb's problem. I think it's a great idea. But, as always, determining what is on that bookshelf is a tough one. The Harvard Classics was a great attempt about a century ago [0]. 'Dr. Elliot's 5 foot shelf of books' was what an undergraduate degree at Harvard in 1909 included. Harvard University President Charles W. Eliot put together about all of the great books that those Gilded Age scions were supposed to digest. Personally speaking, the greatest thing about the Harvard Classics was the 15-minute-a-day Reading Guide to the corpus. I went through it all a few years ago, and man, that was a really good idea. Like, I like Shakespeare now; he's really good! And I read through that philosophy finally, and that was really good too! And, lord, the poetry; I never really liked poems, but now I really love them. Most days were like that for me. I'll fully admit though, there were some real stinkers in there. But only once in a while. If you'd like to read along too, you can download scanned versions of the books here: https://www.myharvardclassics.com/categories/20120212 https://www.myharvardclassics.com/categories/20120212 . For example, today's reading is: Vol. 2, pp. 31-43 : Plato's Crito -- Socrates unceasingly strove for beauty, truth, and perfection. Sentenced to death on a false charge, he refused to escape from the death cell, even when opportunity was offered. As an aside, I'd love for an updated version of the Harvard Classics complete with 15-minute-a-day type readings or other media. I really did look forward to that dose of mind-training every day when I went through it. Does anyone know of a good place for daily mind training that is like this? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Classics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Classics

spencerchubb 4y ago

It didn't become a commodity, it always was

woodruffw 4y ago

The Marxist definition of "commodity" is a useful one, but doesn't do full justice to the nature of the problem. Attention is a commodity in the same way that corn and other raw materials are commodities: it's subdivided into abstract units for sale (and speculation), entirely divorced from the underlying asset (Joe Schmoe on Facebook) until the moment of redemption. Commoditization is (arguably) a very good thing: it allows the market to make stable pricing decisions (at various risk levels) without having to worry about the exact load of corn (or human attention units) showing up right when needed. But it's also a fundamentally obfuscative force: the commoditizing party is incentivized to lie about the underlying asset's value. Advertising exemplifies this to a greater extent than agriculture: we don't really know what attention is, and so it's much easier (and more profitable) to misrepresent to buyers. Subprime Attention Crisis[1] is a really fantastic analysis of the attention market, this specific sort of commoditization, and its latent risks. [1]: https://www.fsgoriginals.com/books/subprime-attention-crisis https://www.fsgoriginals.com/books/subprime-attention-crisis

walrus01 4y ago
see also, Marx's theory of Alienation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation The theoretical basis of alienation is that the worker invariably loses the ability to determine life and destiny when deprived of the right to think (conceive) of themselves as the director of their own actions; to determine the character of said actions; to define relationships with other people; and to own those items of value from goods and services, produced by their own labour. Although the worker is an autonomous, self-realized human being, as an economic entity this worker is directed to goals and diverted to activities that are dictated by the bourgeoisie—who own the means of production—in order to extract from the worker the maximum amount of surplus value in the course of business competition among industrialists. that sure sounds like a paycheck-to-paycheck, permanent renter class person that's become trapped in a debt-laden advertising-driven consumer lifestyle to me.
- woodruffw 4y ago
  People have accused Marx of all sorts of ridiculous things, but a lack of prescience isn't one of them :-)

its_ethan 4y ago

> three seconds of the time of a 25- to 28-year-old male with a Bachelors degree in a STEM subject from a state college, an interest in travel to the Baltic countries, centre-right political leanings, and a credit score between 650-720. Facebook can also ensure that those three seconds are sandwiched between a message from his mom and a holiday photo from a potential love interest Haven't there been a number of studies/articles written about how Facebook/Google sometimes really suck at delivering ads to the correct people that ad-buyer's ask for? Anecdotally, I've gotten ads for burger shops in Chicago while living in California. The above fear mongering, worst case claim, makes it real hard for me to take this guys philosophical /ethical break down seriously.

walrus01 4y ago
You may not be the sort of person who fills out their Facebook profile with details like age, marital status, what high school you went to, hometown, but there are hundreds of millions who do. just be correlating details like IP space geolocation, nevermind GPS/location API permission on a phone, with what pages a person likes, their biographical details, their friend network and the location data from those friends, advertising can get extremely targeted.
andrenotgiant 4y ago
Yeah when I read that sentence, it's a big red flag that the author has no idea what they're talking about. They're likely just rehashing something a friend told them after watching a TED Talk. If you set an advertising campaign that specific, you're going to get no impressions. Researchers keep using these examples of "disturbing levels of specificity" of Facebook targeting. No advertisers actually do this. They're too lazy and they want volume. They do plenty of other disturbing things but this is not one of them.
- tresqotheq 4y ago
  > They do plenty of other disturbing things but this is not one of them. I think some kind of AI employed here, would end up doing things like this and more, may be not right now but in very near future.

DesiLurker 4y ago

my old take is that money as such is a long-tailed weighted average between physical energy & mental energy (energy needed to modify belief structure & spring action). Attention is just the 'write head' to direct that energy. The interesting thing is that if physical energy becomes cheap as in we went from animals->wood->coal->petroleum->(maybe)solar->(possibly)fusion then its reasonable that money as a representation of change/energy only leans heavier on the human side. I dont see this as inherently bad but actually a sign of progress. the things I detest are basically perversions of attention related to some hack in our attention mechanism, for instance businesses that exploit peoples gambling addiction (or addiction of any kind).

mrsmee89 4y ago

I think the idea of attention being commodity is mostly looked at through a pejorative lens but I wonder if it's the beginning of the next stage of human evolution were boredom no longer has value and maybe thats a good thing? I haven't thought about this alot and I'm very curious shat other on here might think about this idea.

remir 4y ago

It seems like there's something darker and more perverse at play here. I'm not saying it's necessarily organized, but it's a dangerous dynamic. It like everything is done to prevent people's mind to be at peace and to relax. The constant noise and audio/visual pollution we see everywhere is deeply troubling. You cannot go to a simple store without some music being played, often very loudly for no reason. I went to my parent's house the other day and the TV was on. I had to turn it off so we could have a normal conversation like normal people do. The TV was constantly pulling our attention on some stupid crap like ads or some garbage program that tries to polarize people.

tremon 4y ago
My personal biggest gripe: music being played in-between points in tennis and volleyball matches (and I'm sure other sports, but I used to watch those). It's not just that the type of music being played offends my sensibilities, but the entire idea that people can't even be trusted to have ten seconds to themselves deeply saddens me. For me, it's one of the reasons why I no longer go to such events.
- prometheus76 4y ago
  They all just instantly pull out their phones and zombiescroll every time the action lulls for more than three seconds whether the facility blasts music or not. I think the loss of boredom tolerance is a huge issue in our culture.
62951413 4y ago
I have seen a particular flavor of it mentioned a few times. There are people who like having noise in the background. Typically in older generations and lower classes it's not music or intentionally selected podcasts. Instead, they keep their TV on at all times. I'll not be surprised if it turns out to be a major vector for government propaganda.
roeles 4y ago
> It like everything is done to prevent people's mind to be at peace and to relax. I think that our human nature is the source of this. Having spare time often means being bored (initially an unpleasant sensation) and potentially coming to terms with your own life, behavior and intentions. Only after a while of discomfort do you get the gains: creativity and growth. I have introduced people around me to meditation, and some just cannot bear to be idle. They start to ruminate and feel like they can handle it.

boringg 4y ago

Isn't this incredibly olds news?

antux 4y ago

In UI design, the user's attention is limited and valuable. I'm always doing things to minimize distractions and emphasize key information. The common problem is that there's so much information/data/content to offer that most people want to show everything. However, revealing everything spreads the user's attention in every little area. There is no concentrated focus on any one thing. As a result, the user doesn't really absorb what they're reading deeply. They don't absorb information in a detailed way because there's something else they have to click around the corner. To improve human attention designers have to say no to displaying certain things and focus on the few that's essential. This is easier said than done, but needs to be done.

plaguepilled 4y ago

I was about to engage with this article seriously... Until I read 'metal health crisis'. Really hope Polyphia and Jamie Christopherson make it out OK. Thoughts and prayers.

yeetard 4y ago
I laughed

wintermutestwin 4y ago

My attention is a commodity and I should be able to set the price. Attention theft is legal and rampant. Instead of advertisers setting targeting me, I should be able to target them (when I deign to pay for something with my attention).

tremon 4y ago
There's an idea. Microdebits for buying my attention! That'd be a worthwhile feature for uBlock.
matheusmoreira 4y ago
Not just theft... Mind rape. They violate the sanctity of our minds by implanting information whether we want it or not. We didn't ask for it, we didn't consent to it. If we complain about it, they act as if they were entitled to our attention, as if it was "payment" for free stuff.
- smitblz 4y ago
nprateem 4y ago
You can. They're called ad blockers and Google.

wintermutestwin 4y ago

>The existence of social media companies has made two changes to society's ethics here: first, they have convinced people that connections with people “they otherwise wouldn’t be able to connect with” is a product that can only be produced by for-profit corporations. I'd donate to a non-profit (or benefit corp) version of facecrook. Without paying their industrial psychologists to figure out how to steal more of my attention, the costs to run would be reasonably affordable for a world that is getting sick of FB.

Barrin92 4y ago

there's a lot of pieces like this but one thing that always stands out to me is the sort of 'half-Marxist' nature of the critique "But this business model is not inevitable, nor is Marx correct about there being one and only one ethical system that results from a given mode of production. If we, as a society, made a conscious decision on how we wanted to live, in particular, if we decided that we valued new and more interpersonal connections without our local communities, then we could use those same market forces to encourage lots of such connections to happen" If you're already starting with Marx you ought to take him seriously. The author owes us an explanation as to why Marx is wrong when he recognized that our values are the product of our material relations, and that we do not just wish them into existence as we please. You can't go pre social media any more than you can go pre-industrial. In Marxist analysis, the market forces use you. If you're going to keep one aspect of Marxism stick with the materialism, not his theory of value.

yeetard 4y ago

It's funny how the comment section here is already prime example of people having v̵e̵r̵y̵ ̵p̵o̵o̵r̵ no attention management skill. How about we stop lamenting the obvious and start thinking about how we could solve the problem? Theoretically it should be a non-issue since (in theory) every disturbance can be overcome by applying adequate willpower (and abundance of information is probably much harder to create then abundance of willpower - or so I think but i don't see any obvious reason for why it would be any other way; took us about 5000 years to create the internet, but the will to do something great clearly came first - otherwise there wouldn't be a internet, duh!). I see a general conflict here with how our society functions as a whole. Our institutions, everything per default is already designed around stealing our attention. Other than eastern religions, abrahamism is less concerned with letting it's adherent find balance and inner peace in a tumultuous world, it's more concerned with keeping you entangled in a constant struggle within, with yourself, and with god or something. With corporations it's the same, except it's about consuming products now. If we delete this, we will probably revert back into the stone age and if we let it be and add too much willpower there is a chance that our civilisation becomes uncontrollable. Psychology knows these concepts: Volition and executive functions. To fix the lack of the former Wikipedia suggests: Nothing, and for the lack of the latter it suggests CBT ( cock and b.., I mean cognitive behavior therapy) a.k.a nothing again, since cognitive behaviour therapy is a pseudoscientific scam that does not work. Also: "More research is required to develop interventions that can improve executive functions and help people generalize those skills to daily activities and settings." Wow, yeah, that is totally the reason for why there are no solutions for this! We just haven't done enough SCIENCE-ing, that's it folks! S C I E N C E! So, I'm pretty open for new ideas here. Maybe an actual neuroscientist could chime in and lecture us about how our neuronal circuits work together to create attention, how the SAS works or something and how we could improve it. But I suspect my attention span is to short and I wouldn't be able to follow along anyway. Welp...

m463 4y ago

Sounds like time to think will become an extravagant luxury.

johnwheeler 4y ago

Does this make procrastination the futures market?

bsedlm 4y ago

and consuming something is labor... netflix should have to pay ME if they want me to gobble up the content they put out...

LargoLasskhyfv 4y ago

Older, but related: http://www.sutjhally.com/articles/advertisingattheed/ http://www.sutjhally.com/articles/advertisingattheed/ https://www.mediaed.org/advertising-at-the-edge/ https://www.mediaed.org/advertising-at-the-edge/

devonallie 4y ago

While I agree with the authors sentiment, I do not think there is a difference in kind between TV advertising and social media advertising. I think it is a difference in scale. With the amount of data points a program can collect on user behaviour and identity, it becomes much easier to tune advertisements. This happens in TV as well (polling, viewership stats, demographics, focus groups) but obviously nowhere near to the same level of breadth and depth someone like Facebook can achieve.

eevilspock 4y ago

A related post and discussion: “User Engagement” Is Code for “Addiction” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26153331 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26153331 archive of OP: https://web.archive.org/web/20210216125517/https://craigwritescode.medium.com/user-engagement-is-code-for-addiction-a2f50d36d7ac https://web.archive.org/web/20210216125517/https://craigwrit...

FunnyBadger 4y ago

Which is why one block yourself from most MSM and social media which is the primary harvesting system. Just say no to all of it! Ration it if you must use it at all - like having a brandy from time to time but never every day.

SnowHill9902 4y ago
Block yourself from most men who have sex with men?