15 ms·

The attention economy corrupts everything it touches: not just science, but journalism, politics, and even childhood. Being famous used to be rather difficult.

The attention economy corrupts everything it touches: not just science, but journalism, politics, and even childhood. Being famous used to be rather difficult. Of course there were exceptions (writing To Kill a Mockingbird, being the guy who dove into the river to save a drowning child, for example), but for the most part, you were going to live your life known only to the few hundred or thousand people you met personally. Even though you could pick up a phone and dial anyone in the world who owned a phone, you wouldn't, and if you did, they'd hang up on you. Now you can force your idiotic, or great ideas onto the screens of millions of people you'll never meet. Is that a good or a bad thing? It's certainly bad in some ways, and this is one of them.

nopenopenopeno 4y ago
>Now you can force your idiotic, or great ideas onto the screens of millions of people you'll never meet. No you can’t. Attention is scarce. That’s why it’s called “attention economy”. In fact, it was far easier to force idiotic ideas onto the screens of millions of people before the internet came along. That’s what TV commercials were.
- NL807 4y ago
  I think you're thinking about corporate/org-scale attention seeking. Putting things into historical context, getting attention today is certainly easier for a random individual. In fact anyone could directly compete with large organisations and even surpass them in some cases. You can set up a youtube account then do episodic dumb shit, and i can guarantee you'll get thousands of not millions of views eventually. You simply couldn't do that 30 years ago.
  - AlbertCory 4y ago
    Exactly. And it is, indeed, still hard to become famous, but not as hard as 30 years ago.
- autoexec 4y ago
  > That’s why it’s called “attention economy”. Those are your words. How many people do you think have already read them? How many more do you think will have read them after 10, 20, or 50 years? If you'd said the same thing before we were using computers to communicate with each other, who would you have said it to? How many people would have heard it? How long would those words have been discoverable? What chance you would you have had to have your words reach millions of people? Forget about you, what chance would I and everyone else have? Speaking as someone who wasn't born after the internet it's much easier now than it was when I was a child for my words to reach a massive number of people, and every child alive today has a better chance than I did at their age. Attention is scarce, when you've got near instant communication over a global network of billions of people you only need a tiny fraction of them to be looking your way and you've got your ideas onto the screens of millions of people
NL807 4y ago
The problem seems to be more fundamental. Attention is not inherently bad, the issue is how and what kind of attention is rewarded. Many platforms reward engagement of attention seeking behaviour, both good and particularly bad ones, as it easily evokes primal emotions in the audience. And so there is incentives for content creators to continue peddling shitty content.
- meowkit 4y ago
  ...it is more fundamental. It's Moloch - the optimization for one criterion (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/) on the grandest scale. It's attention in the "attention economy", but attention is just signal for revenue opportunity, which is profit extraction aka the optimizing measure for Capitalism. Too be clear, I am not even against Capitalism. Its been a powerful tool for driving market economies, and in conjunction with social justice it has risen all boats. The problem now is that it's been eroding foundational societal elements that make contemporary society (and Capitalism itself) possible in the first place... like attention, science, community, political sense-making, and more. This is different from, but related to, Goodhart's Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law).
  - sedeki 4y ago
    If I say: Then attention becomes more valuable under Capitalism, so a siginficant portion of people will choose to have low screen time? Think of a "Deep Work" Movement or so. I don't intend the above to be read as a would-be theorem in economics ("if-then"), I just want to know how you reason here.
    - 411111111111111 4y ago
      > Then attention becomes more valuable under Capitalism, so a siginficant portion of people will choose to have low screen time? I'm not the person you've responded to but i don't think that these sentences are logically connected. If the former is true then the hustle to get this attention will become even stronger, increasing the attention economy. Unless you're not talking about valuable in a momentary manner, but that would mean you've moved on from capitalism.
thghtihadanacct 4y ago
Humans ... us people things, etc ... are prone to our most immediate concerns. It used to be that predators were our concern, now its social media. We react, we make noises, we continue. The unfortunate thing is that there are no lions to take out the weak anymore.
bawolff 4y ago
Pretty sure being famous is still pretty damn hard. For every tick tock virally famous influencer there are thousands of wannabes that nobody cares about. > Now you can force your idiotic, or great ideas onto the screens of millions of people you'll never meet. I'm sorry, did a hand reach out of your phone and force you to install and view the app of the week?
- Retric 4y ago
  Being famous doesn’t require my personal attention, just the attention of people who actually downloaded the app of the week. The barrier to being famous dropped as people spend less time on any one thing. A few seconds of attention is qualitatively different than reading a novel or even watching a movie.
  - bawolff 4y ago
    That's rediculous. You think that influencer fame just happens? Influencers put lots of effort into being famous. Probably a similar amount as hollywood starlets of yesteryear put into being "discovered".
    - Retric 4y ago
      How many musicians do you think put in extreme effort without becoming famous? It’s not that it’s easy, it’s that more people make it to B and C list fame.
- godelski 4y ago
  Still hard but I think the parent is arguing that there are more famous people today than say 50 years ago. One of the things the internet did is create more niche groups. There's way more B list and C list celebrities than ever before. Being an A list is still very hard, but being a celebrity in general is easier. Plus there's all the one hit wonders and many more of them. Even the "runs into burning building" famous people are much more likely to become known across the country or globe than before
user3939382 4y ago
The thing that scares me the most is that unlike reading a novel, or pensively writing a letter in the 19th century, we focus much less now on one thing for long periods. Even looking at HN, but look especially at TikTok, YouTube “shorts” — the dopamine pinball game going off in our brains and constant change of focus is robbing us of a skill which I fear will have unforeseen consequences at the scale of our global society.
- lkrubner 4y ago
  And yet, in my career, I've noticed the rewards are increasing for being the person who is willing to focus on one thing for a long time (for several weeks, or months). For instance, I've never been the kind of software developer who could write obviously clever code. But I have written code that was admired and praised, and sometimes seen as the salvation of the company I was working for -- but not because I'm especially skilled as a software developer, but only because I was willing to think about specific problems, deeply, for longer than anyone else at the company. In 2012/2013, to the extent that I helped re-invent the tech stack at Timeout.com, it was because I was willing to spend weeks thinking about exactly why we'd reached the limits of what we could do with various cache strategies, and then what would come next. I then introduced the idea of "an architecture of small apps" which was the phrase I used because the phrase "microservices" didn't really become widespread until Martin Fowler wrote his essay about it at the very end of of 2013. Likewise, I now work as the principal software architect at Futurestay.com, and my main contribution has been my willingness to spend weeks thinking about the flaws in the old database schema, and what we needed to do to streamline our data model and overcome the tech debt that built up over the 7 years before I was hired. We live in a world where there are large economic rewards for the kinds of people who are willing to think about one thing, deeply, for weeks and weeks or even months and months, until finally understanding a problem better than anyone else. I have to hope some young people eventually escape the attention-sucking technologies that try to sabotage their concentration, and eventually discover the satisfactions of thinking about complex problems, continuously, for months and months and months.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
anm89 4y ago
Came here to say this. There is nothing meaningful in our lives which goes completely unscathed from the cultural destruction of the attention economy.
1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
It is well-established that the human animal is evolved to live in small groups. When people come together in large numbers, it is a special occurrence, limited in time and space. The idea of living "as if" one is always in this situation is unnatural and arguably unhealthy. It is not something we should be promoting or even allowing. We should be promoting small groups. If I was asked to "regulate" this problem of so-called "altmetrics", and the "attention economy" in general, here is how would I do it. Twitter used to be based on SMS, but since 2020 it is just a gigantic website like Facebook. These two mega-sized websites are the primary sources of "altmetrics". If we take away the right to create these gigantic outsourced websites, what would happen. I would place limits on websites that are comprised of so-called user-generated content. For example, if someone wants to run a website with millions of pages, they are free to do so. (If they could actually produce enough content to justify so many pages.) However, they are not free to have millions of different people author the pages. A website could not be a mass scale middleman (intermediaries) for people who wish to publish using the www. A mega-website doing no work to produce content, financed solely by selling people out to advertising could not, for example, supplant an organisation that employs journalists and editors to produce news. By regulating creation of these mega-websites we could reduce the incentive for advertising. The mega-websites would lose their traffic and disappear. They would be replaced by normal-sized websites that cater to specific audiences. Allowing a few websites to grow to enormous size while not having to do any work to produce content has been a mistake. Of course they can make billions in advertising revenue. It also allows any notion of egalitarianism in the www's design to be compromised in favour of a sharecropper model, so-called "platforms". Without oversized websites no one would be able to publish their content to every website in existence. No website would be able to do zero work to create content and yet act as a middleman drawing massive traffic that can be monitised via advertising. That is what these mega-websites like Twitter and Facebook do. They sit between people who create content and people who consume it and sell these people out to advertisers. The cost of publishing data/information to the www will continue to fall. The technology to make it easy will contnue to advance. We do need to be able to communicate in small groups, as we have always done. That is possible. We do not need to collectively use mega-websites with billions of pages run by a handful of third parties in order to do it. The follow-on effects of millions of people communicating via these third party websites are obviously harmful.
omegalulw 4y ago
I don't understand this attitude. Who is the judge of what ideas are great and what ideas are idiotic?
- lkrubner 4y ago
  - guerrilla 4y ago
    No, that's not what they're suggesting. That's a straw man that begs the question. They're suggesting there's no such thing objectively. Not everyone agrees on what's great because it's subjective and different people value different things. You're trying to reify your taste and in the process confounding your subjective values whith objective values (which can't exist.) PG does the same thing in one of his essays, whereupon this was repeatedly pointed out.
    - lkrubner 4y ago
      "Not everyone agrees on what's great because it's subjective and different people value different things." You are confusing people's disagreement with the competing definitions of "objective" and "subjective". These are separate things. Something can be objectively true and yet people will still disagree about it. Objectively, vaccines for Covid-19 can lower the risk of death for those who get a case of Covid-19 -- people disagree about it, but it is not a subjective question. Objectively, Darwin's theory of natural selection explains much of the development of the diversity of life on Earth, but people still reject the theory. There are many objective facts in the world that people still disagree with, because some people are irrational. What you seem to be confused about is the role disagreement plays in determining whether something is objectively true, which is to say, it plays no role at all -- many things are objectively true, yet fiercely contested by irrational people. The fact that irrational people exist does not mean that everything in the world is subjective, it only means that some people have some experiences which they experience subjectively. George Orwell made the remark that some people could not be brought around to facing to reality till their wrong beliefs were tested on a battlefield, and it is true, if you shoot someone in the brain, the argument that everything is subjective comes to a sudden end.
guerrilla 4y ago
> and if you did, they'd hang up on you Not so much as you'd think. Try it. You'd be surprised.
- autoexec 4y ago
  these days I'd be surprised if they even pick up in the first place. If I don't know you and I'm not expecting your call you get voicemail. Some folks basically never answer their phone because 'everyone I want to talk to knows to text me'. I don't doubt you'll eventually reach someone who would stay on the line and chat a bit, but unless you're lucky it could take a while.
- AlbertCory 4y ago
  You should write a blog post about that, with transcripts. I bet it'd get lots of attention and go viral. See how easy it is to become famous? I just told you how :)
ShamelessC 4y ago
> Being famous used to be rather difficult. Of course there were exceptions (writing To Kill a Mockingbird... Shots fired!

nopenopenopeno 4y ago

>Now you can force your idiotic, or great ideas onto the screens of millions of people you'll never meet. No you can’t. Attention is scarce. That’s why it’s called “attention economy”. In fact, it was far easier to force idiotic ideas onto the screens of millions of people before the internet came along. That’s what TV commercials were.

NL807 4y ago
I think you're thinking about corporate/org-scale attention seeking. Putting things into historical context, getting attention today is certainly easier for a random individual. In fact anyone could directly compete with large organisations and even surpass them in some cases. You can set up a youtube account then do episodic dumb shit, and i can guarantee you'll get thousands of not millions of views eventually. You simply couldn't do that 30 years ago.
- AlbertCory 4y ago
  Exactly. And it is, indeed, still hard to become famous, but not as hard as 30 years ago.
autoexec 4y ago
> That’s why it’s called “attention economy”. Those are your words. How many people do you think have already read them? How many more do you think will have read them after 10, 20, or 50 years? If you'd said the same thing before we were using computers to communicate with each other, who would you have said it to? How many people would have heard it? How long would those words have been discoverable? What chance you would you have had to have your words reach millions of people? Forget about you, what chance would I and everyone else have? Speaking as someone who wasn't born after the internet it's much easier now than it was when I was a child for my words to reach a massive number of people, and every child alive today has a better chance than I did at their age. Attention is scarce, when you've got near instant communication over a global network of billions of people you only need a tiny fraction of them to be looking your way and you've got your ideas onto the screens of millions of people

NL807 4y ago

The problem seems to be more fundamental. Attention is not inherently bad, the issue is how and what kind of attention is rewarded. Many platforms reward engagement of attention seeking behaviour, both good and particularly bad ones, as it easily evokes primal emotions in the audience. And so there is incentives for content creators to continue peddling shitty content.

meowkit 4y ago
...it is more fundamental. It's Moloch - the optimization for one criterion (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/) on the grandest scale. It's attention in the "attention economy", but attention is just signal for revenue opportunity, which is profit extraction aka the optimizing measure for Capitalism. Too be clear, I am not even against Capitalism. Its been a powerful tool for driving market economies, and in conjunction with social justice it has risen all boats. The problem now is that it's been eroding foundational societal elements that make contemporary society (and Capitalism itself) possible in the first place... like attention, science, community, political sense-making, and more. This is different from, but related to, Goodhart's Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law).
- sedeki 4y ago
  If I say: Then attention becomes more valuable under Capitalism, so a siginficant portion of people will choose to have low screen time? Think of a "Deep Work" Movement or so. I don't intend the above to be read as a would-be theorem in economics ("if-then"), I just want to know how you reason here.
  - 411111111111111 4y ago
    > Then attention becomes more valuable under Capitalism, so a siginficant portion of people will choose to have low screen time? I'm not the person you've responded to but i don't think that these sentences are logically connected. If the former is true then the hustle to get this attention will become even stronger, increasing the attention economy. Unless you're not talking about valuable in a momentary manner, but that would mean you've moved on from capitalism.

thghtihadanacct 4y ago

Humans ... us people things, etc ... are prone to our most immediate concerns. It used to be that predators were our concern, now its social media. We react, we make noises, we continue. The unfortunate thing is that there are no lions to take out the weak anymore.

bawolff 4y ago

Pretty sure being famous is still pretty damn hard. For every tick tock virally famous influencer there are thousands of wannabes that nobody cares about. > Now you can force your idiotic, or great ideas onto the screens of millions of people you'll never meet. I'm sorry, did a hand reach out of your phone and force you to install and view the app of the week?

Retric 4y ago
Being famous doesn’t require my personal attention, just the attention of people who actually downloaded the app of the week. The barrier to being famous dropped as people spend less time on any one thing. A few seconds of attention is qualitatively different than reading a novel or even watching a movie.
- bawolff 4y ago
  That's rediculous. You think that influencer fame just happens? Influencers put lots of effort into being famous. Probably a similar amount as hollywood starlets of yesteryear put into being "discovered".
  - Retric 4y ago
    How many musicians do you think put in extreme effort without becoming famous? It’s not that it’s easy, it’s that more people make it to B and C list fame.
godelski 4y ago
Still hard but I think the parent is arguing that there are more famous people today than say 50 years ago. One of the things the internet did is create more niche groups. There's way more B list and C list celebrities than ever before. Being an A list is still very hard, but being a celebrity in general is easier. Plus there's all the one hit wonders and many more of them. Even the "runs into burning building" famous people are much more likely to become known across the country or globe than before

user3939382 4y ago

The thing that scares me the most is that unlike reading a novel, or pensively writing a letter in the 19th century, we focus much less now on one thing for long periods. Even looking at HN, but look especially at TikTok, YouTube “shorts” — the dopamine pinball game going off in our brains and constant change of focus is robbing us of a skill which I fear will have unforeseen consequences at the scale of our global society.

lkrubner 4y ago
And yet, in my career, I've noticed the rewards are increasing for being the person who is willing to focus on one thing for a long time (for several weeks, or months). For instance, I've never been the kind of software developer who could write obviously clever code. But I have written code that was admired and praised, and sometimes seen as the salvation of the company I was working for -- but not because I'm especially skilled as a software developer, but only because I was willing to think about specific problems, deeply, for longer than anyone else at the company. In 2012/2013, to the extent that I helped re-invent the tech stack at Timeout.com, it was because I was willing to spend weeks thinking about exactly why we'd reached the limits of what we could do with various cache strategies, and then what would come next. I then introduced the idea of "an architecture of small apps" which was the phrase I used because the phrase "microservices" didn't really become widespread until Martin Fowler wrote his essay about it at the very end of of 2013. Likewise, I now work as the principal software architect at Futurestay.com, and my main contribution has been my willingness to spend weeks thinking about the flaws in the old database schema, and what we needed to do to streamline our data model and overcome the tech debt that built up over the 7 years before I was hired. We live in a world where there are large economic rewards for the kinds of people who are willing to think about one thing, deeply, for weeks and weeks or even months and months, until finally understanding a problem better than anyone else. I have to hope some young people eventually escape the attention-sucking technologies that try to sabotage their concentration, and eventually discover the satisfactions of thinking about complex problems, continuously, for months and months and months.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

anm89 4y ago

Came here to say this. There is nothing meaningful in our lives which goes completely unscathed from the cultural destruction of the attention economy.

1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago

It is well-established that the human animal is evolved to live in small groups. When people come together in large numbers, it is a special occurrence, limited in time and space. The idea of living "as if" one is always in this situation is unnatural and arguably unhealthy. It is not something we should be promoting or even allowing. We should be promoting small groups. If I was asked to "regulate" this problem of so-called "altmetrics", and the "attention economy" in general, here is how would I do it. Twitter used to be based on SMS, but since 2020 it is just a gigantic website like Facebook. These two mega-sized websites are the primary sources of "altmetrics". If we take away the right to create these gigantic outsourced websites, what would happen. I would place limits on websites that are comprised of so-called user-generated content. For example, if someone wants to run a website with millions of pages, they are free to do so. (If they could actually produce enough content to justify so many pages.) However, they are not free to have millions of different people author the pages. A website could not be a mass scale middleman (intermediaries) for people who wish to publish using the www. A mega-website doing no work to produce content, financed solely by selling people out to advertising could not, for example, supplant an organisation that employs journalists and editors to produce news. By regulating creation of these mega-websites we could reduce the incentive for advertising. The mega-websites would lose their traffic and disappear. They would be replaced by normal-sized websites that cater to specific audiences. Allowing a few websites to grow to enormous size while not having to do any work to produce content has been a mistake. Of course they can make billions in advertising revenue. It also allows any notion of egalitarianism in the www's design to be compromised in favour of a sharecropper model, so-called "platforms". Without oversized websites no one would be able to publish their content to every website in existence. No website would be able to do zero work to create content and yet act as a middleman drawing massive traffic that can be monitised via advertising. That is what these mega-websites like Twitter and Facebook do. They sit between people who create content and people who consume it and sell these people out to advertisers. The cost of publishing data/information to the www will continue to fall. The technology to make it easy will contnue to advance. We do need to be able to communicate in small groups, as we have always done. That is possible. We do not need to collectively use mega-websites with billions of pages run by a handful of third parties in order to do it. The follow-on effects of millions of people communicating via these third party websites are obviously harmful.

omegalulw 4y ago

I don't understand this attitude. Who is the judge of what ideas are great and what ideas are idiotic?

lkrubner 4y ago
- guerrilla 4y ago
  No, that's not what they're suggesting. That's a straw man that begs the question. They're suggesting there's no such thing objectively. Not everyone agrees on what's great because it's subjective and different people value different things. You're trying to reify your taste and in the process confounding your subjective values whith objective values (which can't exist.) PG does the same thing in one of his essays, whereupon this was repeatedly pointed out.
  - lkrubner 4y ago
    "Not everyone agrees on what's great because it's subjective and different people value different things." You are confusing people's disagreement with the competing definitions of "objective" and "subjective". These are separate things. Something can be objectively true and yet people will still disagree about it. Objectively, vaccines for Covid-19 can lower the risk of death for those who get a case of Covid-19 -- people disagree about it, but it is not a subjective question. Objectively, Darwin's theory of natural selection explains much of the development of the diversity of life on Earth, but people still reject the theory. There are many objective facts in the world that people still disagree with, because some people are irrational. What you seem to be confused about is the role disagreement plays in determining whether something is objectively true, which is to say, it plays no role at all -- many things are objectively true, yet fiercely contested by irrational people. The fact that irrational people exist does not mean that everything in the world is subjective, it only means that some people have some experiences which they experience subjectively. George Orwell made the remark that some people could not be brought around to facing to reality till their wrong beliefs were tested on a battlefield, and it is true, if you shoot someone in the brain, the argument that everything is subjective comes to a sudden end.

guerrilla 4y ago

> and if you did, they'd hang up on you Not so much as you'd think. Try it. You'd be surprised.

autoexec 4y ago
these days I'd be surprised if they even pick up in the first place. If I don't know you and I'm not expecting your call you get voicemail. Some folks basically never answer their phone because 'everyone I want to talk to knows to text me'. I don't doubt you'll eventually reach someone who would stay on the line and chat a bit, but unless you're lucky it could take a while.
AlbertCory 4y ago
You should write a blog post about that, with transcripts. I bet it'd get lots of attention and go viral. See how easy it is to become famous? I just told you how :)

ShamelessC 4y ago

> Being famous used to be rather difficult. Of course there were exceptions (writing To Kill a Mockingbird... Shots fired!