026 - Attention Economy

Imagine that you have $100 you can spend each day, but you can't save any of it. The neurons of your brain have such a daily budget, recouped with healthy sleep.

Now, imagine that you encounter 10 sources of distraction each day, each attempting to persuade you to give them $5 from your budget. These 10 distractions are generic, targeting everyone equally. Most likely, you'll walk away from them while indulging in no more than 1 or 2, as a treat to yourself.

In contrast, imagine another day when you encounter 1,000 sources of distraction, each attempting to persuade you to give them $5 from your budget. These distractions target you specifically, and they are everywhere you look, embedded in every system you use. How much, if any, of your budget might be left by the end of this day?

This is a metaphor for the "attention economy's" practical impact on every internet user in the world's wealthier and more developed countries. Every user's attention is optimized on virtually every platform like factory farming, but for humans.

This is achieved through many different sources sharing the same system of incentives, and utilizing the same toolbox of methods. This includes "dark patterns" of UI/UX that are designed to maximize cognitive bias and emotional potency in human reactions, such as the infamous red dot of push notifications.

This toolbox of manipulation also includes many systems that users never actually see operating, the systems that choose what information to give users, and what information to hide from them. These are newsfeed algorithms, recommender engines, search engines, and #ecommerce search systems.

Though it may be rare for one system to entirely consume any individual's budget, it is also increasingly common for the 1,000 sources of manipulation to entirely consume people. Much as your body has a better chance of fighting off 10 sources of infection than 1,000 sources aiming at you specifically, your mental and emotional health bears the same consideration.

Advertising snake oil attempts to manipulate people into wanting something, into distraction devoid of any real value. There is a better way that benefits all parties.

Offering real value means understanding an individual and that individual's actual needs. It isn't a process of persuasion using adversarial attacks of psychology, but rather it is a process of robust understanding and honest communication. The latter may sound alien to some, but it is quite potent.

We have the technological capacity to build systems that offer such understanding and honest communication, greatly simplifying the process of recognizing and searching for the things that offer people real and specific value. In time, these systems will integrate with e-commerce platforms and replace the social engineering of today's advertising industry.

The attention economy is the Titanic, and we've moved past the iceberg. Will you go down with the ship?

Newsfeed algorithms and search engines are also pretty terrible at predicting human responses today. Many of my own posts that they very obviously deprioritized spreading end up receiving more reactions and reshares than posts they randomly presented to 10 times more people. Such systems may be "intended" to serve a useful function, but in practice, they're often no better than random chance.

A simple roll of the dice would also avoid systematic biases, like prejudice and stereotypes, which newsfeed algorithms heavily utilize. Put another way, Random is better than Racist.

Though many programmers and data scientists may twist statistics to justify their continued employment at major firms, the statistics for the damage they cause in doing so are still there, they just aren't presented. If the scientific method were applied to this problem, the counter-argument statistics could debunk their methods in many cases, favoring the avoidance of many systematic biases at a bare minimum.