Towards an economy of attention

Commenting on my recent reflections on the end of capital, David Galbraith encouraged me to look beyond the simple, pessimistic, interprentation. People won’t be squeezed out by a capital that doesn’t need them anymore. Capital’s ultimate fuel is attention — the new scarcity — and that belongs to people.

I agree with David. Looking at people as mere input, resource, to the economic system — in one word, labour — is reductive.

To be fair, even union leaders from the 50’s understood that:

Henry Ford II: Walter, how are you going to get those robots to pay your union dues?

Walter Reuther (Automobile Worker Union leader): Henry, how are you going to get them to buy your cars? [1]

But this is not enough. Very few people today would argue that we should slow innovation, and automation, to preserve human jobs (except maybe the French government). So, conceding that the right thing to do is to let automation happen, how, in practice, are we going to protect this demand?[1]

In other words, if our key to freedom is the control of our attention how can we exercise that power? What will an economy of attention look like?

Advertising

To find out what our attention is worth, and how much we could get paid for it, we could begin by looking at the monetisation of attention today. No easier place to start than advertising, whose business is precisely “the harvest and sale of human attention” [2].

There is a long history of trading our attention for goods and services, financed by advertising. From newspapers, to commercial television, to search, to email clients, to social networking, even an ad supported Uber might not be that far. We have granted third parties the permission to sell our attention in exchange for cash, and to keep whatever cash was left.

Pushing it to the extreme we could imagine a sort of “attention barter” economy: I sell my attention for coffee while the owner of the coffeeshop sell hers for something else. That doesn’t sound very practical. Beside that, capping the price paid for our attention to “free” makes the attention economy a far-than-perfect market [3].

A better, and more fair, system should allow us to directly sell our attention, for cash:

“Advertisers should pay us, not third parties. If you could assert your property rights to your attention, you could sell it at a price that reflects its value to you”[4]

Data ownership and monetisation

Enabling a real attention economy requires inevitably a change from the centralised web we have created over the years to the purer, decentralised, vision of the early days.

From a user point of view, this means essentially two things: ownership of our personal data (which is much different than data protection as intended today) and the ability to monetise it.

Among the experiments related to the first point, one that is close to my hearth (since conducted in my little home town in Italy) is the project “My Data Store”, run through the Mobile Territorial Lab initiative. The data store is “a secure digital space, owned and controlled by the user, acting as repository for personal information, provided of managing and exploration features”. While today the Data Store is in reality another centralised database, one can easily imagine the same functionalities and interface applied to a decentralised data infrastructure.

Which leads to the second point, easy monetisation.

We can concede to our attention overlords that paying users individually is not easy. But this might change soon. A good example is the 21bitcoin computer which enables each user to create simple endpoints requiring bitcoins for access. Add it to a decentralised storage of personal data and a real marketplace for attention could be within reach.

In sum: the economy of attention goes hand in hand with the renewed promise of peer-to-peer internet.

The real value

Having finally enabled a true market for attention, we can now imagine a world where instead of selling labour for cash which is used to buy goods (the job cycle) we now sell attention for cash that is used to by goods (the attention cycle).

Maybe it is Sunday and I can’t think of anything better, but this doesn’t seem, by itself, that much of a revolution.

One issue is that we are limiting our view on attention to advertising, to the value of our attention when directed towards goods and services. Again, we are setting the price of our key resource (labour in the past, attention today) purely based on its economic value.

But attention as a mean of (commercial) trade is still essentially “captured” attention:

“The difference between directed and captured attention is the same as the difference between doing things and letting things take their course, or between living and “being lived” E.F. Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed.

By doing so we are neglecting an even more important point: the value of directing our attention to others, and ultimately to ourselves. A value that is is much larger but unfortunately unquantifiable.

No matter how we look at it, substituting labour with attention is only a partial step in the right direction. True change will happen when we learn how to put value in things (behaviours, goods) that have no clear economic value. This will be the focus of a future post.