Autonomy in The Attention Economy?
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes.
If you were to go out in public and take a look at the people around you, most likely you’ll see people looking down at their phones. It’s not a pleasant sight, but we all do it whether we like it or not and it’s all thanks to our current economy: the attention economy.
Economics is defined as how a society utilizes its scarce resources. While we used to live in an information economy, with the growth of internet our scarcity is definitely not information anymore. Our access to technology has given us the luxury to look up where you should buy what or who you should go to for specific services all in a matter of seconds.
We live in an economy of attention not information.
Information consumes our attention, making it a scarce resource, we only have so many hours in a day that we can stare into a screen. This is because we live in the attention economy where you succeed by getting people to allocate most of their attention to you or your specific product. Thus, you could essentially dominate the economy if you can make people develop a habit of paying attention to the things you want them to.
In the December ’97 edition of WIRED magazine, theoretical physicist Michael Goldhaper discussed how “the economics of industrialized nations, especially the US have dramatically shifted. An increasing number of workers are no longer involved directly in the production, transportation and distribution of material goods and instead are earning their money managing or dealing with information in some form”. During this time, people believed they lived in an information economy, but Goldhaper believed, “no one would put anything on the internet without the hope of obtaining some attention”.
Twenty years later, ‘news’ isn’t about news; it’s about grabbing public attention. Legacy news sources are struggling, while Vice and YouTube are becoming successful. Social networks aren’t about connecting people; they’re about seeking attention from your peers. If you look on your phone, social networks all tend to utilize “auto-refresh” which leads to the endless scroll feed. In other words, these companies have engineered these sites/apps to fight against your brain.
News and social networks are free, because they’re business is built around collecting attention and selling it to advertisers. As we enter the age of post-scarcity, human attention is one of the only things that will still be valuable. There’s no way to increase the amount of attention per-capita. More and more of economy will revolve around collecting and controlling attention.
The free goods and services of the future economy will cost us not only everything we have, but everything we are. We are slowly losing the ability to consciously choose where to direct out attention. Too many people live for that burst of dopamine that comes from likes, followers or notifications. However, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take advantage of what technology provides us with. Let’s not forget that there is a lot of good that comes from it, just make sure to spend time how you want to spend it.
Looking for some attention autonomy? Simply give yourself some Space.
