2018 Startup Trends: Hacking the Attention Hackers (or, the Attention Arms Race)
Over the past 20 years, we’ve seen the rapid penetration of technology into our lives. I think in many way Tamagotchi served as the first trial balloon of an ever-expanding coup on our attention, which has only become more scientific and sinister.
The Attention Stranglehold
I first noticed technology’s stranglehold on attention when I found myself signing in every day on my Nintendo bulletin board to check to see if anybody responded to any of my posts about Pokemon easter eggs. Later, as I became more involved online, racking up stats of the approval of strangers became my primary focus.
As we started carrying our computers with us in our pockets, and later as some of us even went as far as to strap notification machines to our wrists, the problem only became worse and worse. As the monetization model of the internet shifted from selling us shit to selling our attention to the highest bidder, the arms race of which apps could monetize that attention began heating up into a very intense froth of nihilistic turbulence.
The developers of these applications, in their infinite ability to tweak and optimize against measurable statistics, armed with cheap storage and computational power which enabled the collection of more behavioral statistics than has ever been assembled in the history of our world, became evil scientists of compulsion. They got very good at getting you to feel a deep-seated need to eliminate red dots.
For me, this addiction culminated in a psychotic break that I experienced about two and a half years ago, when, after nearly 72 hours of amphetamine-soaked work without sleep, I found myself screaming at my phone on a New York Subway at 3:00 in the morning. It had to stop.
Like many others, the stress and compulsive checking of the internet got to me, and it broke me. And so my psychiatrist recommended I take a break, and learn how to become more intentional. I deleted all of my social media accounts, from twitter to linkedin. I kept up my personal blog, but due to some legal problems, I had to take that down to. For a moment, I was free.
As a developer, however, it is critical for me to stay up on the trends. After all, two of our businesses at In Formation depend on monopolizing attention as much as Facebook. So I kept a separate phone with fake accounts to see what technical weapons of mass attention were the rage. I kept fastidious notes.
I noticed over the past 3 years in particular, a radical shift in the depersonalization of notifications. While before this time, most notifications involved you personally, and actions that directly involved you, there was a slow but steady shift to notifications about events involving those connected to you, and making content recommendations.
Anecdotally, I began hearing people complaining more and more about this. People getting a buzz during a meeting, taking the risk to look at it being that it could be important, and then sighing as it turned out to be some article about Trump that was trending.
The Problem of our Unevolved Brains
The purpose of our brains is to take the massive mountain of data that the various sensors in our bodies produce, and filter out the signal from the noise. We’ve evolved over billions of years to get to the point where we could take that data, and turn it into deeply insightful knowledge about the inner-workings of the universe.
But we live in a time now where the amount of data available exceeds any time before it by an order of magnitude. Worse, much of that data looks a lot like signal. Even worse, there are people who are actively trying to take advantage of that to make money.
We are overwhelmed. And we all know it. We are all talking about it, but the problem is just getting worse.
On a geopolitical level, the advent of fake news and Russian election meddling has started to highlight just how easily these systems can be manipulated to disastrous ends.
What to Expect in 2018
In 2018, I’d expect to see some breaks in the trend. People are getting tired of this, and computers are getting more powerful, so I’d expect to see people starting to augment the inadequate filters of their wetware brains with technology.
No, I don’t think we’re going to get bionic brains just yet, but I think that you will start to see the major platform players like Apple and Google either take charge of attention filtering on their own, or open up APIs to allow third-party developers to come up with clever ways to fix our problems.
Expect to see development of artificial intelligence techniques for learning our preferences and optimizing not just for maximizing engagement, but also hitting specific target levels of engagement, putting control back in the hands of the flesh-and-blood attenders themselves.
Expect to see legal regulation as well. Think CAN-SPAM for push notifications, especially after we start to see evidence of the Democrats taking over Congress later this year, when politicians need to start sowing the seeds of cooperation on “less-important” issues.
Expect to see a surge in research on attention, on how it impacts our emotions, and mountains of whitepapers and news articles. Expect to see a lot of thought-leaders weighing in on how to fix it (without actually doing shit, of course). Expect to see Children’s Books about cellphone addiction.
Expect to see tools for controlling the amount of penetration into our lives, and tools for being more intentional about how we shut things out. Expect the mindfulness meditation trend to continue.
Expect to see more people reviving Huxley’s rambling classic, The Doors of Perception and talking about it as if they just discovered the rainbow.
Finally, expect to see more applications being monetized honestly. Expect investor trepidation in startups requiring monetization through advertising and selling personal data. Expect to see more technology and data living locally rather than in the cloud (or at least virtually so).
