Thinking aloud... Here we have the characteristics of the “attention economy” that we are moving into... integrated divisions of labor that need in no wise be geographically concentrated...information problems no longer complications but of the essence... brands and platforms—and the remarkable phenomenon of clickbait... earning money by making your primary users more unhappy.... Write-once, write-often, distribute-everywhere, and take advantage of what virally grabs attention to then make enough to sustain the enterprise via the sale of ancillary services.
I think you're treating two separate -- though commonly mediated -- things together. And while maybe they are one thing from one angle, just as ocean piracy and ocean transport are born from the same roots, for present-day analysis I think it's helpful to separate the things.
Materialist definitions of information are difficult; one useful heuristic is "information causes change". You're going to do something different when you realize this particular chunk of data is information, unlike the essentially garbage-to-you data around it.
In context of productive endeavours, there are three things going on with information. One is the indirect gift of VLSI industrial processes; _everything_ is much more precise and predictable than it used to be. Purities and precisions that used to require an entire world-class lab started getting found in cheap kitchen knives in the 2000s and are effectively everywhere now. This has enabled the increasing witchcraft of materials science; weld-on tool steels, increasingly invincible adhesives, utterly consistent extremely thin coatings (take a bunch of modern pop cans to 1950 in your time machine and hand them out to the very best laboratory organizations and cause despair) and so on. (Auto-polarizing eyeglass lenses are a thing, on the "it's a menu item" economic scale of "sure, you can have that; it costs a little extra")
Two is the size collapse of effective units of productivity. What took a shop with thirty people in Henry Ford's day is today one skilled person and (in real dollar terms) less investment in machines. Get the per-individual productivity up enough and the number of individuals to do the job drops to one or two. That unit of productivity _stops having management_; you need management once you've got three or more, maybe five or more if you've got existing social bonds. The gain to not having management costs is substantial. The organizational change becomes a scattering of experts. (E.g., you need a ditch dug. A hundred years ago, you needed a largish work gang using machine-produced tools but still digging by hand; fifty years ago, you needed a dozen people with third generation heavy machinery they had to continuously maintain; today, it's one or two people with much, much better machinery.) This has the direct consequence that what used to be a blue collar job has ceased to exist. There's work there -- it pays well, there's steady demand -- but only if you're expert. If you're not expert there's no mechanism to make use of you. It also has direct consequence on how work is organized; it gets fed through a succession of experts. Knowing what's possible, the order of experts, and having the personal relationships to get stuff done this month isn't management, but it's surely important and getting more so. (It's also, culturally for patriarchal cultures, _extremely_ girly. This matters.)
Three is the distribution of knowledge. The whole of human knowledge isn't on the internet yet, but you can watch someone practice your trade and learn things. You can find out things exist -- micro TIG welders for jewelers! binocular microscope built in! -- and you can look up instructions for almost anything. Nothing will save you from a lack of conceptual understanding, but if you've got that, you can find out how to do anything.
So that's the information thing; if you're expert, and it's an economically useful expertise, you're plugged into a network that lets people who want you find you. You're probably a bit stressed -- the pandemic has made all the supply chains erratic -- but you're doing OK. (You might work for Apple; the really indispensable experts, the individual contributors or distinguished engineers or technical fellows, work for large corporations but it's still a lot like this. And the need for direct human contact is more comfortable and customary than strictly necessary; the "how do we resolve our differences/reach consensus" tools for asynchronous communication exist. They're slower, they're different skills to use, but they're there.)
From an economic perspective, the essential thing here -- aside from the recognition that all productive labour has become expert -- is that the organizing principle has stopped being price signals. Price signals apply to _inputs_ -- and maybe you produce inputs, like tool inserts or adhesives or cleaning fluid or fabric -- but the organizing principle of the expert network is less and less concerned with price signals and more and more concerned with predictability. _What am I going to get?_, and _when will I have it?_ (Hence the intense focus on reviews to let intermediary sellers game the predictability aspect of an information economy.)
The _attention_ thing, well. You're not expert; you're not productive. (These are near enough the same statement these days.) You know you should be doing _something_ different, but the specific information -- what you could be expert in -- might not exist. (If it does exist, it's not even a little obvious.)
This makes you terribly vulnerable. You're useless, and you know you're useless, and you know you live in late capitalism where only a fading notion of the rule of law keeps the useless from becoming soap. (There's already substantial structure pressure to make them corpses.) People will set out to sell you notional information -- things you must do! without, somehow, more than the seeming of the actual information, the material reason -- because while there are a plethora of things we really need to collectively do, those things are not permitted; those things interfere with profitability. If you do these things, you're a source of profit. (and thus, perversely, if not virtuous -- mammonite virtue requires that you have money -- then permissible; you're contributing to profitability. It makes your existence permissible, in the way that being useless does not.)
So we've got an id amplifier -- unfiltered emotional signal -- and a grift -- create notional information, get attention, convert the "must do something different" into cash transfer towards you -- interacting. The pressure to _do_, to act differently (to spend might be to tax, but it's not to act, not emotionally) leaks into society as material acts. Sportsball riots, insurrection, stochastic terrorism, it's all the same "this isn't really information but it's the best I've got" mechanism where _do something different_ has become decoupled from any actual information. (On purpose. Facebook delenda est.)
They're not the same thing; the temptation to lump them together is real, especially if you're in a position of increased insecurity due to the pattern of change. They're still not the same thing; expertise and panic are both intense, but they can't be usefully conflated.
The pandemic has almost nothing to do with this except removing various refusals to admit the mechanisms existed; lots of disabled folks have been asking for just what happened in the way of work accommodations due to the pandemic, and noting with some bitterness that the post-pandemic response (still rather ahead of itself) is to remove all those accommodations, not because of any material reason -- productivity has done fine -- but because the people making the decisions are using some mix of a moral construction of work and personal satisfaction from exerting (inherently unhelpful) control via primate social channels.
So if you want a grand sweep of history take -- social organization starts with primate band-forming social mechanisms. Money gets invented, and social organization gets heavily mediated by price signals. (which takes a long time to become general. It takes industrialization and large voluntary organizations detached from agriculture.) Now, with universal broadcast and universal point-to-point communication and consequential productivity increases collapsing much practice into the individual (enhanced and extelligent) expert, primate band-forming social mechanisms shift focus from hierarchy to co-operation.
Which might be both lower-overhead and better on personal scales.
Absolutely not on if you're an oligarch, though. (And kinda fragile when the supply chains fall over, which they haven't done yet but they sure are slumping.)
Your post reminds me of reading The Economist back in the day. Back in the day had to be pre 2000 or so. The stories were of how reading X-rays and architectural services were being outsourced to India or other places. I asked my brother in law about this. He was in high end commercial real estate at the time. He said never happen. HaHaHa. Also back in this pre historic era my next door neighbor worked for Amdall. He interfaced with Japanese engineers via what was "face time" back then. Seems like "old news" has hit the "front" page.
“human attention is not human utility, not to mention not human flourishing.” Eloquently said. And ironically human attention (attachment/ attunement) is the engine in the machine of early brain development. If early attention is scarce- do we risk children developing their skills for the new economy- executive functioning, meta cognition, social emotional skills.
Maybe this is too obvious, but this seems to miss something of at least some importance: the disjunction in (part of) the attention economy between the "consumer" and the "purchaser".
That is, it is not just that profit is produces "via the sale of ancillary services", but that - in the case of things like Facebook, for example - the profit comes from an entirely independent "sale". As someone said: "if you are not paying for the product, then you are the product".
If the "attention" transaction is an entirely different one than the economic transaction, all manner of strange things can happen.
I like this analysis. Attention is a basic human need, and everyone has some coin in the currency.
One of the lessons of the scientific revolution of which the industrial revolution is just a major component is that if we can figure out how to make large quantities of material goods at affordable prices if we set our minds to it. If we want more energy, we can develop solar power and fracking as an interim measure. If we want more warplanes, we can build 50,000 planes a year. We can't always do so instantly, and the incentive need not be monetary.
It is much harder to come up with new plots for movies or books, lovable fictional characters, novel designs for devices, desirable styles of clothing, satisfying new cuisines or whatever else it takes to get people's attention. It isn't dematerialization so much as the systematic devaluation of the material component with the distribution of goods and rewards subject attention economy.
Didn't Brillat Savarin say, “The discovery of a new dish does more for the happiness of the human race than the discovery of a star?”
Othello is a play about an attention economy.
I think you're treating two separate -- though commonly mediated -- things together. And while maybe they are one thing from one angle, just as ocean piracy and ocean transport are born from the same roots, for present-day analysis I think it's helpful to separate the things.
Materialist definitions of information are difficult; one useful heuristic is "information causes change". You're going to do something different when you realize this particular chunk of data is information, unlike the essentially garbage-to-you data around it.
In context of productive endeavours, there are three things going on with information. One is the indirect gift of VLSI industrial processes; _everything_ is much more precise and predictable than it used to be. Purities and precisions that used to require an entire world-class lab started getting found in cheap kitchen knives in the 2000s and are effectively everywhere now. This has enabled the increasing witchcraft of materials science; weld-on tool steels, increasingly invincible adhesives, utterly consistent extremely thin coatings (take a bunch of modern pop cans to 1950 in your time machine and hand them out to the very best laboratory organizations and cause despair) and so on. (Auto-polarizing eyeglass lenses are a thing, on the "it's a menu item" economic scale of "sure, you can have that; it costs a little extra")
Two is the size collapse of effective units of productivity. What took a shop with thirty people in Henry Ford's day is today one skilled person and (in real dollar terms) less investment in machines. Get the per-individual productivity up enough and the number of individuals to do the job drops to one or two. That unit of productivity _stops having management_; you need management once you've got three or more, maybe five or more if you've got existing social bonds. The gain to not having management costs is substantial. The organizational change becomes a scattering of experts. (E.g., you need a ditch dug. A hundred years ago, you needed a largish work gang using machine-produced tools but still digging by hand; fifty years ago, you needed a dozen people with third generation heavy machinery they had to continuously maintain; today, it's one or two people with much, much better machinery.) This has the direct consequence that what used to be a blue collar job has ceased to exist. There's work there -- it pays well, there's steady demand -- but only if you're expert. If you're not expert there's no mechanism to make use of you. It also has direct consequence on how work is organized; it gets fed through a succession of experts. Knowing what's possible, the order of experts, and having the personal relationships to get stuff done this month isn't management, but it's surely important and getting more so. (It's also, culturally for patriarchal cultures, _extremely_ girly. This matters.)
Three is the distribution of knowledge. The whole of human knowledge isn't on the internet yet, but you can watch someone practice your trade and learn things. You can find out things exist -- micro TIG welders for jewelers! binocular microscope built in! -- and you can look up instructions for almost anything. Nothing will save you from a lack of conceptual understanding, but if you've got that, you can find out how to do anything.
So that's the information thing; if you're expert, and it's an economically useful expertise, you're plugged into a network that lets people who want you find you. You're probably a bit stressed -- the pandemic has made all the supply chains erratic -- but you're doing OK. (You might work for Apple; the really indispensable experts, the individual contributors or distinguished engineers or technical fellows, work for large corporations but it's still a lot like this. And the need for direct human contact is more comfortable and customary than strictly necessary; the "how do we resolve our differences/reach consensus" tools for asynchronous communication exist. They're slower, they're different skills to use, but they're there.)
From an economic perspective, the essential thing here -- aside from the recognition that all productive labour has become expert -- is that the organizing principle has stopped being price signals. Price signals apply to _inputs_ -- and maybe you produce inputs, like tool inserts or adhesives or cleaning fluid or fabric -- but the organizing principle of the expert network is less and less concerned with price signals and more and more concerned with predictability. _What am I going to get?_, and _when will I have it?_ (Hence the intense focus on reviews to let intermediary sellers game the predictability aspect of an information economy.)
The _attention_ thing, well. You're not expert; you're not productive. (These are near enough the same statement these days.) You know you should be doing _something_ different, but the specific information -- what you could be expert in -- might not exist. (If it does exist, it's not even a little obvious.)
This makes you terribly vulnerable. You're useless, and you know you're useless, and you know you live in late capitalism where only a fading notion of the rule of law keeps the useless from becoming soap. (There's already substantial structure pressure to make them corpses.) People will set out to sell you notional information -- things you must do! without, somehow, more than the seeming of the actual information, the material reason -- because while there are a plethora of things we really need to collectively do, those things are not permitted; those things interfere with profitability. If you do these things, you're a source of profit. (and thus, perversely, if not virtuous -- mammonite virtue requires that you have money -- then permissible; you're contributing to profitability. It makes your existence permissible, in the way that being useless does not.)
So we've got an id amplifier -- unfiltered emotional signal -- and a grift -- create notional information, get attention, convert the "must do something different" into cash transfer towards you -- interacting. The pressure to _do_, to act differently (to spend might be to tax, but it's not to act, not emotionally) leaks into society as material acts. Sportsball riots, insurrection, stochastic terrorism, it's all the same "this isn't really information but it's the best I've got" mechanism where _do something different_ has become decoupled from any actual information. (On purpose. Facebook delenda est.)
They're not the same thing; the temptation to lump them together is real, especially if you're in a position of increased insecurity due to the pattern of change. They're still not the same thing; expertise and panic are both intense, but they can't be usefully conflated.
The pandemic has almost nothing to do with this except removing various refusals to admit the mechanisms existed; lots of disabled folks have been asking for just what happened in the way of work accommodations due to the pandemic, and noting with some bitterness that the post-pandemic response (still rather ahead of itself) is to remove all those accommodations, not because of any material reason -- productivity has done fine -- but because the people making the decisions are using some mix of a moral construction of work and personal satisfaction from exerting (inherently unhelpful) control via primate social channels.
So if you want a grand sweep of history take -- social organization starts with primate band-forming social mechanisms. Money gets invented, and social organization gets heavily mediated by price signals. (which takes a long time to become general. It takes industrialization and large voluntary organizations detached from agriculture.) Now, with universal broadcast and universal point-to-point communication and consequential productivity increases collapsing much practice into the individual (enhanced and extelligent) expert, primate band-forming social mechanisms shift focus from hierarchy to co-operation.
Which might be both lower-overhead and better on personal scales.
Absolutely not on if you're an oligarch, though. (And kinda fragile when the supply chains fall over, which they haven't done yet but they sure are slumping.)
Your post reminds me of reading The Economist back in the day. Back in the day had to be pre 2000 or so. The stories were of how reading X-rays and architectural services were being outsourced to India or other places. I asked my brother in law about this. He was in high end commercial real estate at the time. He said never happen. HaHaHa. Also back in this pre historic era my next door neighbor worked for Amdall. He interfaced with Japanese engineers via what was "face time" back then. Seems like "old news" has hit the "front" page.
“human attention is not human utility, not to mention not human flourishing.” Eloquently said. And ironically human attention (attachment/ attunement) is the engine in the machine of early brain development. If early attention is scarce- do we risk children developing their skills for the new economy- executive functioning, meta cognition, social emotional skills.
This is concise and compelling!
Maybe this is too obvious, but this seems to miss something of at least some importance: the disjunction in (part of) the attention economy between the "consumer" and the "purchaser".
That is, it is not just that profit is produces "via the sale of ancillary services", but that - in the case of things like Facebook, for example - the profit comes from an entirely independent "sale". As someone said: "if you are not paying for the product, then you are the product".
If the "attention" transaction is an entirely different one than the economic transaction, all manner of strange things can happen.
I like this analysis. Attention is a basic human need, and everyone has some coin in the currency.
One of the lessons of the scientific revolution of which the industrial revolution is just a major component is that if we can figure out how to make large quantities of material goods at affordable prices if we set our minds to it. If we want more energy, we can develop solar power and fracking as an interim measure. If we want more warplanes, we can build 50,000 planes a year. We can't always do so instantly, and the incentive need not be monetary.
It is much harder to come up with new plots for movies or books, lovable fictional characters, novel designs for devices, desirable styles of clothing, satisfying new cuisines or whatever else it takes to get people's attention. It isn't dematerialization so much as the systematic devaluation of the material component with the distribution of goods and rewards subject attention economy.
Didn't Brillat Savarin say, “The discovery of a new dish does more for the happiness of the human race than the discovery of a star?”
Really interesting stuff. I’ll be thinking about it this during the week.