Pricing Attention

Imagine what your life would have been like if you were born in 1880. How much would your life have changed? Candles and gaslight were expensive, so you grew up in the dark. You weren’t born into a house with running water. By 1920, chances are good you had enough electricity to run an electric light so you could at least read for a few hours. You probably bought a radio around 1922. The radio would have changed a lot of things because you didn’t need to go a physical theatre and suffer those indignities. Imagine how great life would have been by 1924. You could go to a physical theatre and take in a few newsreels and a silent film, come home, flip on the light, listen to the radio, read a newspaper, take a shower, and flush the toilet before collapsing into a bed in a room heated by a central furnace. The 20’s were a great decade compared to what you just came through.

There’d be a price to pay.

Price

Price can be a loaded concept. To me, it’s just a signal, information, data, that emerges out of a system. The equilibrium price is often represented as a point, but there are all sorts of buyers willing to pay at different points along the demand curve. In other words, price is a kind of fuzzy function, a cloud of likelihoods, a delicate balance of avarice, fear, and ignorance, smeared on a chart.

To some price is a symbol of power, greed, corruption, and maybe intent.

The power within a firm to set a firms’ pricing strategy can certainly be seen as symbolic.

Maybe price is both a set of numbers and a set of symbols?

Attention, too, can be a loaded term.

If you’re sitting on the chesterfield, reading a newspaper while the radio crackles in the background, what are you really paying attention to? Fast forward 90 years and ask yourself: if an Advertising Video on Demand (AVOD) platform like PlutoTV is playing on the large screen while you’re reading a book on a small screen, what are you really paying attention to?

Radio explains a lot about the price of your attention for at least two reasons.

The first is that you couldn’t stop the ads. There wasn’t a skip button on the radio. And if you wanted to change the channel you had to physically lift yourself up off the chesterfield, walk across the room to the radio cabinet, and turn the dial.

The second is that it changed the unit economics of entertainment. When you were a teenager, back in the 1890’s, assuming you had any time to spare and you lived in a major centre, you had to congregate in a physical space to watch a performer. When you were in your early twenties, maybe you’d go see a silent film and a few newsreels. If you wanted to be entertained at home, and could afford to burn animal fat to get enough light, you read. Newspapers were becoming cheaper and by your thirties you had a few magazines to choose from. You could flip past the printed ads. You could control your attention toward them. You could evade the toll, the fare, for the subsidy of medium.

Radio was wild. You bought a box, which was quite affordable even in the early 1920’s, and then the content itself was free. Who paid the content creators? The advertisers! And you paid the advertisers twice: first with your attention, and then when you totally bought their products or services because you would have on your own even if it wasn’t for the ad because you’re totally independent and free from the influence of marketing. But you didn’t mind because you liked all the new things they were coming up with: canned tomatoes, automobiles, toothpaste, iceboxes. What a time to be alive! What will they think of next?

Radio set the stage for a similar deal to emerge with television, cable, and later the Internet.

The price of the content is baked into the medium and the good/service.

And regardless if you opt into the medium, you’re still paying the price, twice.

Distribution, Distribution Power, and Pricing Power

A new technology enters the world as a distributed, decentralized, network, then one cluster of nodes condenses, consolidates, and the winner(s) take all. It’s the same pattern over and over: telegram, telephone, newspapers, film, radio, cable, Internet (Wu, 2011). The state likes this because fewer firms means fewer agents to surveil. It’s easier to tax, censor, and control the medium (Scott, 2020). It also works to the monopolists advantage: because it’s just more efficient this way and they who better to guard the public interest? It’s peak convenient, self-serving, reasoning.

Distribution is a bottleneck and there’s power at the bottlenecks. And if you have power over a bottleneck, you have the power to set a price.

And it only becomes a problem when citizens start complaining about the problem. Or some elite crosses another one and it becomes a grudge fuelled spectacle.

Attention Distribution Networks in 2024

By 2024, Meta, ByteDance, and Google got good enough at packaging packets, quantums, of your attention. And they got quite good at selling them off at auction. Your attention and identity are commodities.

They aren’t perfect at it.

There’s plenty of confusion and frustration on three sides of your screen. There’s a tendency for individuals to overestimate how unique they are, a tendency for buyers of your attention to overgeneralize how similar you are, and a tendency for distributors to almost engage in a strategic ignorance about coordinating both perspectives.

All the while, most platforms don’t understand the root cause of radicalizing content. Why do Americans love white supremacist content so much? And that’s a huge problem because advertisers don’t want their brands associated with some views. The hurling of grunting noises approximating speech about what constitute harm, what is freedom, and what is not, has been less than productive. Why grow consensus when farming rage is so much more lucrative?

It’s likely that the best people at connecting the dots at Meta, ByteDance and Google connect the political dots and know enough about the incentives to remain quiet about what they know. Emails published by the Justice Department related to anti-trust cases reveal a fraught political landscape that doesn’t engender trust and transparency. As a result, the knowledge of the best dot connectors are rarely operationalized by the business, little though society. And who can blame rational people behaving in their own self-interest?

It would seem as the technology that brings us together works just enough, in spite of the natural forces that drive us apart.

Now that distribution networks have been successfully re-centralized, the argument in the United States has shifted to who should have the privilege of moderating the distribution of ideas. One can’t take any of the public statements or representations at face value. These are negotiations and executives primary obligations is to their shareholders, not citizens, users, nor customers. They’re going to engage in deception, misrepresenting their position publicly so as to secure a better deal. Because attention distribution is valuable enough for political parties to contest, it follows that it will be contested. The highest bidder tends to win. And it would appear as though there is a negotiation over the price of your attention, not any other dimension which could be salient. Like say, for instance, how a citizenry can be assisted in making up their own minds.

Could there be an incentive to prevent citizens from setting their own floor price for their attention?

Flush Toilets, Refrigerators, Flat Screen TVs: You Know, We Spoil You

Those around the North Atlantic are better off, materially, today than we were in 1870. I like on demand water, electricity, heating, cooling and entertainment. Material life is quite a bit better. And it could be better, still, for those who don’t live around the North Atlantic.

If you listen hard enough, you’ll hear a kind of complaint that the access to material goods between the median income earner and a billionaire is democratic. A billionaire uses the same model of iPhone that I use. Probably a similar HDTV. We probably both howl, to this day, at Airlocking scene on HBO’s Avenue5. Assuming that billionaires are people and there are differences amongst them, it stands to reason that some have a deep need to compete for status. They need attention because they’ve already rung up the leaderboard on the Forbes list. So maybe there’s a competition for control over attention distribution platforms for the purposes of sculpting public opinion? After all, certainly, some billionaires feel the need for distinctive goods that differentiate their status from the masses? And who’s creating those goods?

The right to influence what you do with your attention isn’t just a monetizable asset class, it may be symbolically vital for ego reinforcement and self-esteem formation. It may be a prized virtual good unto itself. Your attention may be the new bananas the monkeys are fighting for. And, arguably, so long as the State gets to use it in service of Grand Strategy, then it’s alright for the powerful to compete for the ownership of those assets.

Letting anybody say whatever they want within some sets of reasons was a right carefully negotiated and continuously re-litigated by every generation. There appears to be a consensus amongst a plurality of certain segments of American society that accountability is the price that some people must pay in exchange for expressing speech could be regarded, in some circumstances that are subjective and objective, as harmful. And it certainly appears as though some brands are moving their marketing dollars accordingly. Great marketers know the four P’s of marketing. Placement and promotion matter because they are predictive of Return On Investment.

There appears to be a consensus amongst a minority of a sub-segment of American society that accountability must be deployed against the others as a warning to others, before freedom of speech can be extinguished once and for all.

There appears to be no consensus amongst any coalition of those in the middle. The status quo, to some extent, is inadequate. Something must be done. And that sense of inadequacy generates the social justification and the surface upon which control over distribution is contested. On the one hand, this is inadequate. On the other, at least there is acknowledgement that the plebs and proles matter enough to be contested over.

You matter.

Name Your Own Price

Radio, television, cable, the console, the SVOD/AVOD platform, and the newsfeed offer good deals. Are you not entertained? Is this not why you are here?

If you want to compete for some of that sweet sweet esteem affirming fame, you can offer your goods to the platforms and compete directly. And, aside from a few appointed gatekeepers at a few platforms and some classic Roman-style nepotism, there’s at least a nominal idea, some semblance, of meritocracy. If you can find an audience, and an audience can find you, then you got your limelight. And as a consumer, you get all the lulz, the feels, the highs and the thrills, almost for free. All you have to do is pay attention to what’s on.

You have a few choices in how you choose to spend your time. You have a lot of power.

What if more of us used it?

Would we find a better price?

References

Wu, T. (2011). The master switch: The rise and fall of information empires. Vintage.

Scott, J. C. (2020). Seeing like a state: How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. yale university Press.