The Market For Your Attention

This post offers some value in exchange for your attention. I’ll open up with an observation about attention payments and platforms. I’ll expand on the relationship between platforms, the state, and citizens. I’ll dive into recent changes in attention markets, talk about motives, expand on how I’m thinking about choices, and conclude with a practical rule of thumb that could be useful.

Oh you’ll pay. You’ll all pay.

You pay attention. You pay for attention with your time. Sometimes you’ll pay money and then pay attention — like when you go to the movies or the theatre. If you run a business, you may even pay for the attention of others in cold hard money to an attention distributer who will, in turn, make those people pay. And they’ll pay because you paid.

And there are so many things competing for your attention: in the meters of feed you scroll past, creating meters of feed of your own, the hundreds of outdoor advertising exposures you get, the hundreds of channels on the television, and to all content that you didn’t ask for but is thrusted into your attention. Attention distribution platforms have to manage the variability of the quality, relevance, and volume from content producers in order to maximize how much value they extract from the relationship between content consumers and advertisers. It’s at least a three sided value exchange: the content producer gets attention, the content consumer gets utility (facts, information, misinformation, entertainment, escape, bias-reinforcement, variable-reward driven dopamine bursts and so on), and the platform gets money by operating as an intermediary for advertisers, who need your attention to fulfill different needs to varying levels of satisfaction. As is tradition, the firm that controls the distribution channel controls the rent. It isn’t new. It’s a story as old as tolls.

Recent Developments

It’s taking its toll on some of us more than others.

One guy has such an insatiable need for attention, for the status that the attention symbolically represents, that he bought himself a platform. Sure, he said that it was about some broader banner, some societal value, that affects us all. But if that were true, his actions would have been consistent with those words. It makes you wonder about the cause of that inconsistency? Is it incompetence or is it deception? Porque no los dos?

He appears to have exhausted a narrow supply for affirmation, so now he’s suing others for not paying money to fuel it.

Why are we letting it happen?

Well, he has nobody in his life that will anchor him. He’s procured millions of people who are participating in the delusion. People have been hurt in Great Britain as a result. So now, it’s a question of how many more people will be physically injured before the state intervenes. It’s as wild as it sounds. The emperor truly has no clothes. He’s so naked that he’s peeling off his own skin.

And, by persisting on that platform, I’m enabling it.

If you’re using such a platform, you’re paying a few times over – first with your time, and then, usually, with your wallet. You, as a consumer, pay for advertising. That’s you. You pay.

Alright, so what? I’ve been asking you for years and years who do you trust to manage your attention. Who cares?

I hope you care.

It’s interesting who stopped caring. Some people pay with their young lives for it. We could maybe say there was an attempt to signal concern for the side-effects of the major platforms before 2020. Given the incentives for platforms to lie, coupled with the complete information asymmetry to assess if they were intervening for public good, it’s likely that some of it was deception. Now, it would appear, it’s open season on those who can least afford to pay.

Young people are just figuring out their social lives. And for many of them, their social life is life. There is no distinction. When you’re that age, the stakes feel extreme not just because it’s a sequence of novel experiences. Young people feel some alienation towards older people as they’re describing their feelings because the elders aren’t reacting with as much passion. But there is sometimes empathy for that it’s like. New constructs always feel surprising because…by definition…the new feels surprising. That confluence of novelty and extremity produces vulnerability.

There doesn’t see to be any coordinated effort to mitigate the harm of attention platforms on youth. Even right now, SV continues to fund startups that build and target high school and college students with anonymous social networking app in spite of the incredible harm they do. Moderation as a product, platform safety, DEI, social impact – all of it – is on the out. Finished. TikTok proved that you didn’t need to invest in platform safety to get the rewards. Safety teams have been liquidated. The shareholders have decided.

Just to be appallingly clear: they’ll kill your children for an extra dollar, call it free speech, and charge you for the privilege of watching it. They’re daring you to make you make them stop. And it’ll only stop when you force the legislators to make them. Those born on this side of 2000 are justified in condemning those of us born before for not putting an end to it.

Such is the power of capital to override public utilities. It shouldn’t be this way, but it is.

Where now?

Curious people are curious. Interesting people are interesting in many ways. I pay attention to whole people. I’ll subscribe to their feed for a flow of links, thoughts, pictures about running, cooking, camping, memes, conferences, all sorts of events because I’m curious about their lives. Curious people notice curious things. It’s worth paying attention to.

I’ve noticed that a few of the people I’ve followed for years have just stopped. I don’t see them anymore. Their lights have gone out, one at a time.

I’ve noticed that a few others have changed which version of themselves they’re choosing to share. I’m not even sure that it’s them anymore. And I can’t tell which audience it’s for. It’s as though they’re competing for attention instead of sharing for interest. And doesn’t seem to be simply Generative AI outsourcing or convience-seeking behaviour. The takes are shorter, hotter, fresher. In some cases, it’s as though they’ve hired a PR agency to procure a new brand positioning that is more likely to resonate with what remaining audiences are craving. This, of course, is their right. It’s their attention to pay, and I’m not entitled to anything.

Maybe they want larger audiences? Maybe a large following is a signal of value itself? Attention is scarce and what is scarce is competed for?

Maybe there’s something about the way people feel they need to show up on certain platforms?

How are people showing up on LinkedIn? Are people sharing on LinkedIn happy with what they’re sharing on LinkedIn?

I feel a bit of sadness, malaise, regret and dissatisfaction that those I know quite well in four or five dimensions only appear, on some platforms, in two dimensions. Sad, because maybe, in some cases, they’re estimating that they can’t afford to pay the price of presenting themselves as they are. And just because I assess their personality, their light, as one that is worth paying attention to, that doesn’t guarantee that it’s true. My perception isn’t the aggregate perception. Taste is individual. Audiences are fickle and demand what they demand.

If you’re going to play to mass audiences, there’s a cost that you’re going to pay.

I don’t know how much they can afford to pay to be themselves.

The reality I want is for anybody who chooses to share…can afford to share: a minimum guaranteed income of attention, esteem, respect, or opportunity. The reality we have is the reality we have. Things should be somewhat better. But we all get to decide how to spend our attention, and that, at least, is fair.

Could we start with the principle that we shouldn’t be deploying systems that cause children to kill themselves? Let’s start there and then maybe get to the social covering issues resolved in committee. Let’s take that one offline and circle on back next week.

One Heuristic

Fear is a signal. A signal can be useful. Fear can be useful.

Here’s a way to understand fear so you quantify how much courage you can afford:

It may be worth using a pen and paper and working through how much of yourself you can afford to share. Don’t put that down in digital format. Keep it in print. Write out forty words you’d like to share that would scare you to share. Write five bullets about what’s the worst that could happen. Write five bullets about what’s the best that could happen. Quantify the likelihood that each could happen using two numbers: the lowest odds, from 0% to 100% that it would happen, and then the highest odds, from 0% to 100% that it could happen. Pick the number in the middle. Write out how much it would cost you or benefit you. Multiply the percentage by the payout and sum them together. Go to sleep. The next day, ask if it’s true. Re-score if you have to. At the bottom of the page score how useful the whole thing was.

If you learned something from a single experience, maybe do it a second time. Note the rate of diminishing returns by plotting the number at the bottom of the page. Repeat for as many times as it makes sense.

At least then you’ll be able to put your fear, which is real to you because it appears real, into a real bound. That is how, after all, we take power away from fear: we quantify it. And it’s by way of the bound that you can understand courage. That’s at least one way to discern what you would assess as recklessness from wisdom.

That’s a lot of processing to understand a risk-reward curve. It is, at least, a reliable way to generate a personal result.

The Market For Your Attention

Wouldn’t a lower risk threshold for sharing information be better? Lower barriers to an open Internet and an ecosystem design that was more responsive to a wider range of incentives and outcomes. The first bit has been happening gradually over the past three decades. It’s easier and cheaper than ever to run a server on the open Internet. The barrier is still high, but it’s coming down. There’s opportunity to lower the barrier further.

The way value is delivered on the open Internet could be somewhat better. There’s good reason to believe that because young people consume more material: more furniture, clothes, electronics, food, and experiences, that entities that rely disproportionately on young people tend to respond disproportionately to their preferences. If you sell skateboards, you’re going to pay attention to the values that skateboard buyers hold, and you’re going to respond to them.

The power distribution of the centralized Internet reflects this somewhat, where some players are able to centralize power to an incredible extent. The winner really did take all. And as a result we experience less diversity. That’s why YouTube feels the way that it does. In several respects it has become far more censored than television. It might seem that’s what the median youth consumer and the median brand manager want. They’re both getting exactly what they want from YouTube? Is brand safety collective security?

What is perceived as accountability to one generation is perceived as a tyranny to another. Until, that is, the flow is reversed. Then it’s perceived as of the opposite. It’s impossible to be a consistent hypocrite. For better or worse, the interface between commerce and art has always been sharp, lumpy, and soft in different places, depending on where you look and where you’re coming from. Some unusual noise happens when they grind up against one another. The platforms that are sorting most of our attention are doing their thing. And audiences are doing theirs.

It’s never been a better time to be a median consumer. You’re getting exactly what you want.

But does it have to be this way?

I wonder about all of those who aren’t getting what they need.

How are we paying attention?

And what would be the point?