Musings on the attention economy

Modern phones, besides being incredible value adding devices, have also served as a platform for building and using digital drugs — the attention economy.

Large teams of engineers work tirelessly at engineering digital addiction, under the premise of “engagement”. Whereas Google’s goal was to keep you on its product as little as possible, social media’s goal is to keep you on their product as much as possible.

The feed mechanics that mirror slot machines seem to have been a great fit towards this goal. As long as you can get the user a win every five pulls of the lever, they’ll keep playing the slot machines.

When things are going well, you’re not paying attention. If your bank account is fine you stop looking. If you’re okay with your weight you stop obsessively checking the scale. When you’re worried about something, that’s when you pay attention. Worried about your health, worried about your girlfriend, family, whatever. You. Pay. Attention.

It feels like the combination of these dynamics — the engineering of digital addiction, combined with the kinds of ideas that the attention-industry thrives on — has made the rise of anxiety-inducing phenomenons almost inevitable. The attention-inducing content is out there. The attention economy likes it when we pay attention to it.

Conspiracy theories thrive when context is collapsing, and if you’re predisposed to believe, you’ll pay attention. And the reaction to the rise of conspiracy theorists is equally disquieting, so another mass of people will pay attention to that.

There’s nothing that will make you pay attention more than living in a crisis-after-crisis-after-crisis bubble, where anxiety is all around.

And the people that cause this anxiety will ride that wave and be lifted by it, because the more anxiety they cause, the more addicted we all are, the platforms learn how to surface even more addictive content and deliver it to our brains.

Social media feels like the incubation Petri dish of making us pay attention — and regular media just follows suit on those learnings and profits from it — a dynamic discovered about at the right time when their share of attention was starting to slide.

I have written this not because I understand what is happening, but exactly because I don’t. It’s only a perspective, a way to look at things, that for me made some sense.

I hope that if you read this you gain something similar: just a way of looking at a slice of what’s happening.