Internet doomsayer debunked!

...or at least challenged.

It’s always unsettling when demonstrably prescient people peer into the future and look alarmed. So I was disturbed (initially) to read in the New York Times last week about a man who decades ago foresaw many of our current troubles and now thinks they’re going to get worse.

The man is Michael Goldhaber, a 78-year-old physicist who popularized the term “the attention economy” in a 1997 Wired essay. According to Times opinion writer Charles Warzel, Goldhaber foresaw “the complete dominance of the internet, increased shamelessness in politics, terrorists co-opting social media, the rise of reality television” and a bunch of other stuff, including “oversharing.”

And what does he see now? “While Mr. Goldhaber said he wanted to remain hopeful,” writes Warzel, he has trouble seeing a bright future for democracy. “Nuanced policy discussions, he said, will almost certainly get simplified into ‘meaningless slogans’ in order to travel farther online, and politicians will continue to stake out more extreme positions and commandeer news cycles.” Goldhaber told Warzel that “rational discussion of what people stand to gain or lose from policies will be drowned out by the loudest and most ridiculous.” He sees infamous attention hound Donald Trump as a “near-perfect” embodiment of the logic of the attention economy, and he expects that logic to grow in strength.

Look, I take a back seat to no one when it comes to Cassandra-izing. (I’m the one who made this newsletter the home of The Apocalypse Aversion Project!) But I think Goldhaber should dial the pessimism down a bit. I agree that the “attention economy” is a valuable paradigm for looking at our current mess, but I don’t see the takeaway being that we’re  doomed to live in a world where the loudest voices, the crudest messages, and the craziest conspiracy theories dominate people’s attention, crowding out reason and reflection.

I mean, obviously, that world is pretty much where we live now, and obviously the situation has tended to get worse lately. But you know what they say about trends: they continue until they don’t. And I think Goldhaber’s paradigm points to something that could stop this trend and even turn it around.

The idea of the “attention economy” comes from the brilliant American economist Herbert Simon, who died in 2001 (and who in the 1980s kindly spent time on the phone with me and gave me a key insight for a magazine column I was writing called The Information Age). Simon noted that, as information gets cheaper and cheaper to generate and replicate and distribute,  it becomes an increasingly abundant resource. But attention—the amount of time people can spend absorbing information—can’t grow commensurately and so becomes a relatively scarce resource. As the information age proceeded, Simon said, information suppliers would increasingly be competing for people’s attention. 

He had that right! These days ads and videos and headlines have been precision engineered to commandeer your attention—and you have to be careful which ones you click on, because the algorithms behind them will use your click patterns to more powerfully commandeer it in the future.

And it isn’t just corporations that are trying to steal your attention. What is Twitter if not a bunch of people test-marketing and refining strategies for grabbing the attention of as many people as possible? Sometimes I’m embarrassed for them. Sometimes, after I tweet, I’m embarrassed for myself.

Which brings us to one of the distinctive features of the modern attention economy: the fact that now, suddenly, we’re all playing both sides of the game.

Why, when I was a boy, there was an “attention economy,” but it was one-sided: big companies competed for my attention. They created enticing TV shows, catchy ad jingles, engrossing books, addictive record albums. They published tabloids with headlines like “Headless Body in Topless Bar” (a headline that, in a just world, would have singlehandedly won the New York Post a Pulitzer Prize).

And, as those big companies sought my attention, whose attention did I seek? Well, my parents’ attention (until adolescence) and the attention of kids in my neighborhood and at school and… that was about it. My audience was pretty much limited to my immediate physical environment. And so it would remain even after I reached adulthood—unless I became one of the very few people who got into a business like advertising or journalism (which, as it happens, I did, but that’s another story).

In that 1997 Wired essay, Goldhaber highlighted what was about to change as a result of the digital age. He wrote that cyberspace “promises nearly everyone a chance at attention from millions… Whoever you are, however you express yourself, you can now have a crack at the global audience.”

Of course, most of us don’t really think we can get attention from “millions.” But we all have the potential, every day, to increase the amount of attention we get, because people all over the world are within reach, via social media and other means. We’re all in the attention-getting game, and there’s always the hope of expanding our audience. 

And if we can seek the attention of lots of people, that means lots of people can seek the attention of us. Whereas competition for my attention, circa 1980, came mainly from a few big companies scattered across the country and a few human beings in my immediate vicinity, now all kinds of people and companies and NGOs around the world have a shot at me.

So that’s the modern attention economy: Each of us can compete for the attention of a whole lot of people and organizations, while a whole lot of people and organizations compete for our attention. Goldhaber wrote in 1997 that the internet “ups the ante, increasing the relentless pressure to get some fraction of this limited resource. At the same time, it generates ever greater demands on each of us to pay what scarce attention we can to others.”

Now here’s something that will sound like bad news, but which I’m about to claim is good news: By and large, all this seems not to be making us happy. At least, that’s my tentative conclusion—based, admittedly, on only a smattering of actual data plus some anecdotal observations.

So why would it be good news that the attention economy is having bad effects at the level of individual happiness? Because I think Goldhaber is right to say that it is having bad effects at the level of democracy as well. And maybe the bad effects on happiness will motivate people to change their relationship to the attention economy in ways that reduce the bad effects on democracy.

For example, as I’ve noted before (except without using the phrase “attention economy”): One bad effect of the attention economy on democracy is that, on both sides of America’s tribal divide, the most unabashedly tribalistic people,  employing the most cheaply emotional appeals, seem to enjoy the most success on social media, thus increasing their attention share and with it their stature and power, even as they increase intertribal antagonism. Meanwhile, one thing I’ve noticed some people doing to reduce the toll taken by the attention economy on their happiness is remove the Twitter app from their smartphone. Well, if some people disengage from Twitter, that could reduce the sway of these unabashedly tribalistic Twitter potentates.

I don’t consider disengaging from Twitter the ideal response to the stress of the attention economy. I’d rather that people engaged with social media but did so purposefully and mindfully, with the conscious goal of reducing tribalism and making democracy work better. I’ve talked about that before in this newsletter, and I’ll talk about it again in the future, as an explicit part of the Apocalypse Aversion Project.

For now I’m mainly making a broader and vaguer point: It’s early days. The social media phase of the evolution of the attention economy hasn’t been with us for long. We’ve only within the last few years come to really appreciate the threats it poses to individual happiness and to democracy. (Seems like only a few years ago—and it was!—that Mark Zuckerberg was depicted in mainstream media as a benign entrepreneurial genius rather than a malign imperialistic capitalist.)

So we’re just starting to figure out how to handle those two threats. And it’s certainly possible that we can come up with solutions that work in synergy—find ways to reconcile social media with mental health in ways that also reconcile them with societal and political health.

So maybe we’ll look back someday and be glad that the attention economy posed a challenge to our individual happiness, and not just to our political cohesion. Self-help is a more potent motivator than civic do-goodism, and maybe that will have made the difference.

Meanwhile, I’ll close with a line from Howard Rheingold’s book The Virtual Community, a line that Goldhaber quoted in his Wired essay: “Attention is a limited resource, so pay attention to where you pay attention."