By tracing alternative routes of attention, we can see that there are many yet untapped formations of attention. Esther Dyson, an early internet pioneer and investor, has long complained of the asymmetry of attention in email. Since she has been active in forming the governance of the internet and financing many innovative startups, her inbox overflows with mail from people she doesn’t know. She says, “Email is a system that lets other people add things to my to-do list.” Right now there is no cost for adding an email in someone else’s queue. Twenty years ago she proposed a system that would enable someone to charge senders for reading their email. In other words, you’d have to pay Esther to read your email to her. She might charge as little as 25 cents for some senders—say, students—or more (say, $2) for a press release from a PR company. Friends and family are probably not charged, but a complicated pitch from an entrepreneur might warrant a $5 fee. Charges can also be forgiven retroactively once a piece of mail is read. Of course, Esther is a sought-after investor, so her default filter may be set high—say, $3 per email message she reads. An average person won’t command the same fee, but any charge acts as a filter. More important, a sufficient fee to read acts as a signal to the recipient that the message is deemed “important.”
The recipient doesn’t need to be as famous as Esther to be worth paying to read an email. It could involve a small-time influencer. An extremely powerful use of the cloud is to untangle the tangled network of followers and followed. Massive cognification can trace out every permutation of who is influencing whom. People who influence a small number of people who in turn influence others may get a different ranking than people who influence a whole lot of people who don’t influence others. Status is very local and specific. A teenage girl with a lot of loyal friends who follow her lead in fashion could have a much higher influence rank than a CEO of a tech company. This relationship network analysis can go to the third and fourth level (the friend of a friend of a friend) in an explosion of computational complexity. Out of this complexity various types of scores can be assigned for degrees of influence and attention. A high scorer may charge more to read an email, but may also choose to adjust what is charged based on the scores of the sender—which adds further complexity and costs to calculating the sum.
The principle of paying people directly for their attention can be extended to advertising as well. We spend our attention on ads for free. Why don’t we charge companies to watch their commercials? As in Esther’s scheme, different people might charge different fees depending on the source of the ad. And different people would have different desirability quotients for the vendors. Some watchers would be worth a lot. Retailers speak about the total lifetime spending of a customer; a customer predicted to spent $10,000 over his or her lifetime at a particular retailer’s store would be worth an early $200 discount bonus. There might also be a total lifetime influence for customers as well, as their influence ripples out to the followers of followers of followers, and so on. The sum could be tallied up and estimated for their lifespan. For those attention-givers with a high estimated lifetime influence, a company might find it worthwhile to pay them directly instead of paying advertisers. The company could pay in either cash or valuable goods and services. This is essentially what the swag bags given away at the Oscar Award ceremonies do. In 2015 the bags for some nominees were crammed with $168,000 worth of merchandise, a mixture of consumer commodities like lip gloss, lollipops, travel pillows, and luxury hotel and travel packages. Vendors make the reasonable calculation that Oscar nominees are high influencers. The recipients don’t need any of this stuff, but they might gab about their gifts to their fans.
The Oscars are obviously an outlier. But on a smaller scale, locally well-known people can gather a significantly loyal following and earn a sizable lifetime influence score. But until recently it was impossible to pinpoint the myriad microcelebrities in a population of hundreds of millions. Today, advances in filtering technology and sharing media enable these mavens to be spotted and reached in bulk. Instead of the Oscars, retailers can aim at a huge network of smaller influencers. Companies that normally advertise could skip ads altogether. They would take their million-dollar advertising budgets and directly pay the accounts of tens of thousands of small-time influencers for their attention.
We have not yet explored all the possible ways to exchange and manage attention and influence. A blank continent is opening up. Many of the most interesting possible modes—like getting paid for your attention or influence—are still unborn. The future forms of attention will emerge from a choreography of streams of influence that are subject to tracking, filtering, sharing, and remixing. The scale of data needed to orchestrate this dance of attention reaches new heights of complexity.
Our lives are already significantly more complex than even five years ago. We need to pay attention to far more sources in order to do our jobs, to learn, to parent, or even to be entertained. The number of factors and possibilities we have to attend to rises each year almost exponentially. Thus our seemingly permanently distracted state and our endless flitting from one thing to another is not a sign of disaster, but is a necessary adaptation to this current environment. Google is not making us dumber. Rather we need to web surf to be agile, to remain alert to the next new thing. Our brains were not evolved to deal with zillions. This realm is beyond our natural capabilities, and so we have to rely on our machines to interface with it. We need a real-time system of filters upon filters in order to operate in the explosion of options we have created.
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A major accelerant in this explosion of superabundance—the superabundance that demands constant increases in filtering—is the compounding cheapness of stuff. In general, on average, over time technology tends toward the free. That tends to make things abundant. At first it may be hard to believe that technology wants to be free. But it’s true about most things we make. Over time, if a technology persists long enough, its costs begin to approach (but never reach) zero. In the goodness of time any particular technological function will act as if it were free. This slide toward the free seems to be true for basic things like foodstuffs and materials (often called commodities), and complicated stuff like appliances, as well as services and intangibles. The costs of all these (per fixed unit) has been dropping over time, particularly since the industrial revolution. According to a 2002 paper published by the International Monetary Fund, “There has been a downward trend in real commodity prices of about 1 percent per year over the last 140 years.” For a century and a half prices have been headed toward zero.
This is not just about computer chips and high-tech gear. Just about everything we make, in every industry, is headed in the same economic direction, getting cheaper every day. Let’s take just one example: the dropping cost of copper. Plotted over the long term (since 1800), the graph of its price drifts downward. While it trends toward zero (despite ups and downs), the price will never reach its limit of the absolutely free. Instead it steadily creeps closer and closer to the ideal limit, in an infinite series of narrowing gaps. This pattern of paralleling the limit but never crossing it is called approaching the asymptote. The price here is not zero, but effectively zero. In the vernacular it is known as “too cheap to meter”—too close to zero to even keep track of.
That leaves the big question in an age of cheap plentitude: What is really valuable? Paradoxically, our attention to commodities is not worth much. Our monkey mind is cheaply hijacked. The remaining scarcity in an abundant society is the type of attention that is not derived or focused on commodities. The only things that are increasing in cost while everything else heads to zero are human experiences—which cannot be copied. Everything else becomes commoditized and filterable.