🪴 jd's internet corner

On the attention economy

8 min read

I’ll just start by saying that I love the internet. I love how silly it can be, how rich in information, how diverse the voices on it are, and how revolutionary it has been for learning, connecting with people, being entertained, and getting work done. But the internet has changed, and I think it’s worth reflecting on how it has changed and what that means for me as a user, content-maker, and person out in the world.

From an Open Web to Private Kingdoms

The internet was envisioned, at the outset, as a decentralized network. On the web, different users and servers would make their content freely available by agreeing on basic rules for how to communicate and represent data. These rules are the open protocols that still underpin the internet to this day (think email, DNS, HTTP, HTML and even RSS). Because these tools were free (as in “speech”), users of all stripes could (granted they had the technical wherewithal) use them to build their own site which would instantly become accessible to anyone with a web browser.

With their unique mix of fan content, questionable design, animated GIFs of road signs saying “under construction”(thinking of you, geocities and skyblog), and songs about dancing hamsters, this initial wave of web content was a janky, glorious mess of individuality, creativity and free expression. But the barrier to entry was high. Setting up a web server, dealing with bandwidth costs, registering a domain, and then, finally, coding the damn thing — every step of the process involved in publishing online was complicated and rife with infinite ways to shoot yourself in the foot.

Web 2.0 changed this by empowering users of all backgrounds to contribute their ideas, photos, thoughts, movie reviews, an do much more, to the internet. This democratization of access was made possible by platforms that aggregated user data, abstracted away the complexities of publishing, and made the content available to everyone.

But it is the way they chose to distribute content that made all the difference: people would be shown content of users they knew in real life. And via interposed friends, the content could travel throughout the network — social media was born, and it changed everything. Memes could travel virally, news could bypass mainstream media, and we got to poke, retweet, comment, follow, like and subscribe to our heart’s content. Of course, what we now know but didn’t necessarily understand then, is that platforms providing access to all of this were in fact proposing a faustian bargain.

The platforms of Web 2.0 pitched themselves to their users as a simple way to create a home on the internet and share their lives with their friends . In exchange, they snuck in users’ posts and their friends’ feeds increasingly pernicious algorithms. Conceived as automated ways to cut through the noise of overactive feeds, the algorithms changed the tone and makeup of users’ timelines, supposedly for the better—as measured by engagement metrics, that is. The algorithms also provided a way to inject the sponsored content and ads that paid the platform’s bills.

But time and pecuniary interests erode all things. Now, wherever platforms used to favour users in their design, they choose to favour themselves and their commercial partners. Where suggestions would point us to new social connections or engaging content, now, they bring us doomscroll fodder to keep us on the platform, preferably angry and scared — and therefore eager to buy things to soothe our anxiety. This process, so common that it now has a name, has taken over virtually all social media platforms.

Hijacking our attention for profit

The attention economy created by those digital slot machines has seriously damaged our collective ability to choose what to pay attention to at any point int time. People are now having to compete every second of the day with every platform’s best effort to serve you the stickiest content it can muster. Sure, they want to keep you on the platform and sell you things, but they also influence your mood by manipulating your feed, promoting inflamatory content that increase engagement, helping the spread of misinformation, and actively suppressing topics that are seen as inconvenient or disruptive to business-as-ususal. To convince yourself of this, try to post about the genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza or the war in Congo on Facebook, or type “trump rigged election” in TikTok’s search bear with a US account and see how far you get.

Bending the knee

If the unhealthy consequences of social media stopped there, it would be fair enough. Maybe, by knowing about it, we could learn to take the bad with the good, and, like with alcohol and other substances of abuse, learn to use social media responsibly to mitigate its worst effects. But what makes this possibility a non-starter is that the harm is not only personal — it is societal, and political as well. What we think about and how we act are necessarily linked to what understand the world to be. And by capturing and manipulating so much of our attention, platforms basically decide how we see the world. Obviously that is nothing new, and the effects of mass media on public opinion and on the manufacturing of consent have been discussed for decades. But the degree of tailoring that algorithms make possible is fundamentally different that what can be accomplished by a newspaper or TV broadcast. This difference of In the last few days:

All of this to say that the tech elite, either because of ideological filiation or through intimidation, have all fallen in line behind the administration and have shown a willingness to do its bidding.

Taking it back

Hank Green’s recent TikTok post has some solid advice in response to all this.

Take back your attention. Stop giving it away, be intentional what gets put into your brain. The idea that the TikTok algorithm is something you curate–no–it’s curating you. […] The attention oligarchy is here – it’s been here, obviously– but the brazenness with which thew current party in charge of government in the US is saying they want to reward the attention oligarchs that do what they say and punish those that don’t, is new. […] In that situation, you don’t win the attention war by fighting the attention war. You win the attention war by ending it. Take back your attention.

That’s what I’m trying to do by writing on this site, which I am trying to develop into a digital garden. I will also be shifting away from closed platforms to open ones that participate in the Fediverse. I hope that by living my life outside walled gardens of private platforms, I can interact with people that would have been kept out of my filter bubble. I am also claiming back what infinitesimal bit of power and influence these platforms derive from me and my content, and I am choosing to apply that power in the direction of a more democratic, open and sane. I am aware that that means I will lose sontact with many people who will remain on the old platforms, and also that I am moving to a section of the internet where that is a little slower, and little more boring. But maybe some degree of boredom is exactly what the internet needs to become the amazing, world-enhancing tool it can be instead of the life-consuming addiction it now is. I hope to see you on the other side!

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