Elon Musk Figured Out the Media's Biggest Weakness
politico.com
politico.com
> Here’s how it works: Too many editors are eager to assign an easy-to-assemble story from the components of a Musk prediction, threat or stunt.
Factor 2 - high demand
> And readers seem to love the copy.
Luckily, most articles can easily be avoided, because their headlines contain his or one of his companies’ name. But what a waste of human brain capacity and attention.
He captured the pulpit and town square they've ( " The Media™ " ) used for promoting their stories outside of the publishing entity.
He stole their juice and just poured it all out on the ground out of spite.
They always ensure to give their opinions on current things just to remain in the news cycle. Many of this kind don’t even think about or believe what they say…it’s all to get attention, and, boy, do the media give them a lot of it.
The more perceived negative attention they get, the more their reputation is elevated with their base. Trump was the one who perfected this model to an unbelievable point.
The best is to ignore this kind and not give them attention, which is their driving force.
In my opinion, Musk will be much more better without the attention-seeking that led him to buy Twitter, an outrage machine, instead of focusing on his two very impactful companies (SpaceX and Tesla).
As Musk put it, “Aspiring to have no flame diverter in Boca, but this could turn out to be a mistake.” It probably was a mistake that critically damaged the booster’s maneuvering, but they also want to learn how much they absolutely need to build on Mars.
Which is why telling them don't participate in the attention economy doesn't work very well.
Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class written hundred years ago makes the distinction between Leisure|Consumption and CONSPICUOUS Leisure|Consumption.
It looks like a total waste, what say the royal family or the high clergy, is upto day in day out. They are constantly signalling to the rest of the chimp troupe - look at my house - look at my clothes - look at my chariot - look at my hobbies etc etc The value of all that lies in - You want to be like me/us then do what we tell you to do. Usually dirty work.
This looks like it doesn't have value but it does, especially when problems groups face, get complex and keeping the group together/working together gets harder and harder. Non attention seekers dont have a great track record of solving such problems.
The attention seekers have a better shot cuz a large chunk of chimps in the troupe want to raise their own status.
To complicate matters Attention Economy quantified Status (thro the Like/Follower count) And minimized the Cost of Broadcasting Status Signals to 0.
These things happened by accident as networks grew and info exploded. The techbros reacted by builing tools to control the explosion (collecting personal data by giving freebies ie reducing cost to broadcast to 0, counting Likes and Clicks to rank and filter info). So waste (unnecessary status signalling when there is no real complex prob being solved by the kardashians) in such a badly system keeps rising.
Veblen said a 100 years ago an ideal economist is someone who is looking for a way to minimize this waste in the system.