cen4

Its easy to get the point across to politicians.

Ask them to check how much their own Ad spend is increasing every year.

And ask them to check how much New Content they need to produce everyday. And how much that has increased over the last year.

Basically Politicians, instead of being on the ground dealing with people issues, are turning into Content Factories and Fund raising machines to keep the content factories running.

Human Attention is finite. If its not treated as such, we trap everyone in an Attention Capture arms race to nowhere.

Platform profit, content factories profit, fund raising machines profit - https://www.axios.com/2024/10/31/digital-ad-market-boom-big-...

Nature hasn't been able to get rid of parasites for billions of years. Why? The reason they exist is, there are always parts of ever changing complex systems that can be exploited, faster than any reaction is possible. Same story with people in large orgs. If you hire 1000 people tomorrow to run a factory, there is no 100% guarantee a few parasites won't enter the system. Add to that fact, our culture is built around people worshiping Status accumulation, Wealth accumulation, Consumption etc (with Media signalling it 24x7) it sets the Environment up for parasitic/exploitative activities. Some of it can be minimized by strong/respected leaders setting up a better environment, changing what signals people are getting etc but its never 100% perfect cause of rate of change. There is always a dance going on where balance is shifting back and forth. Covid appears. Causes Chaos. It gets beaten down. Then something else appears. Thats the nature of parasites.

They could learn more from Bernie.

Whats your solution then, when Taiwan falls to China tomorrow and the chips stop flowing in? The parasite execs are a problem, but a much smaller problem than if the Chinese blocks flow of essential chips. It will cause all kinds of cascading issues. Which we saw when supply chains from there, all shutdown during Covid.

Well you have to start by asking why lot of people's identity is tied to wealth accumulation, status accumulation and conspicuous consumption?

Its both nature/genes and nurture/environment.

Nature is what you get when you go and buy a new laptop. Nurture is what you get after it fills up with shit over the years. So you got to be careful about what you install and allow in.

Inputs from the Environment the brain is constantly receiving changes genes, brain structures and brain chemistry over time. You can then pass those changes to the next gen. Media ("media"ting Information entering the brain), plays a big role in what inputs the brain is getting. Its all around you and constantly feeding your brain signals you might not even be conscious off. Media also exploits people's Negativity Bias which compounds the issue.

So pay attention to what you pay attention too. Divide all the info entering into - entertainment, short term value, long term value. Filter out everything else.

Unlike many other sectors where prices drop thanks to constant advances in Tech, what is weird is how Tech hasn't made a dent in Housing.

Health I can understand cause it takes a long time to produce a Doc, and there is a high demand and low supply dynamic.

But we can easily build housing cheap. Even if the real estate/investment lobby is busy buying up all the "prime" land, its not like the US is a small country to work around them somewhere.

First of all the whole notion that Reddit and Twitter are a source of Influence is a joke. That have not been designed to Influence people. They let you believe it cause more than anything else you want to believe it.

People have been conditioned to think how many view/upvotes you get = Influence.

But if the viewer who reads your post then goes and reads 100 other posts your influence is diluted by 100. Platforms don't show you that even though they are quite capable of showing you that.

And that missing Signal is intentional cause it benefits the platforms - oh you aren't getting enough views over the other guy - then pay us more.

So people get trapped, just like the Presidential candidates and their campaigns spending more and more each year with zero change in Influence over anything.

Directly proportional to how much Ad spend increases every year.

Attention Available is finite but Ad Volumes keep growing.

That depends on giving them a goal/reward like increasing "data quality".

I mean frogs don't use their brains much either inspite of the rich world around them they don't really explore.

But chimps do. They can't sit quiet in a tree forever and that boils down to their Reward/Motivation Circuitry. They get pleasure out of explore. And if they didn't we wouldn't be here.

One thing they skip over in these discussions about meditation is where meditation practices emerged and why.

If you look at that history across religions, one thing to note is the environment is totally disconnected from rest of society. That wasn't an accident. The brain chemistry, all kinds of structures within, change based on whats happening in the environment. So its not just a story about controlling Attention but also a story of controlling the environment.

Once this disconnected environment is created why did they need meditation?

Cause they were struggling to handle what the Reward Circuits of the brain + PFC are programmed over zillion years to feed off the environment. Which is Purpose, Connection, Validation/Praise etc. Monks struggle with this stuff once they get isolated and meditation was one of the answers.

The joke today is we don't live in a monastery (disconnected space) but an Attention Economy which has emerged because people might have limited Attention to give anything, but they have unlimited capacity to receive Attention.

Its hard to run Govt's without piling on debt.

The latest great example is Germany breaking its own rules it imposed on Greece recently so that it can borrow more. And its doing it not because its in economic shambles or distress, but because their entire economic model of earning via exports(China) and relying on cheap energy(Russia) is unraveling.

It teaches us nothing is black and white in a complex, fast and ever changing world. What works one day may not work the next day. Political creatures enjoy and thrive in this state of affairs cause nothing they say will be entirely wrong if Media 24x7 frames everything in terms of right and wrong.

There is no big price here. Weaker economies are always dependent on stronger ones for bail outs whenever they face issues. Its not the other way around. If it was the other way around then sure there is a price.

The only interesting thing about Germany right now, is what they come up with to handle the major change in their export relations with China and energy relationship with Russia.

Read The Theory of the Leisure Class and understand what the purpose is of "Conspicuous Luxury".

It is usually taught to business and economics classes to servants of the Elite that require that knowledge to manage their assets. Not to the "high skilled" clueless servants in the factory and design studios.

Sometimes its a good thing that tools slow you down. People have more time to think about what they can achieve. I vaguely remember Planning for Normandy taking 2 years or something, just cause of all the resources they had to mobilize from around the world.

Contrast with today's wars, were all the real time tech in the world is producing lot of half baked outcomes.

Just go to Google News and search of Japanese turning to resignation agencies.

All it takes is one news org doing a small story a month ago and now we get hundreds of stories from news orgs around the world with all kinds of opinions and mutations to the original story. Its like watching bacteria reproduce. Soon we will see antibiotic resistance.

True. ChatGPT has already won me over. I stopped even testing anything else.

Look at the Indian neighborhood (Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar), all sharing similar peoples, culture, high populations/inequality/chaos are all in deep financial trouble and are politically unstable.

Anyone who has visited, would think India has all the ingredients to land up in a similar state.

But the big diff with the neighborhood is the sheer Size of the country, and the really wide range of economic activity in different parts of the country.

Its what we see in Nature, where there is as much chaos and incomprehensible stuff happening as there is in India. If you have a Large ecosystem, lots of different species and a lot of genetic variety, the better such systems handle constant change and unpredictable shocks.

And this feels like what has happened in India. One corner is imploding, while another corner becomes a leading global center of Leather Science or Jewellery Design. And this saves them from burning down like the neighborhood because they have more buffer.

Depending on which corner you are sitting in, the view of what is possible in India changes drastically.

Its not a coincidence that the Japanese Economy imploded around the same time. If your country has 40% of global corporate market cap value and then it drops to 8% after an asset bubble bursts, how many ambitious long term projects you can sustain drops too. The US came really close to following the same trajectory with the 2008 bubble bursting. If the banks hadn't been kept afloat and there were alternatives to Wall St a large chunk of the tech sector would have tanked or moved out. There is no global tech leadership possible, if there is no global Finance domination.

Veblen called sports Conspicuous Leisure. The goal is not fun but that everyone sees you win. So Stakes are Status. And Status gets people things in the same way Cash does.

Pretty sure there is a similar graph for Britain during the wind down phase of their Empire.

> It baffles me

They are just marketing their products and services. They won't solve anything cause Media itself exists as Attention exploitation/manipulation service offered to the highest bidder.

Global Human Attention is a finite natural resource. Its needs to be treated the same way we treat water and uranium. Sooner or later we will get there.

Think more about Attention. Not about Information.

Information is exploding and global available Attention doesn't grow. People who pay attention to one thing, can't use the same time to pay attention to something else.

So govts and corps fight over this common pool of Attention using the Media (TV/Movies/Radio/Social/News/Sports/Gaming etc etc), just like they fought over land and oil and other natural resources. Media is literally used like front line troops of colonial empires in Attention capture wars.

But no one wins as long as Global Human Attention isn't given purpose. We await someone or some group to articulate that vision. Until then people working in Attention Capture fields will keep amusing us to death.

Its going to be interesting.

They don't really have to follow the path of Google/Meta/Twitter etc which hardly had any customers/companies subscribing or paying for their services in the early years. That kind of sowed the seeds of turning them into Adtech companies.

Plus most people forget the collection of personal data started happening cause Google/FB/Youtube search was quite crappy without Context. As info exploded finding stuff got harder. Personal data collection was the answer. That accumulating personal data pile played a big role in making these companies very attractive to the Ad industry and the large corps behind them.

Open AI feels slightly different in that it has real revenue flowing in. For a wide range of subjects, it doesn't need as much personal info about the customer, to provide high quality answers. So more like Netflix in the early years. Paying customers. Good product.

Only diff is Netflix targets people's entertainment budgets, which is a small bucket of piss compared to Global GDP. Total addressable market for OpenAI meanwhile is looking really massive. It feels like it will be a long while before they hit some subscriber revenue upper limit and have to rely on Ads.

Check out the UN report on the Attention Economy. They quote a study that says less than 0.05% of content is consumed by humans. Obviously it has to come from the UN cause such reports wont come from within the entertainment industry which lives in a disconnected la la land.

There is more content being produced than there are eyeballs and time to consume it all.

How does such an industry survive? In a very round about manner that has nothing to do with what they say they do.

General rule in life - Don't focus on the drama a fucked up environment produces.

What ever form of Media you take, the purpose is Attention Allocation.

You have finite Attention. If you spend 10 minutes paying attention to this story, that time is gone for good and unavailable to be used on anything else.

In that sense HN has decided how your attention is allocated and shapes who you are. Since Attention is finite like Oil, Land or Gold there is a big ongoing war to capture or steal as much of it as possible. And all media that captures your attention shapes you. Just like once the British capture the middle east. Their actions shape the future of the middle east.

Everything is already fake.

How Western Media and Advertising work is the root cause.

Cutting and pasting from the first sentence on MIT's class on the Attention Economy.

"In Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan proposes that in paying for space and time in newspapers and magazines, on radio and television, advertisers are effectively buying a piece of the reader, listener, or viewer. And he wryly observes that the ad agencies “would gladly pay the reader, listener, or viewer directly for his time and attention if they knew how to do so.” The absurdity of this proposition underscores the essentially mediated nature of human attention."

The class clearly shows how Human Attention is over exploited way before AI showed up.

All Human Attention is mostly directed towards Consumption, Status Signaling and Accumulation of Wealth through Mass Media/Advertising/Marketing/PR/Influencers etc.

There are examples in history where Human Attention at large scales can be directed towards things other than Consumption, Status Signaling, Accumulation of Wealth. A big one is Gandhi and his influence on a huge variety of people to live a simple life.

But ofcourse the moment charismatic leaders like that exits the stage, the Attention Allocation defaults back to status quo.

So we need very different leaders and a very different kind of Media and Advertising ecosystem to cause shifts in how finite Global Human Attention gets allocated. Lot of imagination is required. Unfortunately our most imaginative minds are in service of financial overlords and rent collectors to sell the plebs new iphones and more Star Wars movies, "experiences" and merch.

Walk the neighborhood at different times of the day. It will give you an idea of the busiest businesses (ie the ones with cash to spare). Make a list and keep updating it. Then print a bunch of official looking visiting cards and walk in and talk to the managers. The key is not to expect to sign a contract but to let them know you are around, how to contact you, collect info on their problems, and who they call, what they pay, how you can do it cheaper etc etc. With time you get a sense of how many callbacks you get after N visits and whether its viable or not in your neighborhood.

Its extreme in comparison to what the rest of the Elite are tweeting about daily.