The attenion market has been discussed more and more over the last decade. I recently read this Substack and revisited this piece by Maanav and it had me wondering: how would the world be different if attention was not as highly valued as it is today?
The internet would be a very different place. “Scrollable” social media video platforms maximize your scrolling and your time spent on the app. Ad platforms operate similarly. If we devalued attention, I think the internet would become… a lot less altruistic. The internet is free today because we pay with our attention, our data. This was PageRank’s second order effect: user reveal preferences through clicks, which lead to better ads. With “devalued” attention, companies providing services still need to monetize. Subscriptions would likely fill this gap, as is the norm with Substack, online newspapers, and streaming services. Users would need to directly pay to indicate what they care about. As these industries mature, they’ll likely lead to oligopolies, which is what we’ve seen with streaming platforms.
What about the “physical” world? Putting aside the obvious candidates of billboards and TV ads, what happens to the physical things we interact with?
Let’s start with personal computing. Our phones are designed to align with what users want more, which tends towards apps that retain attention: social media, video games, etc. When we cared less about this ephemeral attention, phones were much more utilitarian, AKA traditional flip phones. Users often valued “exotic” features more and combining utilities into 1 device. Today, those features are intended to be a “cherry on top” to push users over the edge.
Laptops, despite their utilitarian nature, have also trended towards more attention-grabbing feature sets. But if we didn’t care as much about watching streaming services on our devices geared towards individual preferences, we probably would have very different designs. E-ink screens could be the norm for reading and ease on the eyes. Tactile features such as keyboards and phyiscal buttons might be more relevant. It’s also possible that server-side computing would be more relevant with centralized compute and light-weight client devices that are optimized for specific use-cases only.
The retail industry and physical stores would also be very different. Today’s shift towards online shopping would be thwarted and focus more on in-person experiences. Stores would likely instead optimize for efficiency and utility rather than creating trends that capture online attention.
I think the world would become more collective rather than personal. Without the incentive to cater to individual attention, people themselves would likely value community more. Does that mean attention is overvalued? Maybe. Will it ever truly matter less? I don’t know. It might with enough time go back to some “equilibrium”. But until then it’s fun to consider the alternatives.