You’re spending your most important resource right now and you may not even realize it. Your attention. And I thank you kindly for spending a little of it here.
Attention is the last commodity. It’s what is truly being struggled over in the streaming wars, sports, gaming industry, and both directly and peripherally, the AI boom.
Streaming was supposed to streamline, no pun intended, where your attention was going. Pay the fee, skip the ads. That lasted about a decade. Netflix, Prime, Peacock, Disney, Paramount — all of them run ads now. More than 60% of new Netflix signups take the ad tier. Streamers often lose money on their ad-free tiers versus what they would be paid to take less money and show their subscribers ads. When people began to cut the cable cord, corporations were desperate to get their brands and products in front of the eyes of consumers, wherever they so happen to be.
With YouTube Premium I skip the ads that play through Google AdSense at the beginning of the videos, but I have to manually fast-forward to avoid the product placement and paid sponsorships. Then there’s promo codes. Affiliate links. The ad used to interrupt the content. Now the ad is the content and you often can’t find the seam.
And we’re still just talking about advertising. That’s just one small aspect of this, the larger picture is simply, what gets our attention. And that applies to everything.
Underneath it all sits the algorithm, which isn’t trying to show you what’s good. It’s trying to keep you there. Short-form video is the purest version — an infinite column of stimulus tuned by a machine that knows your weak spots better than you even do.
“SVA was associated with attentional deficits, impaired executive control, and working memory problems.” — International Journal of Adolescence and Youth
SVA is Short Video Addiction. Executive control is the part of you that decides. That’s what’s eroding, and it’s already reached a dangerous point.
YouTube has recently changed their creator pay-out system, and it’s rewarding long form again after the short form gold rush. The thresholds went up on both sides, but long-form still takes the bigger cut of the split. The goal is simple. Keep people on the platform longer, and have more content people are willing to sit through ads to see. A short captures, but doesn’t hold you. A fifteen minute video does.
If you think I’m overselling it, there’s already a cryptocurrency for this. Basic Attention Token, built by the guy who created JavaScript. It measures how much attention you spend and pays you a cut. Raised $35 million in under a minute.
“BAT connects advertisers, publishers, and users and is denominated by relevant user attention.” — Basic Attention Token
Denominated. There’s a whitepaper. There’s a ledger. The commodity of attention has been priced and put on a market. Which shows something unprecedented is taking place that we’re still on the ground floor of.
What does the world look like when generations of people are living life with augmented and virtual reality headsets/eyewear on, gaming, gambling and gooning? The last one is a Gen Z term for one who obsesses over pornography.
Yes, I imagine people will be dating, mating and living their lives in a parallel digital world. And in some fashion getting paid for it.
Facebook/Meta tried to make it a thing, spending more than $80 billion on it and wound up failing miserably. It was so poorly constructed it feels like a money laundering scheme. I haven’t seen that much money result in so little production since California’s high-speed rail.
If the picture I painted sounds bleak, a dystopian future that blends WALL-E, Ready Player One and Idiocracy, know that we’ll have a choice in the matter.
A counterculture movement taking place today seeks to take back our time, attention, and energy from all that entangles us. Rawdogging Flights has become a meme, young men who will board flights across the country and instead of burying their heads in a tablet for six hours, they merely look at the flight tracker on the seatback screen in front of them and people watch, and think, and daydream.
One of the fastest-growing accounts on X is a book club that seeks to use classic literature as a way to combat modernism and all its attention-deficit inducing pitfalls. They’re currently reading The Brothers Karamazov. There’s another trend happening where people dive into The Count of Monte Cristo.
I also don’t believe this is merely an economics story. The battle taking place goes deeper than just being for our mind. The Church Fathers had a word for it long before these technologies existed — nepsis, watchfulness. Guarding your mind against the thoughts that wander in uninvited. They understood your attention is the doorway to your soul.
The modern world is designed to separate this from you all day, everyday, without you even realizing it.
Anyways — thank you for your time. You’ve earned .00001 BAT.