[size=105]The Attention Economy[/size]
If you’ve ever spent time in a really poor country or with people who grew up in awful poverty, you’ll notice how much they talk about food — their favorite foods, what they’re going to eat this weekend, how they like this and don’t like that, and so on.
Much of these people’s lives and conversations revolves around food for the simple reason that the scarcity of food makes it appear incredibly important. The fact you prefer strawberries to oranges matters a lot when you can rarely afford to have either. But in first-world cultures where food is never an issue, discussions of food among most people are superficial and usually over within a few seconds.
For most of human history, the big economic scarcity in the world was [size=105]land[/size]. There was a limited amount of productive land, therefore there was a limited amount of food. And because there was a limited amount of food, most day-to-day economic concerns and political squabbles involved land. Most people spent their lives contemplating what land they were going to work, what they were going to grow, what kind of harvest to expect, and so on. Food was always on the top of people’s mind.9
Eventually, when the industrial revolution hit, the primary scarcity was no longer land, as machines could now help cultivate more than enough food for everybody. Now the big scarcity was [size=105]labor[/size]. You needed trained people to run all of these machines that did all of the cool new shit so you could make money and get rich. Thus, for a couple hundred years, the organizing principle in society was based on labor — who you worked for, how much you made, and so on.
Then, in the 20th century, there was more being produced than any one person would ever need or could ever purchase. The new scarcity in society was no longer labor or land, the scarcity was now [size=105]knowledge[/size]. People had so many choices of what to purchase with their hard-earned money, but they didn’t know what to purchase. Thus, people spent most of their day-to-day existence trying to figure out what the best toothpaste was, what a toaster oven could do, how to spend their bonus money over the holidays and so on. The fields of advertising and marketing were invented and came to dominate society, as they were the means of disseminating the information people needed to allocate their resources appropriately.
Still with me? Because this is where the internet and smartphones have fucked everything up — or, ahem, where they’ve “disrupted” everything.
With the advent of the internet, the primary scarcity in society is no longer information.