Our instincts for determining reality, for parsing safety from danger, are not
adapted to the media environment in which we live. We’re so tuned for
information scarcity that consuming modern media is like trying to drink from
a firehose.
On top of that, most of us received an education that was designed during
and for an internet-free world. The tools and techniques that help someone
at a computer-free home, or even in the public library, judge the veracity of a
claim they read are not fine-tuned for life on the internet. The truth is, simply
put, that most of us don’t know how to fact-check on the internet. We don’t know
how to do it, we don’t know how to make ourselves do it. And when that
happens on a social media platform where we can share everything we read
with the tap of a finger, we compound the problem, as our uncritical
consumption of media leads to uncritical publishing of media. Every time we
read without our “crap detector” fully engaged, the more “crap” we
inadvertently pass along. Our social media “stream” then doesn’t just become
a firehose, it becomes a firehose full of sewage. Finding something edifying
becomes all the more difficult.
This transformation isn’t just about evolution or education. It’s also about the
economy. We’ve all learned about the industrial revolution, when—at least in
3Most of the basic human cognitive functions are shared with other animal species, espe-
cially other mammals, and thus were likely possessed by our shared ancestors millions of
years ago. But even some of humanity’s more advanced cognitive capacities are shared
with other primates, as discussed in fascinating detail in Douglas Fox, “How Human
Smarts Evolved,” Sapiens, published July 27, 2018, www.sapiens.org/evolution/primate-
intelligence/.
4While scientists are still researching and debating when exactly humans developed the
cognitive functions we know and rely on today, there is strong evidence that Homo sapiens
possessed the high-level cognitive skills of spoken language and even music at least 50,000
years ago. See Steven Mithen, The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind
and Body, London: The Orion Publishing Group, Ltd. (2005), pp. 260–65.
Data versus Democracy
7
the West—the feudal, agrarian-based economy (and the accompanying social
order) gave way to a market-based, industrial economy. Rule by land, blood,
or divine right gave way to rule by money and labor. The aristocracy was
replaced by merchants. Farms by factories (and, later, factory farms). And a
whole new social order emerged. As economist Michael H. Goldhaber writes:
Europe back then in the 15th century was still ruled pretty much on
feudal lines, and the feudal lords took it for granted that the new
world would be a space for more of a feudal economy, with dukes
and counts and barons and earls ruling over serfs throughout the
newly discovered continents. They did in fact begin to set up that
system, but it was not what turned out to flourish in the new space.
Instead, the capitalist, market-based industrial economy, then just
starting out, found the new soil much more congenial. Eventually it
grew so strong in North America that, when it re-crossed the ocean,
it finally completed its move to dominance in Western Europe and
then elsewhere in the world.5
In other words, there’s a reason democratic revolution exploded among
Europeans in North America before it ignited Europe itself. The lack of an
established aristocracy and an emphasis on trade and material goods (brought
home to Europe on the backs of slaves) made the New World a different kind
of economic space—one where the mining and production of material goods,
the ability to move it, and the ability to convert it into capital gave one power.
This market-based capitalism, and with it the idea that anyone could better
themselves in society through labor and intelligence, formed the basic of the
new republic (if, at times, in theory more than in practice). Eventually it did
reach Europe, as feudalism slowly gave way in many places to market capitalism.
But this isn’t the only socioeconomic transition humanity has faced. Feudalism
was not the first social system, nor is capitalism the last. (It’s not even the only
system around today!) And capitalism itself comes in many forms. Some have
economy to an information economy. The idea is not that Western capitalism
has gone away, but that the rules of supply and demand that once applied to
materials (goods) and labor (services) now apply to information (data).
Think of it this way. When something is scarce, but desirable, we call it
“precious.” Gold, silver, fertile soil, fats, carbs, protein, etc. In a market-
driven economy, if demand is high and supply low, people compete to trade
5Michael H. Goldhaber, “The Attention Economy and the Net,” First Monday 2/4, published
April 7, 1997, http://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/519/440.
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Chapter 1 | Pay Attention
for it, and in a capitalist economy, they trade money for it. Its cost goes up,
a reflection of the value that society ascribes to it. If supply is high and
demand is low, price goes down, a reflection of the relatively low value given
to it by society.
In an industrial economy, the supply-and-demand equation that keeps things
moving involves materials and labor—what can you get, what can you make
with it, where can you deliver it? The people who control the raw materials
and the labor rule the roost. But what happens when we get so good at
making things that supply overpowers demand even for the things we need most,
like food, clothes, or housing? This is what has happened in many developed
countries, as mechanization and automation have made production so efficient
as to drive supply sky high, and at the same time drastically reducing the
need—and therefore the monetary value—of human labor. When those two
things happen, no one has any money to spend, and when they do spend it,
things are so cheap that no one makes any money. The economy grinds to a
halt.
But, as Paul Mason has noted in his book Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future, 6
capitalism is rather resilient. As the supply-and-demand equation collapses in
on itself in one economic sphere, another one often emerges to take its place.
In the past few decades, as the cost of production (and, thus, the wages for
labor) has generally decreased in the affluent West, information has emerged
to take its place. In other words, it was no longer those who controlled
materials and labor who ruled the roost, it was those who managed information
who had the strongest hold on the economy—and the social order.
But before we could enter into a new, centuries-long era of info-capitalism,
something else happened. Moore’s Law happened. Named after engineer and
Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, Moore’s Law states that the number of
transistors that fit in a given amount of space in a semiconductor circuit
doubl
es roughly every two years. 7 In an era where the economy is ruled by
supply and demand of information, that exponential growth of the ability to
process information is a problem. Add to that the just as rapidly diminishing
cost of storing information, and the absolutely trivial process of copying
information, and the information economy was served a death warrant before
it ever had a chance to go out on its own.
6Paul Mason, Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
(2015).
7Gordon E. Moore, “Progress in Digital Integrated Electronics,” Intel Corporation (1975),
p. 3.
Data versus Democracy
9
All the way back in 1984 at the first Hackers Conference, Stewart Brand
famously said:
On the one hand, information wants to be expensive, because it’s so
valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your
life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the
cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you
have these two fighting against each other.8
Setting aside the problematic mantra that “information wants to be free” has
become, this duality (which Cory Doctorow calls “quite a good Zen koan”9)
is the fundamental problem of basing an economy on information. We can’t.
This is why so many publishers and news media companies have struggled to
move from print and broadcast to digital. This is why we have paywalls, ad
blockers, ad blocker blockers. You can’t have a market capitalism that’s based
around a commodity that is cheap to produce, cheap to copy, and—now that
we have the internet—cheap to access. Some economic voices, like the
aforementioned Paul Mason, suggest that this means capitalism itself is dead,
and that the information age will usher in a new, quasi-socialist era of
postcapitalism. And maybe they’re right.
Or maybe there’s another commodity, and the resilient capitalism still has a
little fight left in it.
When Goldhaber described the transition from feudalism to capitalism, he
didn’t stop there. He was actually writing about the emergence of a new
economy. And not just that, but a new kind of economy.
Contemporary economic ideas stem from that selfsame market-
based industrialism, which was thoroughly different from the feudal,
subsistence-farming-based economy that preceded it. We tend to
think, as we are taught, that economic laws are timeless. That is
plain wrong. Those laws hold true in particular periods and in a par-
ticular kind of space. The characteristic landscape of feudalism, dot-
ted with small fields, walled villages, and castles, differs markedly
from the industrial landscape of cities, smokestack factories and rail-
roads, canals, or superhighways. The "landscape" of cyberspace
exists only in our minds, perhaps, but even so it is where we are
8Cited in Doctorow, Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age, p. 94.
9Ibid.
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Chapter 1 | Pay Attention
increasingly coming to live, and it looks nothing like either of those
others. If cyberspace grows to encompass interactions between the
billions of people now on the planet, those kinds of interaction will
be utterly different from what prevailed for the last few centuries, or
ever before.
If you want to thrive in this new world, it behooves you not to mis-
take it for a place where the dukes and earls of today will naturally
continue to prosper, but rather to learn to think in terms of the
economy natural to it. 10
What are these terms? Goldhaber, writing in 1997, just a few short years after
the invention of the world-wide web (and, if I’m not mistaken, the year I
received my first Juno email account), calls this new economy the attention
economy. (Goldhaber wasn’t the first to use the term, but he was one of the
first to discuss in some detail what the advent of the web might mean for the
socioeconomic structures of our post-industrial society.) In an attention
economy, the supply-and-demand equation that governs economic growth
does not concern the supply and demand of information, but the supply and
demand of human attention. As Matthew Crawford says, “Attention is a
resource—a person has only so much of it. ”11 And as information becomes
cheaper and easier to create, access, distribute, and copy, attention becomes
increasingly scarce, at least from the perspective of those who deal in
information.
As Goldhaber describes it, this isn’t a mere shift from one kind of material for
sale to another. It’s a totally different kind of system. Where money moves in
the opposite direction as goods and services (a modern version of trade),
money moves in the same direction as attention. Yes, we’re still buying things
(and yes, content producers still buy advertising, which is kind of like buying
attention), but increasingly we don’t set out to buy what we want or need.
We set out to be entertained, and the winners of the battle for our attention
are the ones that receive our money. This means different kinds of transactions,
different kinds of sales and marketing strategies, and different kinds of markets
in which these transactions take place. (In industrial terms: is Facebook a
media company, a social club, a public gathering space, or an advertising
agency?)
10Goldhaber, “The Attention Economy and the Net.”
11“Introduction, Attention as a Cultural Problem,” The World Beyond Your Head: On
Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (hardcover) (1st ed.), Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, p. 11.
Data versus Democracy
11
If You Don’t Pay for the Product, You Are
the Product: Attention as Commodity,
Engagement as Currency
When it comes to disinformation and propaganda, there are a couple aspects
of this economic transition that are critical to understand. First of all, the
focus—the choke point, if you will—is our attention. The limits of our
cognitive system are the bedrock of the economy that keeps the supply-and-
demand equation in balance. If we are to be critical consumers, we have to get
our heads around that, at least a little bit. Our attention is the primary “good”
being traded online, on TV, in any form of media. In many ways, we play a more
central economic role in these transactions, even if our money isn’t involved.
Our attention is the commodity, our “engagement” the currency—and,
coincidentally, this is why tracking our activity online is so important to companies
that deal in information. As long as the attention economy exists, Cambridge
Analyticas will exist—companies that leverage data about customers,
competitors, and even voters to provide tailored advertising to them with the
express purpose of influencing, even manipulating, their behavior.12
Second, because our attention is the chief commodity of the new economy,
the digital platforms that we use daily are designed to manipulate and measure
our attention. As former Google employee and tech critic, Tristan Ha
rris, put
it, “A handful of people, working at a handful of technology companies,
through their choices will steer what a billion people are thinking today.” 13 Or
put in perhaps a less dystopian tone, the tech that we use most is the tech
designed to be so good that we keep coming back. But like food, alcohol, sex,
driving a car, playing a sport, even good things can become dangerous when
engaged carelessly or in excess.
But there’s no escaping the fact that when platforms make their money off of
advertising, they make more money when more people spend more time on
those platforms. Here’s the thing, though. While they make some money when
you see an ad (called an impression), they make far more money when you click
on the ad. 14 But that click takes you away from the platform, never to see
12For more on Cambridge Analytica in particular, see the groundbreaking journalism of
The Guardian in “The Cambridge Analytica Files,” www.theguardian.com/news/series/
cambridge-analytica-files.
13Paul Lewis, “’Our Minds Can Be Hijacked’: The Tech Insiders who Fear a Smartphone
Dystopia,” The Guardian, published October 6, 2017, www.theguardian.com/technol-
ogy/2017/oct/05/smartphone-addiction-silicon-valley-dystopia.
14Greg McFarlane, “How Facebook, Twitter, Social Media Make Money From You,”
Investopedia, last updated March 21, 2014, www.investopedia.com/articles/invest-
ing/022315/high-cost-advertising-times-square.asp. See also, “How much It costs to advertise on Facebook,” Facebook Business, accessed February 6, 2019, www.
facebook.com/business/help/201828586525529.
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Chapter 1 | Pay Attention
another ad. Unless the platform is so good, so desirable, so worthy of your
attention, that you come back soon after that trip elsewhere on the web.
In other words, the attention economy makes it good business sense to
design platforms for addiction.15 That’s incredibly dangerous, both for
individuals and for society. And when those platforms are increasingly the
source of news for many individuals, as well as platforms often engaged when
we are at our most relaxed, passive addiction becomes the way that many of
us deal with the most important issues of the day. Harris says, “I don’t know
a more urgent problem than this. … It’s changing our democracy. ”16