At 6:13 am on Sunday, 28 February, Donald Trump fell into a trap on Twitter. For the past five months, a Twitter bot created by the website Gawker had been sending him tweets with quotes from the Italian fascist Mussolini. Now, as one popped into Trump’s notifications – “It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep” – he pressed retweet, broadcasting the quote to more than 10 million followers.
Journalists spotted the tweet; later that day, Trump was asked about it on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” But the billionaire was unrepentant. “It’s a very good quote,” he said. “I didn’t know who said it, but what difference does it make if it was Mussolini or somebody else?”
Asked whether he wanted to be associated with Mussolini, Trump replied, “No, I want to be associated with interesting quotes.” And he added, “Hey, it got your attention, didn’t it?”
It seemed like a ridiculous statement. And, in conventional political terms, Trump was a ridiculous candidate. It wasn’t simply his outlandish and offensive comments, it was his threadbare campaign – because, in the early days especially, Trump ran his candidacy on the cheap. He skimped on staff and infrastructure. He refused to pay for expensive television ads. In the first two months of 2016, Trump spent less on TV advertising than any other major candidate.
But Trump didn’t need to pay for ads – because he had people’s attention. In the new economy, that is all that matters.
Attracting attention has been an industry – advertising – since the second half of the nineteenth century. But in the last 25 years, it has turned into the basis for the entire digital economy. The crucial change was the ability to produce and consume media at increasingly low marginal cost.
At first, people called this new era the “information age,” thinking that once knowledge could be produced cheaply, everyone would be given access to it. In fact, now that information could be manufactured for next to nothing, it became relatively unimportant. What mattered was the truly scarce resource: the attention to consume it.
Today, tech and media companies compete for attention, in the form of time spent on their apps and websites. The business model is simple: capture attention, then monetise it through advertising. Most people won’t click on the adverts, but enough will (or so we hope). In that sense, not much has changed since the first email spammers swamped Yahoo and Hotmail inboxes with ads for vitamins and penis-lengthening. The only difference: today the spam is called “content.”
Once, content meant meaningful material. Now, it means something akin to “stuff”. Instead of art, literature, film and journalism, we have “stuff”. The message – what, in some old fashioned sense, it actually “says” – is beside the point. All that matters is whether it grabs attention.
This dynamic is dictated by the big tech companies which effectively own the internet. Think of any app on your home screen: Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Gmail, Tinder. Every time they send you a notification it may purport to be for your own good, or at least your own convenience; in reality it is a call for attention. Once you arrive on the app, there are a host of tricks designed to keep you there, from Tinder’s swipe to Instagram’s infinite scroll.
From the perspective of the tech firm, it doesn’t matter what you do when you’re on the app. A gif of a cat falling off a table; a photo of your newborn daughter; a long read on the refugee crisis: all just content, grist for the attention mill.
Trump is a master of content. Think of those catchphrases he repeats: “Build a wall”; “Lyin’ Ted Cruz”; “Crooked Hilary”. What are they but the political equivalent of “One weird trick to…” or “You won’t believe what happens next”? He is the clickbait candidate. In the first two months of 2016, he gained $2 billion in unpaid coverage, more than double that of his closest rival. Much of it was bad, but that only encouraged him. Like any troll – and Trump’s clickbait was most definitely of the troll variety – he understood that negative attention is better than none.
As pollster Nate Silver observed at the time: “There’s a notion that Donald Trump’s recent rise in Republican polls is a media-driven creation. That explanation isn’t entirely wrong, but it’s incomplete. It skims over the complex interactions between the media, the public and the candidates, which can produce booms and busts of attention. And it ignores how skilled trolls like Trump can exploit the process to their benefit.”
Since the primaries finished this dynamic has been less marked. Now everyone knows both candidates, attention alone is not enough – voters actually have to like you, at least more than your opponent. But whether Trump wins or loses in November, the template has been set. Similar candidates will no doubt follow.
What can we do to stop this happening? For journalists and politicians, the only way to deal with trolls seems to be to ignore them – a vain hope when the troll is as effective as Trump. Likewise, it’s hard to see how other efforts to improve the standard of discourse will succeed, unless they solve the fundamental scarcity of the attention economy.
For all its high-tech nature, the attention economy resembles nothing so much as the feudal state of medieval England. The Malthusian conditions encourage winner-take-all relations, in which resources are controlled by the powerful (or, in the case of attention, the famous).
That is why, in Silicon Valley, companies are working on a new industrial revolution, this time for attention. They intend to automate attention, so that it no longer becomes a problem.
One way to think about this is through email. You might call it the four ages of email.
In the first age, email grew rapidly. But along with it came with a problem: spam. Spammers are the roving hordes of the attention economy. Their business model was the same as the tech giants, but the way they went about it was crude and nasty.
In the second age, spam filters became much more sophisticated. No-one on Gmail really has much spam any more – instead, Google monetises your email, by selling ads to you on the side. (Note that they have not changed the business model, simply made it more effective.) But as email became more usable, another problem arose: not spam, but messages from other people. There were so many. So, so many.
But not all emails were equally important. So, in the third age, email began to sort itself. Now Gmail has different tabs for filtering different kinds of emails. You might think of them as soft spam filters. They take out the less important stuff and leave it where it can be dealt with later.
Still, that left a lot of email. So, in the fourth age – the age we are entering now – email providers began to suggest responses to each email. When one came in, the system read your email, then wrote a reply on your behalf. On Gmail, the system was called Inbox. Its responses are fairly simple, but then it’s still learning. The more emails you send, the better it will become.
Self-writing emails take the strain out of email. But they don’t solve the fundamental problem of the attention economy. That will come in the fifth age of email: when the responses are so good, they don’t need your approval. They will read, write and send the emails, without troubling you at all.
This might sound like science fiction – but already there are companies working on this technology. For the last six months I have been using a digital personal assistant run by a company called x.ai. Once I’ve given it approval, it will email my correspondent, arrange a time, and then book the meeting in my calendar. I only find out about it when I receive the invite.
It’s hard to understate what a radical shift this is. Ever since the Enlightenment, the starting point for Western political thought has been the free-willing individual. In order to free themselves from the constraint of attention, tech firms are working to remove willing altogether.
Yet, in this regard their promise is actually similar to Trump’s. Both represent a retreat from the painful necessity of choice and compromise. In place of the constant demands of the attention economy, we are presented with a world in which decisions will be made “for our own good.”
The computer or the demagogue: hyper-rationalism or irrationalism. Unless we come to terms with the attention economy, these may end up being the only choices left.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
