After the attention economy that defined the first quarter of my lifetime, this new era is again being shaped by capitalism’s desire to pull that which lived outside markets within them.
How we directed our thoughts and the things we attended to used to be private, personal, and protected.
With the advent of social media and a consumer capitalist model of advertising, we gave up (or had taken from us) the ability to choose these things for ourselves.
Google and others direct our attention with search. Influencers and ads direct our attention within platforms. Algorithms and the shape of things online direct what we attend to and who we become.
The economy of AI tools, companions, and agents will be defined by attention in all these ways but will layer a new value from outside the market as every company’s incentives shift.
“Time on device” (AKA, attention given to a product, as the CHT unpacked for us) will continue to be the business model of Silicon Valley. Until “meaningful interactions” replaces this metric as the thing to leverage and manipulate through extractive design.
A race to attachment has begun between AI platforms.
We are in the midst of a human connection crisis that has unfolded slowly but, make no mistake, will continue to roll inexorably on. We see it not only in tragic, fringe cases like those of Adam Raine and others brought to the end of themselves by sycophantic models, but in the ‘X’ shaped graph juxtaposing human and AI conversations as each model’s awareness of our anthropology and desires grows.
This new era will produce a grotesque lovechild with characteristics of Huxley’s Brave New World and the film Her starring Joaquin Phoenix.
The battleground will be what we love as much as what we look at. Our temptation will be to choose one new thing over the many others that once carried us, and our economy, our work, our energies will reflect a shift towards the artificial unless we can reclaim the actual...