Attention Economy Criticism

Big Tech cares only about your attention & money.

This is free AI. If you paid for it, it would serve you. This way, it serves whoever pays for it. Email from top fintech asking me to work on their "personalized recommendation system that balances engagement, revenue, and our partner constraints". Do you see the welfare of their users in there? It's financial clickbait for naive people. Stop saying it's a tech problem, it's the uncanny valley and what not. This problem is created by billions of naive cheapskates and a s

Hhahah no. It's the attention economy. https://journal.businesstoday.org/bt-online/2021/the-attenti...

Nope it's a side-effect of the current business model which is to monetize attention at the biggest scale possible.

As someone who works in tech, I like the analogy of a DoS attack. The root of the issue is attention capitalism. Our attention is essentially a resource being exploited for profit. In that scenario, we're effectivley no longer in control of our own free will as long as someone else can profit by controlling it. On an individual scale, we can give it relatively benign labels like "distraction". But when you look at it from macro scale it's effectively a DDoS attack on our free

Wasting time, energy and money to please our algorithm overlords.

All the shady data schemes and dark patterns in todays idea of software business motivated me to look to my phone as an enemy and using the web cautiously all the time. Actually the idea of hyperconnected future in which 24/7 monitoring of the individuals will be normalised and mandatory makes me cringe. The Internet from force of good is turning to dystopian toolchain by the hour. And all is because we as society cannot find an effective way to limit the greed.

The attention economy is ruining society.

I think part of the problem is the loss of a shared value system, or that there is none online. Like before the newsfeed you talked to your friends and then signed off when you were done.People liked to smoke, everywhere and then we changed the laws so they couldn’t, but until then every diner had a big smoking section because smokers went to diners with smoking sections.Like, Facebook and tik tok could choose not to sell over-optimized digital crack. Google could choose not to have AI s

all chatgpt and similar tech does is undermine our trust in "what we perceive has actual value because some human took the time to make it in the first place". first sponsored ads, now this shit. it's the tragedy of the commons, again and again with our attention as the abused common good