Money is Dead
Last night Eric and I took our first little field trip out to Silicon Valley. We hopped on the Caltrain with our destination set for Palo Alto and the, in geek eyes, almost mythical PARC (previously Xerox PARC) to check out the BayCHI monthly program meeting.
The first presenter was Christopher Allen who spoke about unstructured trust and the Dunbar number. As I see it, unstructured trust is the type of trust that occurs within smaller social groups where the relationships aren’t formalised. This works since in smaller groups people are able to keep track of the group as a whole thus not needing a formal organisational structure. When the group scales and the number of participants exceed the amount of people that one can keep track of the need for a structure becomes apparent (e.g. in a company you might have a formal organisational hierarchy). When we formalise and make explicit the nature of our relationships the trust also changes. I believe that in a smaller group setting, intimacy makes it possible to direct larger attention to each individual within the group and therefore enabling trust to be “direct” between you and another member. In a larger system that doesn’t afford the same amount of attention for each individual, you instead place trust in the system making interpersonal trust indirect, and in a sense mediated by the structure itself.
The second presenter was Michael Goldhaber who I believe was actually the guy who coined and started the whole movement of the attention economy. The talk contained an interesting comparison between feudal, market-money-industrial and attention economy as systems. Something that made me think was his point that today when most people talk about the attention economy, they are simply mapping attention as a resource onto the existing capitalist system, i.e. they are putting a price tag on attention. However, as Goldhaber states, the prerequisite for the attention economy is the abundance (post-scarcity) of material goods; therefore making the monetary system unnecessary altogether. In a future attention economy, attention is not worth money, attention is currency and money is simply dead.
Very interesting idea, about attention being a currency, but a little hard to grasp.
Maybe when we live in the post-scarcity economy it woulden’t be attention => money but attention => power? or why should anybody even bother with trying to generate attention?
Hi Emil!
Goldhaber believes that seeking attention is a fundamental human character i.e. being human inherently makes one an attention-seeker. I can surely relate to this and think of many situations within society where humans are constantly seeking attention (e.g. pop-stars). The attention usually leads to power in one way of another in a similar way to how money leads to power today.
An interesting thought though is that if you believe attention is by nature something humans desire then it is very different from money (which is something people seek as a method in order to fulfil a second desire). Attention in this sense becomes a \”natural\” currency having value both in society and in the self. Maybe!
Hi Alex!
I m not really familiar Goldhaber’s position, but I spent much time considering the posibility that attention will one day replace money as currency. However, I think that it is save to say that the “second desire” money buys is very often attention. Of course attention is not always the universal attention that a popstar may get. Usually a bit of attention from the community one belongs / wants to belong to is quite satisfying.
In a society based on the much more natural currency “attention” I see a problem with convertability. I believe that money can only be abandoned when the value of basic supplies such as food has become completely arbitrary (i’m not talking about haute cuisine, which very probably has a lot to do with attention). Thinking of the subsidized agriculture in Europe one could of course claim that this is already the case.
When you´re THERE, on spot in Silicon Valley, studying trust and a bit of corporate culture, I really recommend the chapters about Silicon Valley and Robert Noyce (one of the earliest valley semiconductor entrepreneurs) in Tom Wolfe’s essay collection “Hooking up”. Chapter is called something with digibabble and fairydust, don’t really remember.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0312420234/ref=si3_rdr_bb_product/002-6717042-8472802?ie=UTF8
Hi Joachim!
I totally agree, when people are seeking money it is very often as a mean to gain further attention in society. I believe this type of attention is often sought in order to justify your existence i.e. by being recognized (given attention) I convince myself that I matter.
Convertibility is a tough issue in an attention economy. If the attention economy were to become reality we would in a sense have returned to pre-monitary society with an intangible value system. Without attention being quantifiable any type of mathematical conversion of course becomes tough. Since attention might not be transferable (i.e. I can give you a dollar, I can give you my attention but how do I give you a certain “attention credit”?) I’m not sure conversion would even be possible. Would conversion even be necessary?
Andie, thanks for the recommendation! I’ll definitely check it out asap.
I named it Unstructured Trust as a counterpoint to Structured Trust. Structured Trust is rational and logical — you look at previous performance, make an estimate of risk, set some performance guidelines, see if the guidelines were met, lather, rinse, repeat.
Unstructured Trust isn’t quite so rational, parts of it are deeper in our consciousness. It is more of a intuitive feeling then something that can be teased out as being very logical. I’ve also heard it call monkeysphere trust.
These are great articles, I really appriciate your work.