The War for Human Attention
In this story, we learn why half of the world’s most valuable companies buy and sell human attention. This chapter is all about Attention Economics.
As of August 2024, the ten most valuable companies in the world are:
Apple ($3.5T)
Microsoft ($3.1T)
Nvidia ($2.9T)
Alphabet ($2T)
Amazon ($1.8 T)
Saudi Aramco ($1.77 T)
Meta ($842 B)
Berkshire Hathaway ($944 B)
Taiwan Semiconductor ($840 B)
Eli Lilly ($725 B)
Let’s count how many of these companies generate their revenues from human attention:
Apple produces the primary mobile device for 1.2 billion people worldwide. You might be reading this story on an Apple device right now.
Microsoft produces Windows, Office, and Xbox. Just imagine how many people work in Office or play on Xbox every day. Microsoft also owns Xandr, a real time bidding engine (RTB) that auctions our attention to the highest bidder.
Nvidia produces the best graphics chips for making movies, video games, chatbots, and generative AI. How many seconds of human attention get poured into those things every day?
Alphabet owns Google and YouTube. Google responds to 99,000 Internet searches every single second. People watch one billion hours of YouTube every single day.
You may not think of Amazon as an attention merchant, but they sold $40 billion dollars of advertising in the Amazon search bar last year. That’s more money than they made on Amazon Prime and Amazon Web Services, which serves Netflix (also an attention merchant).
Meta is the “General Motors” of social media. Actually, based on their revenue, Meta is really just Instagram and the hope that everyone on Earth will be retired in 5 years spending all their time in Oculus virtual reality.
Berkshire is a conglomerate holding company, but 28.8% of their portfolio is Apple—by far their largest position.
If you’ve never heard of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), they supply most of the microchips that Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta use to harvest our attention.
@physicists: If Quantum Mechanics means our universe only “renders reality” for each observer like a first person video game, then human attention might just be the most valuable commodity in the universe. 😳
Attention Economics
The war for human attention can also be thought of as Attention Economics because economics is really just “nerfed” warfare. Or maybe warfare is “hyper economics”. For example, the reason Russia bombed Ukraine’s power stations is because Vladimir Putin wants to invest capital from the Russian economy (bombs) to eliminate the means of production within the Ukrainian economy (power stations).
When a Russian bomb destroys a Ukrainian maternity hospital (which is an absolutely disgusting decision), rebuilding that hospital will require the human attention of doctors, nurses, architects, engineers, crane operators, bankers, lawyers, government inspectors, construction workers, and truck drivers. There are huge opportunity costs in war. All those people can’t invest their human attention building new hospitals if they are busy rebuilding the hospitals that just exploded. And those people can’t even rebuild the hospitals that just exploded if nationwide power outages mean they have to spend all day chopping wood to stay alive in the winter.
One of the biggest reasons America is so rich is because our geography means we haven’t rebuilt war-torn dams, bridges, and hospitals since before the invention of electricity. Think about that. America’s two biggest neighbors are the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean, so American prosperity is the compound interest from generations and generations of accumulated labor. Using labor to accumulate capital is an important theme throughout this chapter, so here’s an important economics formula to remember:
@children: Whenever you play Risk: The Game of Global Domination, don’t ever try to take over Asia until you control North America and Europe. Asia just has too many borders to defend. 😉
@parents: Can we all agree to teach our children to create capital for other people instead of destroying the capital of other people? 🙄
In contrast to Russia and Voldemort Kaput-in, countless people in history have used their human attention to build hospitals, grow food, create technology companies, finance apartment buildings, and manage day-care schools. All of those things create different forms of capital for other people.
Before we get into attention economics, let’s start with some definitions.
@ChatGPT: how do you define human attention?
ChatGPT: Human attention can be defined as the cognitive process by which individuals selectively concentrate their awareness and mental resources on specific stimuli, tasks, or information. It involves the ability to maintain focus, ignore distractions, and allocate cognitive resources effectively. Human attention is crucial for various cognitive functions, including perception, learning, memory, decision-making, and problem-solving.
Human attention is a finite resource for each person, just like the processing power of a digital computer. Computers meticulously track their resource usage for every process, so it's easy to know what computers are “digitally thinking” about. On Mac and Unix machines, the top command shows each process, the total CPU time it has consumed (TIME), and percentage of the CPU it is currently consuming (%CPU). Here’s an example:
Pop quiz: Which process has consumed the most CPU time on this computer? It’s much more difficult to know the resource usage for the human brain. Our brains have so many processes running inside them that they hide most of our quantum computation inside our subconscious minds. We don’t any control over those processes, so let’s define human attention as the “total conscious computing power” of the human brain.
Our attention can be measured in “Seconds of Time” and “% Usage”, just like a computer. For example, most traffic accidents are caused by drivers using less than 100% of their total attention.
The goal of attention economics is to improve the value of our time—also known as our Human Capital. Human capital is what we sell to our employers by the hour. The value of any human capital is determined by what our employers trust us to manage during the time they purchase each day. For example, if an employer can trust you to keep a warehouse clean, that’s worth about $10-15 per hour. If an employer can trust you to manage a $500M investment portfolio, that’s worth about $250-500 per hour.
Whenever we use our attention to increase the value of our human capital, that’s called Education. Education includes any learning, reading, training, work experience, practice, certifications, apprenticeships, discipleships, and all forms of failure.
We can also use our attention to destroy our human capital with things like alcohol, drugs, and porn. For example, how much can any employer trust a person who uses heroin on the job? See the effect on human capital? If you don’t think porn negatively impacts your human capital, ask your girlfriend if she thinks your porn habits make you a better listener.
The Start of the War
The war for human attention has been raging for way longer than the advertising engines on Google, Instagram, and Amazon. In the book, The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads, author Tim Wu cleverly points out that when radio and television were first introduced, many of the marketing geniuses that transformed those mediums were the sons of preachers. That’s right—the first “Mad Men” on Madison Avenue grew up in church.
Monetizing human attention may have been new to the world economy back in 1930, but it has been stock-and-trade in religions for millennia. Religions turn the “weekly sacrifice” of human attention into a) moral improvement of their supporters, b) revenues for the church, and c) acts of service to improve the world. If you are a religious person, what else would God and the Devil be fighting for other than seconds of human attention?
Even if you aren’t a religious person, the stories in this chapter will help you improve the value of your time.
In The Price of Our Attention, we learn how the attention economy works and why most of the major players are so desperate to harvest our personal data. For example, Meta makes $3.50 per brain per month on 2 billion Instagram users, but they secretly buy ovulation data from period tracker apps to ensure the best price for the ads they sell. Remember, if you don’t pay for the product—you are the product. 😵💫
In When Labor and Capital Are Free, we learn how human attention became the world’s most valuable commodity from economist Albert Wenger. Using his framework for technological revolutions, we consider the future impact of general purpose robots on the global economy. In the last three years, Amazon has reduced their human labor force by 300,000 humans and increased their robot labor force by 600,000 robots. 🤖
In The Attentional Investor, we learn the difference between “paying attention” and “investing attention”. The average American already spends 13 hours and 11 minutes each day consuming digital media. And that’s before everyone has super genius robot butlers to do all our work. So we discuss content budgets and various “Returns on Attention” that prevent us from drifting into total entertainment forever. 🫠
In Weapons of Mass Deception, we discuss the next major scarcity in the global economy—the truth. The Internet is already plagued with fake news, romance scams, tech support scams, phishing scams, auction fraud, click farms, and ransomware. In 2023, the estimated cost of all that inauthentic activity was eight trillion dollars, which was 9% of the global economy. Just imagine how expensive this problem will be when cybercriminals incorporate super intelligent generative AI into these existing scams. 😬
Finally, in Email Times Best Seller List, we learn how communications technology has changed since the invention of the Internet. We also learn why Informational Liquidity, Audience Segmentation, and Individualization are now the most important strategies for digital communications. 🤓
These stories will teach you how to get the most out of your time here on Earth because Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Instagram, Heaven, and Hell aren’t the only ones fighting for our attention. Nike, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, State Farm, Geico, and Capital One spend billions of pre-tax dollars to buy time in our life, everywhere we look. Video games, politicians, the apps on our phones, our jobs, our kids, our spouses, our hobbies, our friends, and our pets are all competing against each other in the zero-sum game for our human attention.
Continue reading…
Table of Contents
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