#it's the internet economy at work

[etraytin]

Been doing paid surveys lately on Prolific Academic, a site that gathers up respondents mainly for academic studies and business focus testing. It's honestly pretty good money compared to other survey sites I've used, especially if you get into the focus groups, and came across one study looking for anonymously shared Safari browsing data. I passed on it, but imagine what would happen if I hadn't. "All right, and here you'll see one outlier who spends 40,000 hours per week on Archive Of Our Own and should not be counted."

[iirulancorrino]

The Green brothers are doing effective altruism better than maybe 95% of people who identify online as effective altruists.

[runawaymarbles]

at this point i am simply uninterested in any opinion on a hot-button political topic that treats human beings as a mass of meaningless hypotheticals

[dickvinci]

and i know i could and possibly might just start posting about fics and what not that i'm writing her and set up a kofi and take suggestions and what not but. it's a lot of work.

[raffaellopalandri]

The Paradox of "Free Work"

Daily writing promptWhat job would you do for free?View all responses The question of “Which job would you do for free” is a bit of a trick question from my current perspective. Image taken from Internet Here’s why (please consider that to keep the post at an acceptable length I will just give here the key elements of my reasoning): In a truly ideal world, unburdened by the constraints of…

[carp-from-space]

Irl i heard worst feedback and gods i wish i was allowed to drink alcohol.

[radmystique]

Twitter “activists” are something else, man.

[stargod]

God, I- DESPERATELY- Need someone to make a 5 hr video essay on the history of people breaking video game economies. I thought about it like 5 seconds ago and now i need it like a drug, its Killing me!

Please!! If someone knows of any videos like this or even if u just wanna tell me/link me one of the tales PLEASE Feeeed meee!!

[aeide-thea]

At the Delphinbrunnen, Volkspark Friedrichshain, Berlin Photo by Thomas Lautenschlag, 2011

[aph-estonia]

fuck i'm so fucking mad i didn't bet on the election i would've made bank

[tmarshconnors]

The Attention Economy

Welcome to the Attention Economy, where platforms, brands, and content creators constantly vie for a slice of your time and focus. In the digital age, attention is finite, and those who command it, control influence, and ultimately profit. But what exactly is the Attention Economy, and how does it shape our everyday lives?

What Is the Attention Economy?

The Attention Economy is a concept that views human attention as a scarce resource, much like any other commodity in a capitalist economy. As the internet and social media have expanded, the amount of information we are exposed to has increased exponentially.

Yet, our capacity to process this information remains limited. This mismatch between information and attention has transformed attention into a hot commodity, with tech companies and advertisers striving to capture as much of it as possible.

The economist and psychologist Herbert A. Simon first coined the term in the 1970s. He predicted that as information became abundant, attention would become the bottleneck to productivity and success. Fast forward to 2024, and Simon’s foresight is all too accurate.

The Currency of Digital Platforms

Social media platforms, video-sharing sites, and even news outlets thrive on keeping you glued to their pages for as long as possible. The longer you scroll, watch, or engage, the more ads you see, and the more data they collect on your behaviour. In essence, your attention becomes the currency that fuels their growth.

This is why apps are meticulously designed to be addictive. Features like infinite scrolling, notifications, and personalised content feeds are not mere conveniences; they are carefully engineered to keep you from putting down your phone. These platforms know that the longer you stay, the more profitable you become.

The Cost to Society

While the Attention Economy may be a goldmine for tech giants and advertisers, it’s taking a toll on society in more ways than one. Here are some of the most concerning impacts:

1. Reduced Focus and Productivity: With endless streams of information competing for our attention, it has become harder to focus on a single task for extended periods. Research shows that constantly switching between tasks (known as multitasking) hampers our ability to concentrate, making us less productive in both work and personal life.

2. Erosion of Mental Health: Studies have linked excessive social media use with rising rates of anxiety, depression, and loneliness. Platforms like Instagram and TikTok encourage endless comparison, which can damage self-esteem and foster feelings of inadequacy.

3. Manipulation of Behaviour: The algorithms driving the Attention Economy are designed to show us more of what we like. While this sounds harmless, it can lead to the creation of echo chambers where users are only exposed to content that reinforces their existing beliefs. This has been linked to increased polarisation, making meaningful political and social discourse more difficult.

Who Benefits?

The primary beneficiaries of the Attention Economy are the companies and advertisers who profit from our engagement. Every click, like, and share generates valuable data that can be sold to advertisers. Platforms like Facebook, Google, and TikTok have turned this into a science, offering hyper-targeted advertising that maximises revenue.

For content creators and influencers, the Attention Economy presents both opportunity and challenge. On one hand, anyone with a smartphone and internet access can capture attention and potentially build a career. On the other, the competition for attention is fierce, and staying relevant requires a constant stream of new and engaging content.

Breaking Free from the Attention Economy

So, is it possible to reclaim our attention in a world that’s constantly fighting for it? Yes, but it requires conscious effort. 

Here are a few ways you can take control:

1. Set Boundaries: Limit your social media use by setting time limits or scheduling "offline" hours during the day. Apps like "Screen Time" on iPhone can help monitor and restrict your usage.

2. Curate Your Digital Diet: Be selective about the content you consume. Unfollow accounts or pages that don't add value to your life, and prioritise content that enriches your mind rather than distracting it.

3. Practice Mindfulness: Techniques like meditation and mindfulness can help train your brain to focus on the present moment, making it easier to resist the pull of endless distractions.

4. Prioritise Deep Work: Set aside blocks of time for deep, focused work or activities without distractions. Author Cal Newport’s book Deep Workis an excellent guide on how to achieve this in an age of information overload.

In the Attention Economy, the stakes are high. Our attention is not just a measure of what we consume; it shapes how we think, feel, and behave. While it’s easy to fall into the trap of constant distraction, we do have the power to reclaim our attention.

By setting boundaries, curating our content, and practicing mindfulness, we can shift the balance back in our favour transforming the Attention Economy from a battleground into a balanced relationship between consumption and creation.

As we navigate this evolving landscape, it’s essential to remember that our attention is precious. So ask yourself: where do you want to invest it?

[apricops]

So, the thing about Don Quixote.

The thing about Don Quixote is that he tilts at windmills - tilts in the archaic sense of ‘charge at with a lance,’ because it’s the story of a guy who read so much chivalric romance that he lost his mind and started larping as a knight-errant. He was, if you’ll pardon the phrasing, chivalrybrained.

The thing about Don Quixote is, sometimes people take it as this story of whimsical and bravely misguided individualism or ‘being yourself’ or whatever, and they’re wrong. If it took place in the modern day, Don Quixote would absolutely be the story of a trust fund kid who blew his inheritance being a gacha whale until his internet got cut off so now he wanders around insisting that people refer to him as ‘Gudako.’

But the real thing about Don Quixote is that it was published in the early 1600s, and the thing about the 1600s is that Europe was one big tire fire. This is because 1600s Europe was still organized around feudalism (or ‘vassalage and manorialism’ if ya nasty), which assumed that land (and the peasants attached to it) were the only source of wealth. And that had worked just fine (well, ‘just fine,’ it was still feudalism) for a long time, because Europe had been a relative backwater with little in the way of urbanization or large-scale trade.

That was no longer true for Europe in the 1600s. The combination of urban development, technological advances, and brutal Spanish colonialism meant that land was no longer the sole source of wealth. Sudden there was a new class of business-savvy, investment-minded upwardly-mobile commoners, and another new class of downwardly-mobile gentry who simply couldn’t compete in this new fast-paced economy. Cervantes saw this process with his own eyes.

One of the symbols of this new age was the windmill, a complicated piece of engineering that was expensive to build but would then produce profits indefinitely - in other words, a windmill was capital.

The thing about Don Quixote is, when he tilts at windmills, he has correctly identified his nemesis.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Red Lobster was killed by private equity, not Endless Shrimp

For the rest of May, my bestselling solarpunk utopian novel THE LOST CAUSE (2023) is available as a $2.99, DRM-free ebook!

A decade ago, a hedge fund had an improbable viral comedy hit: a 294-page slide deck explaining why Olive Garden was going out of business, blaming the failure on too many breadsticks and insufficiently salted pasta-water:

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/940944/000092189514002031/ex991dfan14a06297125_091114.pdf

Everyone loved this story. As David Dayen wrote for Salon, it let readers "mock that silly chain restaurant they remember from their childhoods in the suburbs" and laugh at "the silly hedge fund that took the time to write the world’s worst review":

https://www.salon.com/2014/09/17/the_real_olive_garden_scandal_why_greedy_hedge_funders_suddenly_care_so_much_about_breadsticks/

But – as Dayen wrote at the time, the hedge fund that produced that slide deck, Starboard Value, was not motivated by dissatisfaction with bread-sticks. They were "activist investors" (finspeak for "rapacious assholes") with a giant stake in Darden Restaurants, Olive Garden's parent company. They wanted Darden to liquidate all of Olive Garden's real-estate holdings and declare a one-off dividend that would net investors a billion dollars, while literally yanking the floor out from beneath Olive Garden, converting it from owner to tenant, subject to rent-shocks and other nasty surprises.

They wanted to asset-strip the company, in other words ("asset strip" is what they call it in hedge-fund land; the mafia calls it a "bust-out," famous to anyone who watched the twenty-third episode of The Sopranos):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bust_Out

Starboard didn't have enough money to force the sale, but they had recently engineered the CEO's ouster. The giant slide-deck making fun of Olive Garden's food was just a PR campaign to help it sell the bust-out by creating a narrative that they were being activists* to save this badly managed disaster of a restaurant chain.

*assholes

Starboard was bent on eviscerating Darden like a couple of entrail-maddened dogs in an elk carcass:

https://web.archive.org/web/20051220005944/http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~solan/dogsinelk/

They had forced Darden to sell off another of its holdings, Red Lobster, to a hedge-fund called Golden Gate Capital. Golden Gate flogged all of Red Lobster's real estate holdings for $2.1 billion the same day, then pissed it all away on dividends to its shareholders, including Starboard. The new landlords, a Real Estate Investment Trust, proceeded to charge so much for rent on those buildings Red Lobster just flogged that the company's net earnings immediately dropped by half.

Dayen ends his piece with these prophetic words:

Olive Garden and Red Lobster may not be destinations for hipster Internet journalists, and they have seen revenue declines amid stagnant middle-class wages and increased competition. But they are still profitable businesses. Thousands of Americans work there. Why should they be bled dry by predatory investors in the name of “shareholder value”? What of the value of worker productivity instead of the financial engineers?

Flash forward a decade. Today, Dayen is editor-in-chief of The American Prospect, one of the best sources of news about private equity looting in the world. Writing for the Prospect, Luke Goldstein picks up Dayen's story, ten years on:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-05-22-raiding-red-lobster/

It's not pretty. Ten years of being bled out on rents and flipped from one hedge fund to another has killed Red Lobster. It just shuttered 50 restaurants and declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Ten years hasn't changed much; the same kind of snark that was deployed at the news of Olive Garden's imminent demise is now being hurled at Red Lobster.

Instead of dunking on free bread-sticks, Red Lobster's grave-dancers are jeering at "Endless Shrimp," a promotional deal that works exactly how it sounds like it would work. Endless Shrimp cost the chain $11m.

Which raises a question: why did Red Lobster make this money-losing offer? Are they just good-hearted slobs? Can't they do math?

Or, you know, was it another hedge-fund, bust-out scam?

Here's a hint. The supplier who provided Red Lobster with all that shrimp is Thai Union. Thai Union also owns Red Lobster. They bought the chain from Golden Gate Capital, last seen in 2014, holding a flash-sale on all of Red Lobster's buildings, pocketing billions, and cutting Red Lobster's earnings in half.

Red Lobster rose to success – 700 restaurants nationwide at its peak – by combining no-frills dining with powerful buying power, which it used to force discounts from seafood suppliers. In response, the seafood industry consolidated through a wave of mergers, turning into a cozy cartel that could resist the buyer power of Red Lobster and other major customers.

This was facilitated by conservation efforts that limited the total volume of biomass that fishers were allowed to extract, and allocated quotas to existing companies and individual fishermen. The costs of complying with this "catch management" system were high, punishingly so for small independents, bearably so for large conglomerates.

Competition from overseas fisheries drove consolidation further, as countries in the global south were blocked from implementing their own conservation efforts. US fisheries merged further, seeking economies of scale that would let them compete, largely by shafting fishermen and other suppliers. Today's Alaskan crab fishery is dominated by a four-company cartel; in the Pacific Northwest, most fish goes through a single intermediary, Pacific Seafood.

These dominant actors entered into illegal collusive arrangements with one another to rig their markets and further immiserate their suppliers, who filed antitrust suits accusing the companies of operating a monopsony (a market with a powerful buyer, akin to a monopoly, which is a market with a powerful seller):

https://www.classaction.org/news/pacific-seafood-under-fire-for-allegedly-fixing-prices-paid-to-dungeness-crabbers-in-pacific-northwest

Golden Gate bought Red Lobster in the midst of these fish wars, promising to right its ship. As Goldstein points out, that's the same promise they made when they bought Payless shoes, just before they destroyed the company and flogged it off to Alden Capital, the hedge fund that bought and destroyed dozens of America's most beloved newspapers:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/16/sociopathic-monsters/#all-the-news-thats-fit-to-print

Under Golden Gate's management, Red Lobster saw its staffing levels slashed, so diners endured longer wait times to be seated and served. Then, in 2020, they sold the company to Thai Union, the company's largest supplier (a transaction Goldstein likens to a Walmart buyout of Procter and Gamble).

Thai Union continued to bleed Red Lobster, imposing more cuts and loading it up with more debts financed by yet another private equity giant, Fortress Investment Group. That brings us to today, with Thai Union having moved a gigantic amount of its own product through a failing, debt-loaded subsidiary, even as it lobbies for deregulation of American fisheries, which would let it and its lobbying partners drain American waters of the last of its depleted fish stocks.

Dayen's 2020 must-read book Monopolized describes the way that monopolies proliferate, using the US health care industry as a case-study:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/29/fractal-bullshit/#dayenu

After deregulation allowed the pharma sector to consolidate, it acquired pricing power of hospitals, who found themselves gouged to the edge of bankruptcy on drug prices. Hospitals then merged into regional monopolies, which allowed them to resist pharma pricing power – and gouge health insurance companies, who saw the price of routine care explode. So the insurance companies gobbled each other up, too, leaving most of us with two or fewer choices for health insurance – even as insurance prices skyrocketed, and our benefits shrank.

Today, Americans pay more for worse healthcare, which is delivered by health workers who get paid less and work under worse conditions. That's because, lacking a regulator to consolidate patients' interests, and strong unions to consolidate workers' interests, patients and workers are easy pickings for those consolidated links in the health supply-chain.

That's a pretty good model for understanding what's happened to Red Lobster: monopoly power and monopsony power begat more monopolies and monoposonies in the supply chain. Everything that hasn't consolidated is defenseless: diners, restaurant workers, fishermen, and the environment. We're all fucked.

Decent, no-frills family restaurant are good. Great, even. I'm not the world's greatest fan of chain restaurants, but I'm also comfortably middle-class and not struggling to afford to give my family a nice night out at a place with good food, friendly staff and reasonable prices. These places are easy pickings for looters because the people who patronize them have little power in our society – and because those of us with more power are easily tricked into sneering at these places' failures as a kind of comeuppance that's all that's due to tacky joints that serve the working class.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/23/spineless/#invertebrates

[cleoselene]

In economics we divide the population into income quintiles -- top 20%, bottom 20%, etc

The Biden Economy has been very, very good to the bottom 20% -- I know because I am in that quintile and under the Biden Presidency I have seen multiple SNAP increases, the best COLA adjustments for Social Security in four decades, Medicare now pays my utilities, and because I'm part of the Affordable Connectivity Program, they can now never turn off my internet even if I can't afford to pay the bill.

The problem with the poorest people being the one who benefits the most? Is that it doesn't resonate as a media story. The media is not catering to that bottom quintile -- we don't have the expendable income their advertisers are seeking.

But if you want to elect a POTUS who is honestly helping the people who need it the most, you should be an enthusiastic Biden supporter. It won't make splashy news headlines, you're not even going to find MSNBC going GUESS WHAT THE POORS ARE DOING BETTER all the time because it's really not a sexy story. But it's a real story. A true story.

I'm just really sick of the pseudo-leftist takes that characterize Biden and the Democrats as 'conservative' or assertions that they don't have policy platforms except 'we're not the Republicans.' Such commentary sounds intelligent but only in the way Libertarian commentary sounds intelligent: you have to not think critically at all to some to such absurd conclusions. Democrats are working within a broken system and doing the best they can. You wanna fix the system? Great, I'm onboard, but smearing the only people trying to help is not going to get you anywhere.

[prettykikimora]

Americans have a little adolf hitler living inside every single one of them, and it comes out when they're mildly inconvenienced by or convinced they're under threat by a minority. Most people with the money to order food service all the time are making decent living, without what other nonsense classifications of hypothetical people you want to use as a cudgel, terrified white women looking you dead in the eye and saying it's feminist and empowering women's safety to automatically assume all men of color are out to get you because they expected a woman delivering their sandwich, and man showed up instead. We live in a hysteria culture, a fascist fourth reich society. It tells you to be afraid of everyone.Don't look at the statistics that's say a majority of assaults are carried out by people who know each other, just distrust people of color, EASY! You will be bought and sold if it means someone can get their treats on time. " I am disabled. I don't have to think about the consequences of my actions. I will report my food service workers to show up as someone different then what was shown in their picture." As if anyone who isn't insane even looks at that anyways. It is vastly entitled and disgusting to eliminate effectively this underground economy of people who are for whatever reason, unable to find normal work, use their friends account for doordashing. This is a common and unspoken practice and i'm afraid now got the little nazis on the internet here are raising a nothing fuss about it that's soon, we're all going to need real ID's and scan our Fucking eyeballs with our phones just a log into a fucking food delivery app to deliver j. fogle's forty five dollar single item from across town, being your personal chauffeur for a cup of coffee. It's a lack of respect for workers. A lack of respect for poor people, a lack of respect for felons, migrant workers, trans people, people whose account is just fucked up, it's just next door type people fuckin locked away in their house or work. Brain's becoming more and more fascist by the day because they live in a suburb and are disconnected from the lives of the average working person and they lack the compassion. pretty soon we're not gonna be able to do anything dude. Don't tell these petty bourgeois little creeps about selling food stamps.

I say all that having a big, stupid argument with people because, of course, like a golden trumpet sounding, a chariot from the gods raining down on us, The one pure example for them to point to of the person I tried to defend specifically bringing up this point that just because someone has a criminal record, they're not a danger to you specifically, unbeknownst to me for whatever fucking reason is a guy who Lost his job for a doordash because he killed somebody in a hit and run. And then it becomes something totally different, it's not a leftist, defending compassion, people down on their luck, and the rights of the lumpen proletariat, It becomes me suddenly saying "nobody should ever get a background check, meryl thinks it's cool That guy killed a guy, and it's still driving for doordash because he uses his friend's account now."

Doesn't that just figure.

You don't just get sent to jail forever. Life continues when you get out and you gotta do what you gotta do. A felon working for the Western express trucking company just brought you your groceries, a felon put out the fire Engulfing your forest. A felon made the hubcaps for your car and like a million other things, because the American economy is predicated on slavery still play another name, which is why the state of California voted against ending slavery buy another name Because it would mean higher prices and less jobs like ancient Rome, California is a disgusting place that grew so large because of efficiency in subjugation.

[yellowocaballero]

There's a genre of post that I see pretty frequently, which can overall be summed up as, "Modern fandom has a culture problem where fanfic authors are treated as content producers instead of community members and their fanfic is treated as a commodity to be consumed instead of a high-effort labor of love that deserves attention and compliments given directly to the author". I agree with 3/4ths of that. I find the part I disagree with very interesting, the same way I find a lot of writeblr interesting, because it's a perspective that I had to work very hard to actually understand.

Because the posts have such a warped view of what writing is and why we post our writing! They say that fanfic fights against the commodified internet we live in, but all they're doing is changing the currency of payment in this attention economy. Another way you can summarize about 70% of these posts is, "My payment for writing and posting my fanfiction is compliments, and if you do not give me those compliments you are not paying. If you give those compliments behind my back, or talk about them privately without giving them to me as well, then you are stealing from me." I don't want to put it like that, but a lot of these posts use words like 'deprive', as if the reader who enjoys the fic without commenting is withholding something from them that they deserve. They use the word engagement, and they do talk about how part of that engagement is just the joy of talking about AUs and ships with other people, but when people say that comments are their motivation to keep writing, what they mean is that validation is their motivation to keep writing. Which is compliments.

I understand that, because I understand that fanfic writers are not immune to the attention economy. But I don't understand how almost every one of these posts talk about how this lack of attention makes them stop writing - that this act of theft is killing their desire to write. I could understand this if they meant 'desire to POST fic' (I don't post fic I think zero people would read.), but they talk about how lack of payment stops them from writing at all.

IMHO, that is what creates a commodity from fic. People want to treat fic as art, but an artist makes art for themself. Art is made because we want to hold parts of skills and ourselves in our hands. If you won't make art if you get no payment, then you have devalued the art completely.

We think of AO3 as this unique site that's born entirely from passion and is filled with fics written for love of the game. But guilt-tripping posts that shame people for not commenting on a fic they enjoy, and that describe how there's no point in writing fic if it's not getting attention, are directly contributing towards the culture of treating fic like a commodity.

I also really want a fandom culture where the relationship between artist and reader is reciprocal, where it feels like a community, and where I get to talk about my fanfic with people. My favorite part of posting fanfic is rambling about it on my blog, because I can talk about my art all day and I love it when people stop and listen. But I love that because I love my own art. If you love your own art, then it'll always have value.

Also Google your username, just trust me, that's how you find The Secret Discussions. Someone made a TikTok fansong of me once. WHAT?