P2P Book of the Week, Exerpt 2: All the World a Stage: The Emerging Attention Economy…, by Michael H. Goldhaber

Our Book of the Week selection continues from Mr. Goldhaber’s introduction, previously posted. To download the complete chapters, please go to his blog.

The Attention Economy, Chapter One: May I Have Your Attention, Please…

“The one constant of human life is change” — a cliché, no doubt, but worth recalling. Changes such as earthquakes and droughts may be beyond our collective control, but most of the changes that affect us are the direct or indirect consequences of various people’s choices. They can be tiny or huge, from minute aspects of one person’s life to the entire shape of life in general.

Changes may be obvious, even planned. Often though, they sneak up, long unnoticed even by those who cause them. A shortcut across a lawn becomes a wide path. An overheard remark sets someone’s life in a new direction. People drift into a moderate size town and turn it into a city, and then others drift into the city and turn it into a metropolis. A new word said just once as a joke becomes a standard way of talking. A story someone tells on a dull evening becomes the heart of a new religion. An angry protest on the spur of the moment becomes a powerful political movement.

If change occurs at every scale, the very widest is the most important, but also, paradoxically, it is often best at sneaking up unseen. With no special planning, hundreds of millions of people alter their daily patterns little by little, until suddenly the whole world runs differently. Sometimes, these widespread changes are still shallow, no more than fads or changes in fashion, such as when men choose wide ties for a while and then revert to narrow ones. Sometimes, as with the rise of fast foods, the changes can have somewhat deeper effects, both on how families partake of meals together and on health, but still the basic structure of life remains pretty much unchanged. Sometimes, however, these wide changes are also deep, going to the very core of what life is about.

The transformation now under way mixes up the very categories we have thought up and relied on to make sense of the different forces that influence us. The economy, politics, peace and war, education, arts and entertainment, were once pretty much separate realms. Now they are going through a blender, chopped up and spewed forth in new combinations. Our daily lives, our connections to one another, our ethical standards, and our basic ways of understanding the world will be — and are being — remarkably altered. To make real sense of the world now, to live and plan with any intelligence, we have little choice but to try to grasp some of the details of the change and what they imply, even as they continue to swirl around us.

A change so wide and deep should have symptoms almost wherever one looks, and this one does. At the start of the 21st century the prominent symptoms include: the dot-com boom and bust; the rise of terrorism; America’s intensifying political polarization; weakening traditional community ties and rising individualism; burgeoning new media, such as the Internet and blogging; the fight over music file sharing; super-high executive pay; and much else besides.

The change will be messy and confusing. As is so much the case right now, many people playing new roles and living by new rules will still believe they are playing old roles with old rules. Those on top in the old system, and those on the bottom will both resist at times, but sometimes one or the other of these groups will find alliance with one or other of the two incoming groups I’ve labeled as stars and fans. Much of the swirl of events we are likely to experience over the next decades will be the intricate dance between new identities and old, as partners quickly mutate into foes and back again, and as the sense of the system in which we are living melts and re-crystallizes, perhaps more than once.

A Completely New Kind of Economy

I’ve learned in talking and writing about this new economy that one basic point is very hard to take in, so let me repeat: Attention cuts through our lives at a different angle than money and material goods do. (I’ll explain just how in Part II of the book.) What this implies is that the new economy is not merely going to supplement, dress up, or alter the old; it’s going to replace it totally as a system for organizing our lives.

This where a wrenching challenge facess the deeply-held presumptions I alluded to at the start of this introduction — including many that most of us have never had much need to question before. Among them are that you know what parts of life relate to “the economy” and what parts don’t, that you know more or less how to participate in that economy, and that you know how to measure success and failure. It’s also extremely easy to think that that economy is completely natural, that it is the only way people have ever arranged their lives, that it is indeed so normal that no other possible way of ordering life could exist.

In one respect, it should be pretty obvious that the market-based industrial economy is not the only one that’s possible. We are descended from animals, and it would be quite a stretch to apply terms like GDP, money supply, employment opportunities, interest rates, or productivity growth to groups of monkeys, chimpanzees or indeed any other kind of non-human animal. As far as we know, it would also be silly to apply these terms to early human societies. That means that what we think of as natural economic laws were the result of something some humans did in adopting a certain way of life. We can adopt a new way of life and seem to be doing so, and, if we do, there is no reason to suppose we won’t alter our economic laws quite drastically in the process. Indeed, history demonstrates that the same sort of thing has happened at least several times in the past. Unless you believe we are now strangely immune from history, you ought to accept that it can happen again.

In spite of these seemingly clear arguments, the conventional wisdom — that our basic system really can’t change much — is quite well insulated from challenge. There are several reasons. For one thing, from one day to the next, large-scale change is very hard to notice. We can’t help focusing on the immediate present. Most of us only very occasionally look back to times before our births. We rarely envisage how the world might change over, say, the next twenty years, even though that’s a pretty short time in comparison with human history, and even considerably less than our own life expectancies.

Economics is a profession, requiring long years of study to obtain mastery. No profession easily admits that conditions might have changed so much that its basic tenets may not be useful any more. So it is in no way surprising that economists continue to use the measures (such as GDP, employment rates, balance-of-payments deficits, money supply, interest rates, or cost-of-living increases) and arguments that once served them so well. It’s also not strange that news reporters, accountants, financial analysts, business people, union leaders, politicians and, through them, the rest of us still usually take it for granted that economists’ many measures continue to provide a valid picture, clear at least to experts, of the realities of our economic life. Still, just because it is understandable for us all to hew to the old measures, that doesn’t mean they still tell us much.

Third, when it comes to thinking about the possibility of other kinds of economy replacing what is familiar to us, the whole world still lives in the shadow of Karl Marx. Marx, who lived in the mid-nineteenth century, happened to be more or less the first person to take seriously the idea that economies had changed radically in the past and might do so again. But he had a specific idea of what the future change should be, namely to what he called either “socialism” or “communism.”

When we look back today on how he and his subsequent followers envisioned those goals, we can see that what they had in mind were merely variants on industrial, factory-based production, though without markets, which were to be replaced by centralized planning. This was not as radical as Marx thought. By now, experience has taught us that such systems don’t survive without an unpleasantly totalitarian state enforcing them, and even then tend to an ultimately fatal stasis.

But the problem with Marx’s vision that matters most to us now is that he managed to convince himself not only that socialism should happen, but that it would, inevitably, replace what he called capitalism. To reach that conclusion he had had to sweep aside any thought that something different from either socialism or capitalism even could develop. In fact, to him, once socialism had taken over, the history of large-scale economic change would be at an end. Socialism (or communism) was to last forever. Until it showed up, however, capitalism would survive. Other than those two options, there just was nothing else.

Today, Marx’s aspirations for socialism have been pretty much discarded. Nevertheless, practically all of us accept without much thought that he was right about one thing: capitalism and socialism are supposedly the only alternatives for any future economic system. But why on earth should that be? Looked at with any care, it’s just an amazing assumption to make.

In my view, then, Marx was right that different kinds of economies have replaced one another before and can again. He was wrong that the socialism he posited would have been a genuinely new system that could bring about the equality and liberty he wanted. He was also wrong that major curves in history’s trajectory would stop coming. Even the most ardent supporters of capitalism often follow him in one or the other of his major mistakes. When they do, they get the world equally wrong.

I’ve learned in talking and writing about this new economy that one basic point is very hard to take in, so let me repeat: Attention cuts through our lives at a different angle than money and material goods do. (I’ll explain just how in Part II of the book.) What this implies is that the new economy is not merely going to supplement, dress up, or alter the old; it’s going to replace it totally as a system for organizing our lives.

This is where a wrenching challenge faces the deeply-held presumptions I alluded to at the start of this introduction — including many that most of us have never had much need to question before. Among them are that you know what parts of life relate to “the economy” and what parts don’t, that you know more or less how to participate in that economy, and that you know how to measure success and failure. It’s also extremely easy to think that that economy is completely natural, that it is the only way people have ever arranged their lives, that it is indeed so normal that no other possible way of ordering life could exist.

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