In the bygone Information Age, the Free Press, the "fourth estate" of the American Constitutional Republic was always "free" as far as content was concerned, within varying limits of contemporary acceptability; but it has never been free in the context of the dominant commodity, for which it was the primary medium. The poor and/or illiterate have always been effectively left out of the public discourse.
All that has changed. Not necessarily for the better. And the left-out are still left out.
Information markets tanked around 2010, as I remember it, displaced by a new commodity, in the form of the bundled data aggregated from momentary attention, "scraped," as they say, from our "behavioral surplus" (Zuboff) as we clicked, and scrolled, hovered, "liked," "followed," "tweeted" and lingered online.
Hence my use of "Attention Age" to denote the ascendancy of a new commodity that is, in essence, our attentional focus, which is our autonomy when you think about it.
The infrastructure was already in place from the old information markets. It took little more than a change of labels to switch to the new commodity. The extraction machinery has been retooled. Here is a metaphor, an ill-favored thing, but mine own:
When I worked the crab and oyster fisheries on the Chesapeake, in the late 1970s, we dragged drudges with long prongs from a 90-foot wooden "buy-boat" to rake the migrating crabs off the bottom; then when the crab season ended, we had to sail engineless Skipjacks, and only during the coldest months, the ones with "R" in them.
The drudges were retooled with shorter prongs to claw the oysters loose from their beds like old masonry. So there are still some oysters left. But attention-mining is under no such safeguards, and our attention-span has shrunk down to about that of, um, an oyster.
Attention, once you figure out how to render it into a product... but Tim Hwang, former global public policy lead for A.I. and machine learning at Google, now general counsel at Substack, explains this best:
"The amorphous shapeless concept of attention was transformed into discrete, comparable pieces that can be captured, priced and sold; buyers and sellers can quickly evaluate opportunities and transact in attention at mass scale..."""Tim Hwang, "Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising and the Time Bomb at the Heart of the Internet"
Compared to Information, attention is much easier to scrape up, bundle into tranches, and auction off by algorithm, all in about three nanoseconds, 24-7-365. It's cheap, portable, and plentiful.
This was a full-blown paradigm shift, as completely disruptive as driving your car off a bridge into deep water. In such an event we would probably keep stomping on the brakes until the water reached our eyes.
And that's about where we are today, on planet Earth: sinking fast, and still trying to exploit the situation.
Now, I started out to complain that the media, by which we normally mean the apparatus that collects, filters, formats, and dispenses the information on which public action is based, has ceased all but a thin pretense of that function, and that it now serves an entirely different purpose. And after looking at the context described above, it's clear that the media corporations, which had to sink or swim, elected to swim in the waters in which we now sink.
In this new world, a free and adversarial press cannot function as designed in our Constitution, i.e., as a check on political power. This structural feature of the old paradigm no longer works, because the structure has been replaced.
In the old days, journalists dug up stories and worked to get them on the Front Page above the fold, ahead of the other journalists, and constrained by conscience, editors, time, limited column-inches, relevance, and a story's potential to attract or repel advertisers. This worked, at least somewhat, to elevate the adversarial, and suppress the fawning obsequy, enhancing an "informed public."
In our new world, stories are produced by almost anyone with a cellphone to grab attention, hoping to go viral. Spectacular or terrifying content, the latter being most lucrative, crowds out every other contender.
We no longer have the scanty protection of editors and advertisers and outraged citizens to shield us from harmful and crazy-making content. This isn't all bad: without this change we would not have police body-cams, for one example, which may be reducing the number of murders at the hands of law enforcement, at least a little. But there is still the harmful, crazy-making stuff, at unprecedented scale. And so far, we don't know how to regulate that, and still have that foundational freedom of expression.
Who could decide what is harmful or crazy? Or as Zuboff puts it, who decides who decides? Our default answer, just because nobody else was paying attention, has been the "social" platforms, whose ROI is the sole measure of the enterprise's health. And we all know that speech is not free, it's money, since the infamous Citizens United decision.
That was our situation only last month. Things have just gotten disrupted again. A new element has entered the fray.
The Attention Age paradigm-change did not touch the cultural economic structure, but only introduced a new dominant market within it; and the design of this new element is also exclusively profit-oriented. And it removes a last protective firewall between humanity and insanity. It removes the human element altogether, leaving audiences at the mercy of attention-mining machinery that's now equipped with a voice.
The new element is of course artificial intelligence (A.I.) The voice is a close imitation of human, upon which its frighteningly easy to project our own worldviews.
The decisions about content are not made by humans now. They are still made on the basis of ROI; but the "decider" is a bunch of algorithms. Its interface with human beings operates through the parts of our brains evolved for interacting with each other. Our communications with this robot are not informational, they are attentional; they are not rational, they are emotional; they are not human, we are staring into a very strange and dangerous mirror.
We have given our future to a toaster with a caricature of personality, and no conscience, no human experience whatsoever, something devoid of life.
In the midst of this chaos, as readers of Matt Taibbi and others will know, governments are forming "partnerships" with the "social" media corporations, and implementing cyber-suppression to dim conversations that stray into political inconvenience.
So let's add this up. We have a set of computer algorithms portraying a human, which has access (we must now assume) to everything on the internet, and millions of constantly up-dated data-points on every person; shaping public emotion with subtle emphasis or de-emphasis of messages based on some arcane (or just stupid) pattern developed by an industry committed solely to "shareholder value"; and customizing each user's stream of targeted micro-impressions, of body-image, social status, worthiness, and loneliness.
We are all aware of this on some level, mind you. But we're bogged down in the first stage of grief, which is Denial. By the time we realize our real jeopardy our only choice will be acceptance. But that won't last long.
