this be some Whole Earth Catalog bullshit "The currency" is always whatever allows you to live in peace. In a tribe it's friendship and family ties. In larger groups it's whatever the protectors want. Abstracted, "currency" is "whatever taxes are collected in." Taxes, after all, are what keeps the barbarians out, what ensures the seas are free of pirates. Sure, country-to-country you call them tariffs or whatever but fundamentally, the guys with the guns enforce a monopoly on violence in exchange for allowing the cash me outside girl to buy a six million dollar house in Florida. Now - Bhad Bhabie can argue that she trades in attention. The IRS would beg to differ and as they're the ones with the ability to summon punishment for crime, their opinion is the only one that matters. Gary Vaynerchuk can say he "daytrades attention" but what he monetizes is advertising dollars. Nothing new about that, advertising dates back to Pompei or before. Their economy ran on taxes, too. Fealty to the state you occupy is a prerequisite for trade and the state really and truly gives no fux who you are. How do I buy a sandwich? 404 sandwich not found But I only want a sandwich So... the internet is going to knit together a community of sandwich aficionados and we will have a venn diagram of interests that entitles me to a sandwich? I am not a fan of Bitcoin as a currency but goddamn the first thing anyone ever bought with it was pizza. this shit again No one thought that. No one. Serfs mostly lived communally and the royalty protected them from other royalty in exchange for taxes. Then the non-serfs got greedy and legislated the serfs away and those MFers are the ones who invented Victorian slumhouses. they also, I might add, paid their taxes. Still can't buy me a sandwich.Attention flows not only from fan to star, but in a hyperlinked way it can be passed from star to star, or fan to fan. A growing variety of attention types can bounce along through cyberspace: personal advice, suggestions, connections, editing, assistance in self-expression, responses, acclaim, or new software designed especially for your purposes.
But how exactly will a moneyless attention economy play out in the world of old-fashioned, but still-needed, material goods? How will attention get you, say, an automobile? Cars emanate from vast corporations. Can you really expect an entity like GM to pay you enough attention to build one for you? In truth, the process is not nearly so monolithic; no single company makes cars in isolation. Automobile designs are copied, reverse-engineered, or licensed, and parts are often made by smaller outside workshops. Much of the advice, planning, and management comes from outside consultants. The car is no longer assembled from parts on one long assembly line; rather, subassemblies are often put together in different locations first. At every stage, more and more tasks are automated; that means more of the attention required to make a car occurs upstream as part of design and production planning.
With most people involved in the entire process connected to each other and to the rest of the world through cyberspace, it is not difficult to foresee a time when corporations will pretty much disappear, and when it will make a lot more sense to speak of a complex carmaking community, made up mostly of entourages surrounding thousands of stars and microstars. As is common among entourages, much participation would be less than full time, and the majority of members would belong to other communities as well, and even to other entourages.
Thus many people in the broad car community will also share membership in some of the same communities of attention as anyone who might want a car. As long as the person in question gets enough attention, she would almost certainly be able to draw enough from overlaps between her primary communities and the car community to arrange to be put into the driver's seat she craves. Assuming automation keeps cutting the total amount of actual attention needed to make each individual car, less and less stardom will be required to end up with one.
History offers a parallel for understanding this radical notion of an attention economy superseding the use of money. At the height of the feudal order in Europe, everyone took for granted that tilling the soil would always be primary, and that wealth and property would always depend on possessing the right bloodlines to own title to land (which could never be sold). It was unimaginable to either serfs or nobles that nobility and titles could cease to be a means to wealth.
I think the idea is that you'll be so busy rolling around in sandwiches that other people bought for you, you'll no longer want to buy yourself a sandwich.
Oh, there's definitely a "we'll all love each other and capitalism will dissolve" vibe. Thing is? Humans developed money to facilitate trade with people we aren't friends with. So either (A) something needs to fill the sandwich gap or (B) there needs to be some sort of middleware to translate "unknown attention" into "known attention." Both (A) and (B) are going to belong to some sort of external system. You could do it with blockchain but blockchain has no ability to protect you from reavers so fundamentally, it's gonna be whatever the heavies wanna get paid in. If the heavies don't run the blockchain, you need a blockchain-to-heavybucks exchange rate which means we're right back where we started, paying taxes in money. If the heavies do run the blockchain, you're looking squarely at the Social Credit System. Which, frankly, is where they've always been. People hear "China invented paper money" and think "china invented coins made out of paper" when in fact, the value of Chinese currency was whatever the Emperor said it was which had the effect of entrenching their user class against all challenges short of foreign invasion (mongols, Brits) and brutally restricting their ability to trade. The Renaissance was created in no small part by Europeans taking the "money is whatever we say it is" insight of the Chinese and giving it to the banks, rather than feudal lords. Graeber might disagree, but answering the question "how do I pay strangers for stuff I can't afford" is how capitalism took over the world. The Babylonians ran pretty much everything internal on a social credit system. But when they needed external stuff, they used silver. Worked for like 2000 years, until the barbarians they traded with learned to write in a pidgin easier to transact with, went around the social credit system and out-innovated 'em. Seems to me a Tik Tok economy is not a step forward.
This was a great comment - more interesting than the Wired article, actually. Thanks for the discussion.
Allow me to recommend this book and also this book.
I'll add these to my ever expanding reading list.
So the thesis is basically that you have to be an influencer to get material wealth in the new economy? I think I'll kill myself if I live to see that. Fortunately, I think the thesis is half-baked. The analogy of serfdom is not that great, because it's not as if money didn't exist during the middle ages. It's that the average person was locked out of attaining it. The Black Plague helped usher in some forms of technological advance (via labor shortages) that freed people to do other things (like think about stuff, for example), which led to a positive feedback loop of innovation. In the best case scenario, our current trend of automation will do the same. It's scary, because we don't know what happens when a doctor no longer needs to think about what the diagnosis/therapy/prognosis of the patient is, since Watson or whatever can do it with less error in a fraction of the time. But that doesn't mean we haven't seen this movie before. I actually think the opposite of this article is more likely to come to pass. I think we're in the digital equivalent of Oliver Twist. Eventually the skies of London cleared so air was breathable and children didn't have to work 60 hr weeks in the factory. Laws catch up. They will catch up with Facebook and Google, too, because no one wants to live in a world where corporations make you suffer. Again, we've seen that movie and it sucked the first time around. I won't make any predictions about how fast the laws will catch up...the industrial revolution wasn't quick, after all. But they will. Eventually.
If modern child labor laws were passed in 1850, parents would conspire with employers to let kids work in secret. Without that income, they would have to buy less food and coal. If modern child labor laws were rolled back to 1850 laws, hardly any children would miss their screen time. Parents would rather drive an older car or live in humbler housing than send their kids to a factory.Laws catch up.
Child labor laws were gradually introduced starting in the early 19th c and became more strict over time, which corresponded with the growing awareness of how detrimental hard labor is to children, but also with growing material wealth, as you say. It’s not really an either/or. But anyway it doesn’t undermine my point that whether laws are causative or lagging, they portend better conditions.
I reckon a lot of people would say there is less child labor these days "because it's illegal." Haven't you related stories about your earliest experiences with work? One of my earliest gigs was cutting grass with a gas mower, no hearing or eye protection. I worry that a complete lack of hard labor will be detrimental to my kid.
I liked working as a teenager, and I worked as much as I could. In a restaurant. That was subject to osha. And the health department. It was fun and hard, but it wasn’t sewing until my fingers bleed after my 10th hour of work at 8 years old. To pretend mowing your neighbors’ lawns is the same as living in a Dickensian hellscape is disingenuous at best. And it’s still beside the point.
I agree with your point that evolution of child labor practices was partly due to growing material wealth and partly due to cultural evolution, including norms influenced by legislation. Other people might give more credit to the laws. In any case you're more fun to talk to. Legislation alone doesn't change the incentives of parents to try and do what's best for their family. And I don't think society had to be especially aware to recognize that sewing for ten hours until your fingers bleed is detrimental. In 1850, parents chose between going hungry or putting 8-year-olds to work. In 1980, parents chose between having a bored kid at home or encouraging him to earn pocket money. Today, I pull my kid away from the computer to have him mow a corner of the yard with an electric mower, using safety glasses and noise cancelling headphones. It seems like progress, but I wonder if we have overshot some optimum. I don't mean to compare my yard work to sweatshops, though I did sweat a lot. Like you, I enjoyed working. I don't know if child labor laws forbade my work, but if they had prevented me from working it would have been detrimental to my experience.
I definitely broke the law in Michigan routinely. At the time the law was that of you were under 18 then during the school year you couldn’t work more than 30 hrs/wk. (I assume there must be an exception for dropouts or sometime, but I don’t know). Anyway my boss would pay me cash if I went over the limit. Mutually beneficial, no doubt. Of course I wasn’t working to support my family. I was working because I liked the money and even more I liked the sense of belonging I could get in a restaurant kitchen that I couldn’t get at school. Nothing ever boosted my confidence as a person more than when my boss started trusting me with the keys to the place at age 16. So no doubt that I think work is invaluable for adolescents to learn to grow up. I also think the law should have more flexibility. If I weren’t working it’s not as if I would have been studying. But all that said it was a choice, but a necessity. I’m glad we live in a society where kids aren’t forced to work because their families are in dire need (certainly this exists some places…just not writ large in the developed world). Totally agree though that we need to be careful about the pendulum swinging too far in the other direction. Kids are resilient, and I think they actually thrive on responsibility. My kids are younger than yours, but even at 3 and 4 you can see that they love helping put the dishes away or working on home projects. They might suck at it and cause more trouble than it’s worth, but accomplishing a complex task and then getting a high five for it is what they live for. Maybe, and I’m just thinking out loud here, that’s part of my original point, that we live in the digital coal-choked slums. We’ve “protected” kids to the point that all they have left is the iPad. Companies fought for eyeballs, because they know where the eyeballs are to be found. I don’t know if we’ll ever make social media illegal for kids, but I think we’ll approach a day when it’s entirely frowned upon, and hopefully the business models will collapse or change drastically. Legal or not, society shouldn’t be set up to push our kids toward screen addiction from a young age. Just late night ramblings here, so apologies of there are a lot of non sequiturs.
There's an assumption (backed by propaganda and revisionist history) that history has been one long steady arc towards progress when in fact (1) nobody focuses on anything but western European history (2) it's had fucktons of fits'n'starts. "labor" vs. "child labor" became a thing in the Victorian era because pastoralism and artisanism were wiped out by enclosure and mass-production. The Luddites weren't complaining about technology, they were complaining about wealth concentration and the unchecked evolution of Victorian squalor. That's what prompted Communism - Engels wandered over to the UK and went "whoa holy shit industrializaiton and capitalism are a massive step back for ordinary people" and Marx went "seize the means of production" which is a meaningless concept in a preindustrial society. But because we've been at the foremost of industrial society from the get-go, we naturally presume it is an unalloyed good and matchstick girls would have died of cholera even if they weren't drinking their own shit in Whitechapel. Computers and devices are an environmental hazard, one we're adapting rapidly to either deal with or be defeated by. Social media is 20 years old and has radically changed politics and society but I mean, high schools are 100 years old and radically changed politics and society. Fundamentally? If you're a bad parent, you're a bad parent. The challenges change but the need to respond to them doesn't. That "we" has always fucked up their kids, parents have always rebelled against the "we." The "child labor laws" thing is a total non sequitur. I was ten hours a week at a toy store from 4th grade, got social security statements and everything. You can have child actors on stage for anywhere from half an hour (newborns) to 4 hours per day (teenagers) no problem. they can't work full shifts until 16 which... c'mon. Okay, they can't manufacture explosives. But I mean, c'mon. I have an uninterrupted social security history going back to age eight. That doesn't include paper routes, mown lawns, short-order cooking at the ski area or fixing cars. And none of the regulations have changed from when I was a kid.
Gary V has been using the tagline « I day trade attention » for the past 5 years at least. Do t know where he’s at now, because I cut out that brand of husstle réthoric from my life a while ago. But I’m a world where things get priced with a Pay Per View / Impression of course the ability to bring in traffic, brings in the money.
On the other hand, of course the currency of the new economy will still be money.