They call it “economy of attention”. They write (and sell) books about the economy of attention. They make (and monetize) blogs and sites about the economy of attention. They give (and get paid for) conferences about the economy of attention hullabaloo. They even make webcomics about the economy of attention. Don’t get surprised if from now on you start to see bankers turning gold ingots into shiny fish knives. If you didn’t notice, we are actually living a global revolution bigger than the 70’s curly haircuts.
Here you can see a typical Web 2.0 guru making a life from the new opportunities:
Foto: Masayuki - Licencia: CC-BY
I always thought there were only two options in economy: selling a product, and selling air. Little I knew how wrong was I! Competing to get customers using skills and baits is totally a different platform! Forgive me if I did even dare to think something like that already existed in classic television, newspapers, cinema, radio, vacuum cleaner industry and tupperware social meetings. The inventor of the economy of attention is definitively a genius, and deserves his or her place in History among the likes of Galileo or Da Vinci.
Of course, back in our grandfathers’ time they didn’t have this kind of sophisticated know-how. They either sat in their shops letting the chaos theory do the work of sending some customers in or were assigned buyers through a random lottery hosted by their paternalist big brother government.
Here in the sidebar you can see an example of their miserable failure to grasp the concept of “economy of attention” —haw, haw! the poor chaps wouldn’t have figured AdSense in a million years!
Now it’s time to stop basing our economy on the value of ridiculous things, like, food, water, fuel or homes, and embrace the new awesome economy of looking at each other! You’ll be able to pick anything you want from groceries and shops if you stare at the vendor during a certain amount of time, though you’ll need to choose carefully the time of the day if you don’t want to be forced to stay longer to outbid the other stare-buyers. Meanwhile, goods of all sorts will be magically produced by tiny angels in steampunk factories and they’ll ship them to vendors priced in stare-time currency (exchange fees to listen-time, smell-time and touch-time currencies may vary), within 15 labor days, free shipment for 10 units or more.
It really sounds like a perfect plan, and I don’t really know what could ever go wrong with it. Really.
