"...Information used to be scarce.
What’s scarce now?
Attention, specifically your attention.
And lots of people want to seize it, monetize it and commodify it.
...former Google executive James Williams’...thinks that many tech companies see their users as a form of prey — or maybe herd animals would be a better metaphor.
Our attention is lured in via clickbait and algorithmic jiggery-pokery that’s designed to keep us emotionally stirred and engaged (which mostly means angry) and then monetized to make tech companies rich.
- Commodifying-manufactured outrage
This, Williams argues, has negative effects.
Quoting poet Theodore Roethke he says, “A mind too active is no mind at all.”
Yet social media and other tech platforms are designed — deliberately — to keep us in such a state, too busy reacting to the latest fad or outrage (it’s usually outrage) to actually think.
Williams writes, “The most visible and consequential form of compromised ‘daylight’ we see in the digital attention economy is the prevalence and centrality of moral outrage..."
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