4AAVC101 - week 2

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These are my notes from October 03 for 4AAVC101 at King's College London for the 2017-2018 school year. The lecturer, Nick Srnicek, is the author of two excellent books at the intersection of technology and leftist politics: Inventing the Future (with Alex Williams), and Platform Capitalism.

The usual disclaimer: all notes are my personal impressions and do not necessarily reflect the view of the lecturer.

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Cognitive Capitalism and the Attention Economy

Readings

Cognitive Capitalism by Yann Moulier Boutang (chapter 3)

So I started reading this from the beginning and realised that I didn’t just want to read chapter 3, I wanted to read the whole book, which I didn’t have time to do just yet. Luckily, the reading is summarised quite nicely in the lecture notes below.

The Ecology of Attention by Yves Citton (chapter 1)

Notes from the introduction:

• we’re moving from an economy of material goods (governed by the scarcity of the factors of production) to an economy of attention (governed by the scarcity of the capacity for the reception of cultural goods)
• you can see the rise of advertising as a necessary consequence of the need to absorb excess goods coming from rising productivity (and thus excess production relative to needs)
• Herbert Simon is often thought of as the father of the attention economy (he introduced the term in a 1969 conference)
  • a wealth of information means a dearth of attention (our attention is, in fact, consumed by this information)
  • given where scarcity lies these days, content creators (authors, musicians, etc) should really be paying consumers for their attention, not the other way around
  • a spin on “if a product is free, then the real product is you”: the real product is your attention
• given how much $ is in advertising, we know that our attention has a high price, but that price is not paid to us—in exchange, we receive at best a useful free service (Google, Twitter) and at worst a massive time sink that corrupts our minds and souls (Candy Crush, also Twitter)
• of course, the new attention economy won’t ever replace the material economy—that needs to keep existing underneath
• the trend of prescribing Ritalin as a way of increasing our attention span: you can see this as a way of reifying this (frankly stupid) assumption that we should have limitless attention spans
• three types of attention
  1. as a collective phenomenon (I am attentive to what we are collectively attentive to)
  2. within a dyadic relationship (I am attentive to what you are attentive to)
  3. as an individual (attention as a means of individuating the self, creating identity)
• we should try to break free of the economic paradigm of understanding attention, which even infests the way we talk about it (“paying” attention)
• there’s a pretty trenchant critique of Hayek’s liberal Great Society in which everyone can choose their own idea of happiness: “attentional processes are inextricably linked to our process of valorization”, which results in a vicious/virtuous cycle as we value what we pay attention to and we pay attention to what we value (both as individuals and collectively)
• attention is an interaction, an essential mediator of our relationship with the environment around us; some degree of attention is needed just to survive

Chapter 1

• from the POV of an alien looking at earth (you can call this technique estrangement I think)
• we see lots of communal valorization—entire generations taking up the same (material) trends, primarily as the result of the mediasphere
  • in order for factories to sell the physical goods they’ve manufactured, the media itself must manufacture consumers
  • he coins the term echosystem to describe an infrastructure of resonances conditioning our attention and its circulation
  • our “freedom” is severely constrained by the media that conditions us and shapes even our most intimate thoughts
• because our attention is finite, we can never pay enough attention to be truly “rational” the way free market economists would imagine us to be
• there’s a nice subtle critique of GDP as an indicator of prosperity here (cool related concept that I thought of afterwards, while typing this up: Goodhart’s law, though I don’t think the author uses that term here)
• 4 main attention regimes, according to Dominique Bouillier, which you can think of as the ends of axes on a Cartesian plane (not entirely sure why these are useful though, maybe that’ll come later)
  • alertness: like popups; we perceive them as interruptions, nuisances, threats
  • loyalty: building a long-term relationship of trust and reliability (the opposite side of alertness)
  • projection: holding the environment at arms length and allowing you to apply existing models
  • immersion: being plunged into a new, strange, exotic environment and forcing you to stay vigilant in order to adapt

I now want to read this whole book too, which is a little concerning given that I have so many other readings and (as I’ve been reminded by this book) only a finite amount of attention.

Post-script: I have indeed read the whole book, and my notes are, as always, on Bookmarker.

Lecture

(I missed the first few minutes because the room number was “S-1.06” and I interpreted that as S DASH 1.06 and thus spent several stressful minutes around a very empty first floor that was completely devoid of any classrooms and asking everyone who passed by if they knew where the classroom was, to no avail. Luckily I then noticed that there was a basement floor whose room numbers were prefixed by S-1. I still think it’s a very confusing system.)

Cognitive capitalism

• technological determinism is not enough to explain changes (how technology is deployed is always up to people, never neutral)
• we are entering a stage of cognitive capitalism: knowledge production is a key source of value in the modern economy, and we cannot separate that from society
• one consequence of this is the increasing importance of intangible goods: brands, intellectual property, data, etc
  • huge change from industrial age when most value was contained in material goods
• control of innovation means control of the profits
  • companies are starting to realise that you can’t (as you used to be able to do) just “buy” technology and expect it to magically improve your productivity
  • instead, you have to foster the right workplace culture, which might mean loosening hierarchies or giving employees more freedom to try new things
• companies want to be more flexible and responsive to trends (think fast fashion and their terrifying rapid production cycles)
• in the past, corporations could manage complexity simply by growing the company, but now you have to actually adapt (or risk becoming a dinosaur)
• changing modes of production: users now co-produce (think YouTube videos and tweets and other user-generated content, but also the rise of influencer marketing and how that’s starting to transform the advertising industry)
• blurring of inputs to production (capital/labour), since now we have lots of labour mediated by tech
• emergence of networks for organisation/cooperation … neither hierarchical (like a state) nor anarchic (like the market). biggest example: Wikipedia (a very common example for people writing on this stuff in the mid 2000s, when Wikipedia seemed like a model for the future of everything)
• a shift to cognitive/emotional labour (services over manufacturing). the example given was that of Pret employees being told to cultivate a certain atmosphere in order to please the customer (the company wants control over its employees’ affects)
• the most important resource is “invention power”: the capacity to create and invent
• innovation is now a social process, no longer the result of a lone wolf (if it ever was)—it can be distributed geographically, even between disparate companies (think Silicon Valley as a regional concentration of power)
• crisis of property rights (tension between intellectual property and the open source movement)
• the capturing of positive externalities (in which a third party—i.e., a corporation—gets the benefit of the transaction between two parties)
  • corporations monetise this
  • example of positive externality: we go to university but all of society benefits, at least theoretically, and so this is why we should all get free tuition (Srnicek’s idea, though ofc I wholeheartedly agree)
• centrality of bioproduction: if cognitive capitalism is centred on the production of knowledge, then it must also be concerned with the bio conditions for it
• we’ve moved from mercantilism to industrial capitalism to today’s cognitive capitalism
  • though the question is: how geographically limited is this theory? how much has cognitive capitalism spread into the non-OECD countries, for instance?
  • case in point: China—maybe in the tertiary industries, sure, but there’s still a lot of industrial capitalism going on
• to summarise cognitive capitalism:
  • what is being accumulated: knowledge and the capacity for creativity, not physical property
  • how is production organised: intelligent coordination of minds, not a rigid division of labour
  • who is being exploited: positive externalities created by the “cognitariat”, as opposed to the proletariat
• consequences:
  • blurring of work and non-work: with factory shifts, e.g., scooping cereal into cereal boxes, the line was stark; but with cognitive work, there is potentially no end to the shift
  • the end of scarcity (at least potentially): non-rival, theoretically infinitely replicable; any scarcity is artificially imposed
• even if everything becomes abundant, though, we’re still limited in attention–the last scarcity

The attention economy

• in the early 1800s, newspapers started selling ads … since then, it’s been a race to the bottom
• you can see fake news as less of a contemporary phenomenon and more of an almost immanent consequence of the attention economy (there’s a photo of a news article from 1835 about obviously fake moon people)
• at some point the amount of information available exceeds the amount of attention we could potentially pay to it
  • though my response to this is: doesn’t that depend on what we valorise as “information”? in a way, there was always more information than we could pay attention to. we could sit and watch grass grow or listen to birdcalls all day, if we wanted—that’s still information, in a way. we just don’t valorise that sort of thing as “information”
• important to remember that the attention economy is not applicable to just ads-based tech companies: it really includes anything on a screen
  • quote from Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix: they’re competing with not just YouTube and SnapChat but also, well, sleep
  • and of course these companies try to design for addiction (think Netflix’s autoplay, or endless scroll)
  • question: can we rely on “self-control” when these corporations are employing entire teams of very intelligent people whose job it is to break any self-control we might exhibit? do we really control what we use or watch or has it started controlling us?

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