Life in the Attention Economy
Or: How to turn your Butt into a Piggy Bank
What makes Quota is the second text in our new series of Martin Burckhardt’s later writings. First appearing in the December 2017 issue of Merkur1, this essay falls between 2015’s Alles und Nichts:Ein Pandämonium digitaler Weltvernichtung and 2018’s Philosophie der Maschine. When read together with Do it Again!, our previous 2020 text on the aesthetics of iterative design, we get glimpses of the deeper philosophical drivers behind the questions of money and attention. What’s essential is noting how these drivers of our Psychotope’s psychic economy have been overlooked since its founding as what’s commonly referred to as the Greek Miracle – and how it provides the fundamental social glue giving rise to our world’s institutional sculpturing. To us, the uncanniness of how this psychical economy is continually covered over in our conversations with intellectuals is indicative of its need to be releaved-out before we can begin answering the problematic enigmas of our age.
For these reasons, in the future, we'll be undertaking a series of conversations between us exploring the question of the Attention Economy in all of its theoretical monetary filiations. We feel this will bring all of its various themes dispersed over Martin's previous œvure into a coherency. And while this may not provide a conclusive answer, it has the advantage of addressing essential questions for a future theory of money: the problem of sacred money; the connection between the Alphabet and the face value of the Coin; the question of Usury; the Counterfeit Kings of the Middle Ages; the Logic of Representation and the Birth of the Central Bank; the proliferation threat of the Digital Age and Psychic Inflation. Of course, the more profound question is, what are the positive aspects of our Attention Economy – and how do the leitmotifs of Psychologistics and Shrinkage bring about a Renaissance in Modernity’s Digitalwerk? Perhaps once we learn to move past our enchantment with the past and read it as a roadmap to the future, we’ll see the possibilities of an open future...but for now, we give you What makes quota to read as you ponder over our duck pouting images, the thought of Kim Kardashian’s butt, working 24/7, and what it all means in terms of this enigma we all know as the Attention Economy.
Translation by Hopkins Stanley and Martin Burckhardt
What makes Quota
Or: At 8'54", you look like a horse.
The statement that we live in an attention economy is a platitude. At best, it reminds us of how sex, crime, and cat videos promote sales; that click-baiting is the appropriate market strategy; and that being a social media expert is an honorable profession. Although the attention economy has long dominated everyday life, the origins and consequences of this paradigm remain unclear. Like many developments of the longue durée, the Attention Economy has subliminally gained an unquestioned foothold in people's minds. Consequently, every last hillbilly knows that clicks and ratings determine the commercial success of a product, and even YouTubers can achieve celebrity status and a corresponding income. Thus, the Attention Economy goes far beyond what's always seemed to be the purpose of capitalism: namely, the production of scarce economic goods that, by definition, are exchangeable and marketable. In the Attention Economy regime, the aura of the unique and authentic is the actual product. However, it’s a product that’s marketable at will but only in a transferable form. Here, there’s a shift into the psychic space: from logistics to psychologistics, from object to apperception, from the economy of goods to lifestyle.
In cool sociologist jargon, we could say that with the Attention Economy, the individual is no longer simply condemned to selling his muscle power, his sitting flesh, and his brain lard but must see himself as a product needing to be optimized, ideally even transformed into a brand. For this reason, every individual is compelled to perceive and present themselves as a corporate body.
This leads to a complete commodification of the private sphere, while the radiance of the new social body lies concealed in its product character and is sold as immediacy: as true, unadulterated, and pulsating life.
Given the artificiality, you might be inclined to see the virtuosos of self-presentation as legitimate descendants of the artist, as the latter was prepared to sacrifice everything for art. The only difference is that today, we’re dealing with art without art, with artless celebrity – that’s the novelty. Compared to the It Girl's surface of pure projection, who can sell anything and everything, the virtuoso appears as a kind of one-trick pony, a fossil unable to keep up with the rapidly changing fashions.
You don't produce yourself by producing something; no, producing yourself means consuming in a memorable, imitable way. Consequently, the performance of an act of consumption (the food you eat, the handbag you carry) is enough to gain attention and reputation.2
The etymology of consumere is revealing. Because it makes it clear that a kind of logic of destruction is at work here – that what's produced is suitable for consumption. In this respect, self-production – in the sense of marketable authenticity – is not about the survival of the original romantic genius but rather about its end, the moment when the individual throws himself to society (which is no longer a mere metaphor in the case of the expected audience reactions: at 8'54'' you look like a horse).3
From a historical perspective of economics, the disruptive side of this revolution comes into even sharper relief. Early Modernity's publishing system was primarily intended for bridging and supplying goods to distant parts of the world. However, this logistical challenge became obsolete in the networked world, with its instant access to the global markets.
Just to the same degree that our digital logic is conquering the economic cycle, its basic formula is making itself felt: x=xn.4 While this apotheosis of abundance, dating back to George Boole, the founder of binary logic, remains largely unknown – its consequences for the music industry, book publishers, and ultimately all producers of symbols are unmistakable.
Confronted with this proliferation threat, every digitized good must lose its commodity character to such an extent that we can speak in accounting terms of a ‘values devaluation.’ Jeremy Rifkin addressed this issue recently in his Zero Marginal Cost Society (2014)5 – providing a precise, albeit somewhat wordy, description of the structural problem compared to its formulaic formulation.
Delirium of the signs
At the end of the 1960s, this paradigm shift was reflected in the concept of a "post-material" society, and economically it took the form of a symbolic revolution. Importantly, with the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, the post-war monetary order that linked the value of money to the natural scarcity of gold collapsed. Not only did it demonstrate that gold's natural scarcity is no longer suitable as a metric of monetary value, but it also made clear that the sovereign no longer has control over the value of money (as the guardian of the ‘scarce nothing’), but that this must now be left to anonymous, faceless global financial markets – in other words: the ‘network.’ While this connection is abundantly clear in retrospect, it was unclear to the process's protagonists. With the era of free-floating, which not incidentally overlaps with The Epoch (the Unix era since January 1, 1970), the economy enters a new era. And while we've become accustomed to using the term "globalization" to describe this new world, it's becoming increasingly clear we're actually dealing with the advancing march of digitalization.
To everyone's surprise, this system worked quite well, so flawlessly that the historical caesura has hardly left its mark on the collective consciousness, and the belief in money has remained largely untouched. Nonetheless, the shift is fundamental. From a structural point of view, money (which previously, as an expression of natural wealth, referred to as something material) is replaced by a collective act of perception, and speculation becomes an act of value creation. Whereas classical economics saw the money illusion as a perceptual distortion in inflationary times, we now realize capitalism is constitutively based on a phantasm, namely a monetary belief system. This insight is the gateway to the various cataclysms that have hit the global economy at increasingly shorter intervals ever since: Speculative bubbles where confidence in the global financial markets has turned out to be utterly hopeless. Capital, which emancipated itself from natural scarcity, unleashed a kind of endogenous delirium: the world of derivatives, futures and credit default swaps, all representing fictitious forms of capital – all having grown to absurd proportions in relation to the real world.
From the gold rush of psychic tombs
The conundrum is as follows: How can the value of a structurally superfluous object be reliably measured? The answer, as offered by an Attention Economy, is as simple as it's striking. If the value of an object is no longer limited by a natural scarcity, if the digital production paradigm simultaneously allows for limitless proliferating copies – then all that remains is the consumer's own limited time. It is impossible to watch two movies or read two books simultaneously; consequently, the consumer must focus on the object of interest and desire. It's irrelevant whether the consumer is wholly absorbed in the work, as in the days of time-honored contemplation, or takes in as many objects as possible in the sense of fast-forward zapping. The decisive factor is whether it's concentration or fragmentation – if the object burns itself into the consumer's perception and leads to an act of sale.
In this sense, the attention focuses on an economic marker comparable to a speculator's decision to prefer one currency over another. From a structural point of view, we are dealing with a derivative of natural scarcity, except that this is no longer linked to the regiment of nature but to a culturally coded mode of perception as a descriptive data point.
The scarcity of time takes the place of gold; those of culture replace the rules of nature. The triumph of the Attention Economy goes hand in hand with the corresponding measurement sensing technology: while the first measurements in the sixties and seventies focused on the attention of television viewers (with only 625 German households being linked to the corresponding instruments), the networked PC opens up a vast market. Initially, the consumer's purchasing behavior or expression of preferences was analyzed, but now they’ve become an ambulant mouse pointer, a signifier whose conscious and unconscious gestures can be recorded as exemplary by GPS tracking. The term Data Mining is misleading; it would be more accurate to speak of soul or psycho-mining. If a general suspicion about the operators of search engines or social media was established in this context, we shouldn't forget that, with the Attention Economy, market power has shifted over to the consumer side. It is the consumers who ultimately decide the value of a good.6
From a systematic point of view, the Attention Economy is a form of applied mass psychology, a collective probe eclipsing anything that a surveillance-addicted government has been able to obtain about its subjects. Whereas economic acts used to be small spikes and punctuations in an otherwise unfathomable everyday life, the individual's customer's journey is now under constant observation – there's no longer a hint or a twitch that goes unnoticed. The rationalization effects are enormous: wherever a small fringe group articulates a desire, it’s recorded and satisfied within a short time; in addition, there are forecasting processes for advanced bottleneck detection and remedial action. If we have become accustomed to speaking of a global financial market, we could just as well talk of a globally-monitored attention market.
Gluttonous gazes
When, as in the case of Marcel Duchamp's Fountain, a urinal is elevated to a work of art with the stroke of a pen, art no longer consists in the production of the object in question – but in its perception. Since the consumer's attention is now regarded as capital, it's not surprising the latter believes they can pay for the use of an offer with their data (an idea that would have been unthinkable, if not wholly grotesque, a generation ago).
In this shift – from production to reception – the paradigm of the superfluous is priced in, but conversely, the production factor (as manufacture, manual, or intellectual labor) is hidden. The readymade appears as a natural product, or more precisely: as synthetic, which is only elevated to the status of a work of art through its perception (through its conscious emphasis). However, attributing the triumph of art or 'original Romantic genius' here fails to recognize its socially metempsychotic character.
Duchamp's gesture of appreciation shows a remarkable affinity to John Maynard Keynes' economic thinking, who captured the economically characteristic behavior of the Beauty Contest’s logic. Keynes' thought experiment is about choosing from a selection of photographs the one you'd expect to be most selected by others. Economic behavior (and its morals) consists of overcoming individual tastes while simultaneously adopting a supra-individual point of view. While Duchamp may still seek salvation in art, Keynes preaches mass taste – in other words, that which makes quota.
If we understand Duchamp's aesthetics of the readymade object as a blueprint for our Attention Economy, we could speak of a form of meta-work, a work of abstraction that no longer has anything to do with our classic concept of work. While drive and diligence were once regarded as primary virtues that individuals used to objectify themselves in the creation of their product, the traditional work ethic has largely evaporated in the Attention Economy. If people still persevere in a particular job, they act as the Guardians of the Machine. The majority, however, can enjoy a sweet alienation: just as electricity comes from the socket, things come from the factory. And where the price-conscious consumer becomes the prototype of value-added production, apperception takes the place of production; the agony of choice replaces the effort of having to earn a living by the sweat of your brow.
The conditio of this metamorphosis is that classical labor is handed over to the working memory7, so that goods and commodities originate from an automated production process. Since, according to Marx, only what’s created by humans counts as social surplus value, the fully automated production of goods can only produce patterns without value: Junk and excess. Only the sale of an object gives it value, raising it to the rank of capitalist satisfaction – otherwise, we’re only dealing with an object that’s nothing more than dead weight producing storage costs. Under these circumstances, the significance of lifestyle ‘halos’ surrounding socially desirable products is understood. For a long time now, they've no longer served just to satisfy a lower need; as lifestyle products, they carry a higher message – their real mission is to raise the self-confidence of their wearer, giving them a distinguishing feature for sharpening their image and self-actualization.
The object is transformed into a fetish that takes on the status of an identity surrogate – except, structurally speaking, the wearer is always dependent on other people's feathers. The conflict arising here opens the door to an area inadequately described as a luxury problem.
Because the selection of a physical object is arbitrary (do you take this T-shirt or that one?), it gives the decision weight – the act can suddenly be disqualified as an offense against the zeitgeist, as a stylistic sin. Because taste is a highly debatable subject, the evaluation of the production process falls back on the consumer – who suddenly finds themselves disqualified as a Consumer Philistine.
While it was true in our parent’s world that the gap between products was self-made, the disparity has taken on grotesque proportions today: ‘Advertising has these people chasing cars and clothes they don’t need. Generations have been working in jobs they hate, just so they can buy what they don’t really need’8 – in other words, ‘We buy things we don’t want to impress people we don’t like with money we don’t have.’
Economy of the Joke Article
Where attention becomes a currency, it necessitates becoming a socialization metric. Keynes's exemplary Beauty Contest is revealing as it demonstrates that the non-conceptual personal sense of beauty must be sacrificed to the economically socialized gaze of the consumer. In this respect, we could almost speak of a private exorcism – after all, it must constantly be tested for social suitability. This is precisely the logic of social platforms, which, although dedicated to self-presentation, function primarily as a mediality of social formatting.
That the self stages itself as a pouting duck face in all situations in life (#presex, #aftersex, #whatever) is, above all, a simulation: a social pattern in which all bygone, untenable claims become loud. That a general suspicion of genius has become so widespread is attributed to the various staging techniques being delivered free of charge, while the acts of self-staging enjoy the most significant social acclaim. Here, we’re encountering a function that attention currency has in common with classical monetary order but is often overlooked: that every currency always functions as a social glue. The participants are welded together into a symbolic body via a general metrization. With every like receiving an utterance, the issuer's self-confidence grows, and a circulatory sphere is created that rewards similar behavior. In a constant feedback process (I'll follow you if you follow me), collective desire takes shape – a form of community building emerges.
This beneficial societal aspect of the Attention Economy also helps explain the rapid career ratings made by public broadcasters – without any coercion regarding economics or content corseting. Tired of their educational mission, broadcasting producers took to the ratings game, where an entire broadcasting operation began to revolve.9
Because what is ‘good’ can only be defined in terms of its ratings, all the inherent quality standards were sacrificed. The consequences can be ‘admired’ in daily program content: a constant, almost Buddhistic mantra whose sole purpose is not completely losing the dozing viewer's narcotized gaze with games, quiz shows, or cabinets of curiosities à la Panda, Gorilla & Co. Its purpose: a rearguard reign that places any behavior not yet formatted under general suspicion.
Given this intellectual impoverishment and downward spiral, the question arises if the Attention Economy is suitable for determining the quality of goods or what’s good?
Because a fundamental question has been touched upon here, it might be advisable to consult Sigmund Freud – less in his capacity as a psychologist and more as the author of Jokes and their relation to the Unconscious10 , which can be seen as a blueprint for our post-materialist mode of production. In simple terms, the joke is the perfect capitalist commodity; once told, it destroys itself. Interestingly, Freud's chain of reasoning is based on a logic of psychic economy.
By allowing the listener to tunnel under a complicated architecture geared towards inhibition and sublimation, the joke saves the psychological effort while simultaneously liberating laughter, which acts as a form of disinhibition. In this light, the joke's logic, entirely in a sense of consumere, follows an annihilation logic and indeed of regression. Like the joke, the Attention Economy also rewards savings and promotes a limbo competition where, in the end, the winner demands the least effort from the listener.
If this gain in convenience means that the consumer uses increasingly clever, ready-made, and easy-to-use products, the question of production, meaning the effort involved in bringing such a thing into the world, is ignored. It's at this point, however, that the fatal one-sidedness of the Attention Economy becomes apparent. When the quota becomes the predominant calculus, it's an indication that the production process – and with it: the nature of the world – becomes enigmatic and mysterious.
From the great unknown
Instead of facing up to the deep rupture in the capitalist dispositif, the Attention Economy is fueling a steady 'business as usual!' where people believe they can make do with symbols, speech acts, and simulation techniques. This kind of wishful thinking has already orchestrated the dramaturgy of several financial bubbles, and now social media is making phantom pain socially acceptable as a political stance. The rise of populism isn’t an aberration but merely the consequence of a worldview using the means of mutual insurance to obscure its view of the future. In this light, Donald Trump, the self-proclaimed rating machine, is an outright prototypical protagonist; for him, looking at the television screen has replaced the need to see things for himself. The most significant dilemma of the Attention Economy lies in this regressive bias. Because quotas only make what’s predetermined as what is desired as social practice, the intellectual rearguard gains assertiveness: the couch potato, seeing its prejudices confirmed. We could speak of a collectivized Dunning-Kruger effect11: a mental sedation that leaves ever larger sections of the population in the dark about how far their knowledge of the world is from its actual reality.
This process of autoimmunization is similar to the spiraling silence that Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann12 observed back in the 1970s, which has now found its media continuation in the concept of a filter bubble. Even worse: as a result of the network effects of social media, the viewpoint of the arrièregarde, the intellectual rearguard, is gaining an overwhelming dominance – while minoritarian positions are increasingly being marginalized. Although the internet was initially welcomed as a platform for democratization, it's only further increasing the pressure to conform, fuelled by the quota. This may explain the current hostility towards intellectuals and elites and the denunciation of anything not conforming to the prevailing opinion bubble.
This limitation to personal horizons is all the more fatal as it's opposed to the intellectual requirements necessary if you want to experience the present as more than just a consumer. Because when the present attacks the rest of time, it expands into infinity, and the future can neither be anticipated nor can we understand why the present is the way it is. Where the world becomes a presentation, it becomes illegible, a miracle that defies all understanding.
But whatever determines our present, from the search engine to the social network, from the iPhone to electric mobility à la Tesla, was as good as a crazy endeavor in statu nascendi – a fixed idea having more to do with an individual's idiosyncrasies than with the masses’ intelligence. This sinister truth completely disappears behind the quota – as a religion for the consumerist international. To release a successful social sculpture into the world (that is: a Machine that formats human behavior), neither the intelligence nor the acclamation of the assembled crowd is needed – quite the opposite. Unlike in the industrial age, where winning over large crowds was essential, today, it takes only a handful of people to build an architecture that determines the lives of millions. This is precisely the power of Boole's formula – it allows the individual to scale at will (x=xn ), meaning that the idiosyncrasy of an individual can take on a society-changing disruptive quality.
This explains the question that investor Peter Thiel (co-founder of PayPal and Palantir) poses to presumptive company founders: namely, what's the essential truth for you that others don't agree with? This question marks what you might call the other, unworldly side of the attention coin – that which, in Boole's formula, doesn't stand for the world view of the masses but for the great unknown, the human factor: x.
Burckhardt, M. – Was Quote Macht – Oder: Bei 8’54” sieshst du as wie ein Pferd. Merkur, #823, December 2017.
This is the leitmotif of Kafka’s Hunger artist that Martin lays out in Geistesdämmerung – Geistesdämmerung : Zum Verschwinden des Intellektuellen in der Post-histoire. Lettre International 115, Winter 2016. [Translator’s note]
A user’s comment on the Bibis Beauty Palace YouTube channel about the video: 10 kg less with THIS belt ?!! (sic!).
0 x 0 x 0 always results in 0; 1 x 1 x 1 always results in 1. If we formalize this, we get the idempotence formula x=xn. On the manifestations of Boole's formula, see Martin Burckhardt/Dirk Höfer, All and Nothing: A Digital Apocalypse, MIT Press, Massachusetts, 2017.
Jeremy Rifkin essentially lays out the argument, ‘What if consumers began to use the distributed, collaborative nature of the Internet to create lateral economies of scale,’ which at least one reviewer found incredulous at the time of this work’s publication. See Rifkin, J. The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism, St. Martin’s Griffin, NYC,2015. [Translator’s note]
Pierre Klossowki was the first to address this question in his La Monnaie Vivante [Living Currency], published in 1970. He describes this transition using the example of a person walking past a house where an instrumentalist is practicing – and pausing at his playing. Where the canned music, the record player, takes over, the virtuoso's time is over, and the production of the auratic moment passes into the hands of the person playing the record: God is a DJ.
Martin explored this in detail with many of its positive aspects: the question of what rationality is and the differences between Human and Digital Rationality, preliminary questions of shrinkage, which later become Psychologistics, all in what will become the return of the dividual from the Renaissance notion of the Individual. See Burckhardt, M., In Working Memory, Ex nihilo, 5/2023. [Translator’s note]
From Chapter 19 of Chuck Plahniuk’s Fight Club, NYC, 1996. [Translator’s note]
In this context, the case of ZDF journalist Wolfgang Herles, whose book about ratings, Die Gefallsüchtigen (Berlin, 2015), made him persona non grata for broadcasters – an ostracism comparable only to apostasy and expulsion from a religious community, is revealing. [Translator’s note – see Ex nihilo’s Im Gespräch mit ... Wolfgang Herles]
Freud’s 1905 psychoanalytic work on wit’s dependence on the psychic economy for overcoming our inhibitions in a serious discussion. The other important observation is that laughter allows glossing over serious content, sometimes rendering it invisible to its audience. See Freud, S. – Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewußten [Jokes and their relations to the unconscious], 1905. [Translator’s note]
The Dunning-Kruger Effect, first discovered in 1999 by David Dunning and Justin Kruger, refers to the dual burden of how people overestimate their everyday abilities; that is how the overly confidence can be both ignorant of something – and also unaware of their own ignorance. The effect is often thought only to affect those of low intelligence; it refers explicitly to the overconfidence of someone unskilled in a particular task. [Translator’s note]
Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann was a German political scientist known for the spiral of silence model that observes how an individual’s perception of public opinion affects their willingness to express personal opinions, involving multiple components related to Keynes’ Beauty Contest Logic. See Noelle,-Neumann, E. The Spiral of Silence: Public Opinion – Our Social Skin, Chicago, 1984. [Translator’s note]