The Attention Economy 1: devaluation as liberation
Buying into your own hype causes hyperinflation
Ever since VHS outcompeted Betamax in the 1980, the primary driving force behind “technology” has been pornography distribution. VHS won the format war, because the porn industry embraced it over its competitor.
The same thing has been happening ever since. personal computers, to laptops to “phones” - handheld microcomputers. The primary driving force determining it’s evolution is the economic pressure from the American pornography industry, and “the internet” - internet 2.0, “social media”, “content” - these are all inherently, structurally, pornographic. They march to the beat of beating off.
The attention economy of today, in which we are now literally valuing “attention” -through “content” - in donations, subscriptions, “bits”, various microtransactions, substack itself, is a direct emulation and direct causal result of “camming”. That is, a woman live streaming herself masturbating, or putting on some kind of show, while interacting with the audience in real time, who then “tip” her or pay for a private dance. Strippers for the new millennium.
Camming came first, then 5-10 years later industrious gentlemen apply the successful economic format to other disciplines; case in point, creative writing:
It has been said, “onlyfans and internet pornography in general, has in fact not been an economic liberation and opportunity for women, but, a slick sleight of hand, in which any one particular “beautiful woman” is valued much lower than she would have been before the industrial revolution - where a “beautiful woman” today can make a plumbers salary off selling butthole pics, for the same “amount” of beauty, she would have been able to marry into royalty in the middle ages”. I disagree with calling them beautiful, making that the measurement, but you get the general idea.
It’s a kind of variant of the “the economic liberation of women, women entering into the workforce en masse, depressed wages and the long term effect was making a single income household unviable” formula. The common through line is something like:
Lowering barriers of access to producing, universalising access to production, depresses wages and devalues the product. In terms of prostitution, it’s all the same thing.
The basic selling point of internet 2.0 was, everyone can make money. All barriers of access to video production are removed - you can be a YouTube star. A YouTube talking head, a “gamer”, a political commentator, whatever you want. Fields that were previously guarded economically and socially, like video production and publishing, were not complete anarchy. An utterly free market. A libertarian dream. You could even outcompete the old guard in the old institutions, by being young and hip and new.
But that’s not quite what happened. Because that’s not quite what it was - that’s the selling point. That’s the marketing. Marketing for what? What were they selling? Who’s They?
When you remove all barriers of access to something, the general quality nosedives. It’s presented as universal access, freedom, the American dream - everyone can become pewdiepie if they just pick themselves up by the bootstraps.
When it comes to “content”, media - I loathe to call it “art”, there is no genuine art being made today - is a much more controlled and suppressed market than pre-internet. There are less money in it overall, the pie is being split 6 billion ways, and there are bigger winners and everyone else is a bigger loser. The American dream come to life.
The idea that universalising distribution was a great opportunity and gift to the creative people - musicians, artists and writers - is complete bullshit. It’s PR, marketing talk. Yes, you can record a mixtape and upload it the next day and yes you could theoretically reach an audience and become mildly successful, and make a plumbers wage. But you wont and you wont, and you’ll at most get half way there, and in all the time you spent on that you could have become a plumber instead. Cut the middle man.
Universal access to publishing, is this liberation? it’s the freedom to be poor. To make it in music, you still have to know people and make connections. To make it in writing, you still have to know people, and impress your peers and other writers, more than you have to please the audience - so that they will shill your blog on their social media.
The only thing universal access to publishing has done is flood the market with trash, making quality more difficult to shine through. This is entirely by design. “Advertiser friendly content”. The shift from internet 1.0 of anarchy to 2.0 of centralised distribution (youtube, social media, etc), was always about centralisation, about seizing control, and turning the internet into television - a one way communication between distributor and consumer. With Netflix, they have succeeded in full.
But this is the environment we are in, there’s no use crying about it. Everything is content and all content has a dollar value. Every post you make on twitter is throwing an infinitely small amount of money out the window - and that’s why it feels good. micro dosing on purposefully devaluing yourself for masochistic pleasure. All posting is self humiliation. All posting is self exposure - exhibitionism.
All we can do is adapt.
https://www.twitch.tv/eggreport
I will be, as one commenter suggested, “streaming the eu4 games I’m playing anyways, and just rambling”, and we will see whether he’s right about me quitting my job in three months. And practising piano. No schedule yet, we’ll see what happens.
If William Guppy had been born a generation earlier he would have been one of those British talking heads who write funny/ironic newspaper articles commenting on things and going on quiz shows, and making upper middle class money doing it.
As a final, social comment: The rise and fall of internet identities, from funny interesting content producers to “lolcows”, the turn to heel or however you want to put it, of an internet micro celebrity losing the goodwill of his audience and making a fool of himself - this is what happens, when a nerd buys into his own hype, and actually starts believing that he is a celebrity, that he has mainstream appeal and speaks for the masses, that he has a popular mandate. It’s what happens when a nerd and a social outcast experiences a small success, and becomes convinced that he is no longer a social outcast - when he forgets why he came to the internet in the first place. which was to be with likeminded people - other social outcasts.
Or, in a sentence. If you buy into your own hype, you cause hyperinflation. If that happens, you must become the Hitler of your heart.
Thomas Carlyle was writing about this specific phenomenon in 1850 in his Latter Day Pamphlets ("Stump-Orator") -- the problem has been magnified a thousand-fold by the emergence of the internet. But that great saint Martin Luther understood the general nature of this phenomenon better than anyone else. It's your free will that damns you -- the only way to be saved from the consequences of your own decisions is to be reconciled with Christ, to become Christ's slave. It's surrendering control of the past you can't erase, and the future you can't change, over to Christ -- so you have the freedom to live here in the present, which you *can* change. Otherwise, the devil is your master, and you his slave.
But this phenomenon is true not merely for the right-hand kingdom -- the matters of eternal life -- but also for the left-hand kingdom, for the matters of life here on earth.
Freedom of speech is slavery to speech. It's slavery to the exabytes of utter tripe that people spew every single day. It's asphyxiation to the words of Carlyle's stump-orator, to people who have learned to speak eloquently, but who have absolutely nothing of value to say -- so they dredge meaningless language from the void instead. It's camwhores dancing for donations on Twitch to thousands of viewers. It's Googling basic Python functions and having shit, worthless websites written by Indians crowd the top results, drowning out the actual Python docs you wanted.
Freedom of trade is slavery to trade. It's slavery to merchants and bankers and advertisers. It's the worship of the process of trade itself, and the total, utter forsaking of the people who produced the goods traded. It's rewarding the people who manage the distribution of goods, and punishing the people who actually produce the goods. It's Walmart and Amazon selling everything -- no more local stores. It's Facebook and Twitter and Instagram -- no more small independent internet forums. It's merchants selling doves and pigeons in the temple courtyard.
Freedom of religion is freedom from religion: complete and total liberation from the path Christianity illuminated for us, complete and total slavery to the processes and institutions that lead us. It matters not which path we are on, or where the path is headed -- what matters is that we are on a path, that's what's most important, and if you want off the path, well that means undoing a hundred years of *progress*, bigot. Progress, yes, this is the one true measure of righteousness.
Freedom is slavery. Slavery is freedom. 1984 was unironically correct. It is, truly, better to be a slave in heaven than to be free in hell -- so why bother attaching morality to the question of freedom versus slavery? Why indeed.
Dave Chappelle, this American comedian, did this Netflix special a few years ago that leaned toward being politically incorrect, according to the powers that be anyway. He was pretty libertarian about things, honestly pretty milquetoast all things considered -- but I was libertarian then too, so I went into this thinking it'd be pretty cool.
He goes into this bit on abortion, talking about this female friend of his and her situation with an ex. The ex had gotten her pregnant. She decided to keep the child, praise God. But then he gives his opinion. He lifts the mic to his mouth and says, "I think that it's a woman's body, so it's a woman's choice -- she should be able to abort the child if she wishes, no strings attached, the guy has no say." Much applause, many cheers from childless celebrity whores.
He waits from them to quiet down. It takes a bit. Then he adds, "But I also believe that the man has the right to terminate his fatherhood, just as the mother can terminate her motherhood."
That was the moment I stopped being libertarian. That was the moment I got it.
Freedom comes in two different flavors: freedom to marry and freedom to divorce. They're both freedom, but only one of them is good. You can either be a slave to your spouse, your family, your friends, your country -- or you can cast yourself into the void, drown yourself in the freedom it offers you, spiritually asphyxiate yourself in the dopamine it grants you. You can hold your relationships invaluable, sacred, divine -- or you can denominate them in terms that can be understood rationally, represent them with a dollar figure, with social credit. You can run your relationships with the gospel that saves, or with the law that damns.
You can spend your entire life in pursuit of true beauty, true art, true architecture -- chiseling your body into a Greek god, cultivating the garden of your mind, constructing a cathedral in your soul, authoring the story of your life, building a marriage that outshines the sun. You have that freedom -- the freedom to be permanently shackled to your beautiful creations by your undying love for them. Or you can cast it all away, away into the void, and yourself afterward, to become a wirehead, to live a life that is potentially everything and actually nothing. Death. That's also freedom.
As I read your analysis of the turn from self-expression to exhibitionism, I thought about the people of my father's generation and the generations before that. The kind of folks you see in old paintings of sages on mountains.
This was the aspirational ideal of pre-moderns. Those old dudes went on long walks in their free time composing poetry, playing music, or recording observations on the nature of reality (oftentimes all three). You could do it whether you were a hermit on a mountain or the rich guy who owned the mountain. It's seen as an Eastern ideal because the East let go of it last, but it comes through in the lives of people Jung, Montaigne, and countless others who made their art as a form of self-study and personal exploration first, and a performative content piece for the masses second.
Maybe in the capitalist era, you've got to feed the beast a bit more than you used to just to stay alive, but there's nothing stopping us from treating substacking/twitch-streaming/twittering in the same way, right? What's wrong with a plumber who composes Romantic symphonies in his spare time that none of the Soundcloud kids want to listen to if, in the process of his composing those symphonies, he induces his own enlightenment?