Novica Nakov's List: The Attention Economy

If the Web and the Net can be viewed as spaces in which we will increasingly live our lives, the economic laws we will live under have to be natural to this new space. These laws turn out to be quite different from what the old economics teaches, or what rubrics such as "the information age" suggest. What counts most is what is most scarce now, namely attention. The attention economy brings with it its own kind of wealth, its own class divisions - stars vs. fans - and its own forms of property, all of which make it incompatible with the industrial-money-market based economy it bids fair to replace. Success will come to those who best accommodate to this new reality.

Paul Samuelson provided the textbook definition of economics as the "study of how societies use scarce resources to produce valuable commodities and distribute them among different people." Would this definition apply to the information age - or to life on the Internet? Controversies in current literature relate primarily to the words "scarce", "resource" (and hence "commodity") and "produce".

Suppose archaeologists were to unearth the remains of a previously unknown civilization; should they assume from the outset that neo-classical economics correctly explained what went on there? Obviously not. Much the same applies to cyberspace, including the Net. In effect it is a newly discovered civilization, despite the fact that we ourselves and our descendants will inhabit it. Without examination, nothing justifies concluding in advance that neo-classical economics will apply. Indeed, because life in cyberspace is so different from what we are used to outside it, as a first guess, it makes sense to tilt against that supposition.

With the barriers to distribution collapsing, what matters is not the act of distribution, but the act of consumption. Thus, the power is no longer in the hands of those who control the channels of distribution, but those who control the limited resource of attention. This is precisely why YOU were the Person of the Year. Your attention is precious and valuable. It's no longer about push; it's about pull. And the law of two feet is now culturally pervasive.