Revenge of the Luddites Part One: Can I Have Your Attention?
What do FEMA’s crisis in North Carolina, the plight of the Palestinians, and the Rohingya genocide all have in common?
“Today, the commodity that we’re all after is people’s attention.”
What do Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, the burning of the Amazon rainforest, FEMA’s crisis in North Carolina, the plight of the Palestinans, and the Rohingya genocide all have in common?
Mark Zuckerberg.
Of course it is unfair to place all the blame on poor Zuck. Still, he should at least shoulder some because he was practically the inventor of using social media to accrue personal wealth instead of bettering humanity or the planetary ecosystem upon which we all depend.
He could have as easily designed his Facebook and Instagram algorithms to optimize for planetary wellness. Instead, he chose to optimize for engagement, not fully appreciating (at least, we hope not) the implications of that choice. When you optimize for engagement you quickly discover that there is no comparison between engagement in heady discussions that activate the human cerebral cortex to cooperate and collaborate on…