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Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising and the Time Bomb at the Heart of the Internet

Notes

We should see these structural instabilities as an opportunity. Online advertising has long exerted a corrosive effect on the design of the internet, and the perverse incentives to inflate the bubble make it difficult for alternative business models to emerge. Rather than trying to fix a broken market, we should work toward a controlled demolition that reduces its influence in the long run. The vulnerabilities I have laid out chat a path forward, not toward fixing what has long been a problematic system, but toward starting the internet anew.

In "Seeing Like a State", James C. Scott explores a helpful notion of what he terms "legibility." In order to administrate at scale, governments and large bureaucracies need to be able to see the world effectively. The result is that the world is actively shaped in order to enable administration. To set up a system of taxation, for instance, it is necessary to create a system of fixed identities so that the government can track over time which people have paid their taxes. Establishing a legible system of fixed identities may necessitate cultural changes, like introducing the concept of a last name to cultures that previously did not have one.

Social media is no different. The need to create a liquid market in human attention influences the architecture of the social spaces of the web. Commodification requires attention to be legible: in other words, the internet must structure "engagement" in a way that is easy and accurate to measure.

Social interaction between people is meditated by structured tags such as "like" and "favorite" because these render sentiment easy to measure. Even features that we take for granted, such as requiring user registration to create a profile, are building blocks designed to support the delivery of advertising online.