12/18/2008

A Pack of Lies! (Tragedy of the commons)

(new category: nostradamus)

Search engine marketing is a symptom of our current global-awareness/attention-plundering tragedy of the commons.

The more we struggle to make ourselves heard, the more noise we make, the more we make the rest of the world stupid and impoverish it with our noise.

We cannot read two things at once. Attention is a finite resource.

Our aggregate attention span is imploding, as the universe wakes up and realizes how stupid it is (before promptly forgetting).

The more we search online for answers, the stupider we realize we are (yes, stupider is a word).

We rely on the search engine, because we feel so stupid.

The more searches we make, the more powerful the engine becomes, and less trustworthy are the searches, because search results are a commodity, and so answers are being ranked, bought and sold by search engine marketers.

(We still can have faith in questions though. until we start Googling 'What is my question?')

We don't notice this corruption, because we don't have time. We rush to understand. We fail. Because the noise is drowning everything out, because it needs to make itself heard. The noise is trying to make sense of the noise, creating more noise. This is called a vicious cycle, or positive feedback loop, or whatever other euphemism for 'shitstorm' (which is itself a euphemism malphemism).

Attention is a finite resource.

Money, obviously, is not.

Google cannot be benign. Monopolies are eminently corruptible. Search engines rob from the poor and give to the rich.

Search engines allow spammers to traffic in your attention. As time goes on, search engines, once a democratic tool to find what you want, will completely ensure that loud voices are the ones to get heard.

There is way begin reversing the search-engine attention trap: Make attention (counted by the number of neuron firings in your brain) the only valid currency. Attention must supersede money if we are to protect our well-being. The attention-based economy is democratic and fair. The search-engine economy is a black box, susceptible to the vagaries of expedient algorithms that determine maximum gain for those who trade in search.

[I fear the future semantic web because I fear applying someone else's cognitive feedback loops to unborn generations; I'm pretty sure digital conditioning will be more effective long term than Coca cola. And yeah this is a pretty loopy post but screw you - you've read this far]

Only when we enshrine attention rights as inviolable, then those who abuse and seduce it with noise will lose ground.


Attention = love = all the prayers and blog posts of the earth = what's better than money.

[????]

One word: Metacrap