Is Attention Really the Only Thing You Need?

I would argue that the world is fighting to grab anyone's attention. On YouTube, people like to have your attention so they can show you ads and hopefully you interact with the ads itself. YouTube itself tries to push personalized ads to increase the user interaction rate, so they can justify the premium they charged to their actual customer: entities that pay the ads themselves. These entities tried to push something to sell — maybe like games, or couches, or maybe courses (remember the course bros that would like to "improve your life"?). They wanted your attention so maybe they can benefit in one way or another from it.

We are approaching an era where a product — be it actual hard product like shampoo, cars, labubus, or maybe AIs like ChatGPT, xAI, Claude — can be iterated so quickly. Imagine a techbro writing prompts in front of Claude and over one sitting the techbro can create a product AND its production pipelines, then he can mind how he can "sell" this product over. Products can be prompted these days (more or less) or at least parts of them can, which means the actual problem these product owners have is how they can be compensated for these items of value.

Here comes the problem of attentions: the product needs to be considered by its prospective consumers AND the owner can be compensated somehow. How come our techbro can get these "attentions"? He might post in Instagram, or make reels on YouTube, or create a post on TikTok so he can reach someone and farm their attention. Maybe the viewers will interact with the post, scroll over it, or maybe if stars are aligned these viewers will repost and talk about this product on another platform. More attentions for our prospecting techbro.

Attention as currency

As I argue attentions is basically a currency, I would say by themselves they are not worth anything — just like any money form, USD or BTC. Currency has values, or in our argument attentions HAS values, as these attentions can be traded into some other values. For our techbro, with his prospective consumer attentions he can persuade his would-be consumer to subscribe or maybe pay him a coffee 😜 — or maybe he needs to increase his standing among other techbros so his prospective employer or patrons can consider his product.

Maybe our techbro has some revelation that attentions begets more attentions — like a crowdy warung bakso is more catchy for a bakso enjoyer than a lonely warung bakso — so our techbro would like to "manufacture" some of these attentions. So back he is to work, prompting here and there to build some "attentions" in form of likes, reposts, fake Twitter account posts, or maybe "organic" comments. Actual attention owners might be intrigued and consider our techbro's propositions. He might win some actual attentions, but some sharp-eyed attention owners might be repulsed by these blatant fakers roaming around and diminish our techbro's very attention-seeking capability.

Far as I understand, our techbro seeks "organic" or maybe "human" attentions as humans have everything he might want: they can pay money, or maybe they would talk in their social medias and these talks will generate the product owners some prestige. Or maybe as they now have these human attention they can trade these attentions for another product's attentions where the techbro can gain better values for themselves. Notice here I am intentionally avoiding monetary gain, as I would think our techbro understands money would get our techbro girls but not love, get a house not a home, get all prestiges but hollow inside. He might still think there are values more than mere papers.

Scarcity

If our techbro has some wisdom inside him, he might realize there are only so many attentions the world can give. That is why he might encounter some click-baity or over-the-top posts that just snatch and grab people's attentions and leave these people hollow without anything substantial. Humans do what a human does — they will notice the shortcoming of these cheap attention-seeking pieces of slop and will just scroll past. Then if our techbro is getting even wiser, he would argue humans would try in their earnest to find some values so they can be more than willing to give their attention to our enlightened techbro.

But maybe for our techbro he could say "attention is attention", like a boomer would say "$20 is $20". I would not blame him, as in order to sell ANY product you would need attention first. But I would say our techbro is kind of foolish if he thinks it is all he needs — as at the end of an iteration a currency (or in our case attention) should be converted into some values, which is the entire purpose of any currency. He might conclude: "Maybe attentions is not all we need, but all of what we need requires attentions."

Love, my techbro, requires attentions. Maybe we can work on that.