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Shouldn't a person's writing be able to win in the arena of ideas rather than needing it's author to treat it like some spoiled rich kid?"
Yes, true. I believe this was a reasonable stance before mass communication and internet lowering barriers to entry, and now AI giving birth to infinite generation.
Ideas, available to everyone — nonrivalrousness words strung together — are no longer scarce. People's attention is.
Or, put differently: if the quote is true, your ideas and mine, never spread; will never be seen. Concentration toward the extremely clever and eloquent top, Matthew principles
Ideas, available to everyone — nonrivalrousness words strung together — are no longer scarce. People's attention is.
I'd like to explore the idea of paying for attention more.
Attention is scarce, and it's not free (it has opportunity cost). Everyone is endowed with a fixed amount of it... as far as we know it cannot really be increased on a per-person basis. Each individual is therefore the supplier of a perfectly inelastic supply of attention.
So the supply side is somewhat understood. But what is the demand side? Why do people seek attention? The most obvious reason is that the attention can be channeled into getting the person to buy something.
So: company spends money to garner attention, people give the company their attention, the attention is used to sell something, people pay the company to buy stuff, presumably more money than was spent to acquire their attention
But for the people who are giving their attention... at what point do they have so little of economic value to offer that the acquisition of their attention is no longer worthwhile? I suppose in the end there are still a lot of menial tasks that make the lives of our overlords easier, like standing in line for our masters or delivering food and groceries to them. As long as those tasks exist, there should be a reason for buying those peoples' attention.
Attention, like time or "life", is also completely perishable. If you're not monetizing it, let's say, or using it to entertain yourself — or, higher level, discipline your mind, meditate etc — you're losing it.
Rational-econ speaking, you should then be willing to sell attention-time for very little value (micropayments?!) when its second-best option isn't too important
That's true. Attention can't be stored, and you can't really take a lot of time to decide what to do with it either. (Every amount of effort spent trying to optimize attention also spends attention).
This business of paying for attention is hugely interesting to me, but I think it is very difficult to convey to the unwashed masses. People who don't really want to think about it sat: eewww, paying for attention? That's an ad! Nobody likes to read ads!
But I see it the way you do:
"It's an ad" is a flip dismissal of it, but taking yourself so seriously that you would pay to get your thoughts in front of others is something worth taking a look at.
Unfortunately, we have the idea of vanity presses and their largely awful output that gives a sort of lie to this theory. Critics might say: "If you have to pay to get people yo red it, is it really any good to begin with? Shouldn't a person's writing be able to win in the arena of ideas rather than needing it's author to treat it like some spoiled rich kid?"
Such views are at the least naive if they think the ideas and writing that happen to reach them don't have any money behind them.
Excellent post.