Society As A Function Of Attention.
By Anak Wannaphaschaiyong
Incentive is an underlying mechanism that drive society at any scale including individual, group of individuals, and human population as a whole.
Incentive is an abstract concept. Physically, incentives are driven by money, refer to my blog titled “Incentives of Owning Money” for more detail. Another important concept is to accept that money is an indirect form of freedom and power, refer to my blog titled “Blog Freedom and Power are two sides of the same coin” for more detail.
According to argument made in “Sapian” by Yuval Noah Harari, due to increasing complexity of evolution of society, an expert individual with specialized skill is valued more than a wise individual who knows little about everything. The evolution of society require presents of companies.
What is a company?
A company should exist if and only if it satisfies customers need. In reality, a company satisfies its customers’ needs by providing options of solutions. A solution is materialized in a form of either a physical product and a service. Nothing else.
company creates products. Marketing and adverting are adopting as a strategy to increase sell. Goal of marketing is to satisfy need while goal of advertising is to promoting products. Marketing strategy is to increase sell to marketing budget (sell-to-marketing ratio).
Advertising is a subset of marketing.
Startup create solutions that satisfy niche group. Due to the current era of technology and mechanism of capitalism, a startup is incentivized by growth models to expand to its infrastructure unrelated to its core solutions that justify it existent. Expansion of infrastructures are needed to increase user experiences while using the solutions.
spend more time on the solution -> more attention of its users -> monetize its users’ attention.
revenue come from selling solution, selling analysis of its users behavior, selling its users data, and selling its users attentions. Today economy is driven by “attention markets” because its the easiest way to generate revenue. Furthermore, “attention market” is a zero sum game which means the more the company gets attention of its potential clients, the less its competitor can get. Also, due to human bias and explosion of information, unless product is marginally better. Even if the product is marginally better, A company can implement lockdown strategy to make its even harder to its user to switch.
user siwtch when new_product is marginally better than the old product and will be overall more productive solution if trade off of migration due to lockdown is positive.
The current state of technology don’t incentized sharing technology. This is because keeping its technology secret can be advantages which is only possible because these technology built upon its own infastructure. Sure, the technology can be generalized for other to use, but it takes time and resource of the company with no obvious benefit. (why use its own resource to help its competitor and lower its advantage.)
Illustrate the current state of technology as graph, we get. customer - company - function
Ideally, the graph should be like the following. customer - function - company