Tokens in the attention economy

To recap the meta NFT thesis: attention is finite, the internet is vast, we’re tribal creatures driven by mimetic desire, and we’re building an insane parallel financial system that may have found a bridge to celebrities and mass retail adoption via crypto-enabled art and collectibles. When you add all of that up, NFTs allow you to “own a piece of ... See more

In other words: A group of people direct their attention to something, and that changes its value. This, in turn, draws the eye of various media and attention merchants, which in turn changes the value again. Crypto hype is the purest and most logical endpoint of this phenomenon. What most people are talking about with a given crypto asset is just ... See more

Using the so-called “platform internet” isn’t always an investment, in an explicit monetary sense. Crypto can turn some of those passive efforts – scrolling, exploring, socializing – into financial transactions. What would it mean to live in a world where every single image, song, health record, Twitter “like” and blog post has a discrete token att... See more

"The real scarcity isn’t content anymore. It’s attention."