"The economy is just smart people paying beautiful people to promote stuff to insecure people." — @ShaanVP
"The economy is just smart people paying beautiful people to promote stuff to insecure people." — @ShaanVP
A society made up of human beings who have turned themselves into small businesses is basically the logical endpoint of free market capitalism, anyway. To achieve the current iteration of the American dream, you’ve got to shout into the digital void and tell everyone how great you are. All that matters is how many people believe you.
Rebecca Jennings • Everybody Has to Self-Promote Now. Nobody Wants To.
Already today,” he observed at the time, “no matter what you do, the money you receive is more and more likely to track the recognition that comes to you for doing what you do. If there is nothing very special about your work, no matter how hard you apply yourself you won't get noticed, and that increasingly means you won't get paid much either.”&n... See more
L. M. Sacasas • Your Attention Is Not a Resource
Alex Wittenberg added
Part of the reason social media has felt even more “flattening” to one’s identity
Is because social media has shown its benefit towards economic mobility
You can’t sell 50 things. You gotta sell 1, really well. And when that “widget” is the self -> you gotta package it neatly
MK added
Today’s economy rewards people most for merely allocating existing capital. That’s not a recipe for prosperity; it’s simply a game of musical chairs.
Umair Haque • Betterness: Economics for Humans (Kindle Single)
With information effortlessly transferable at zero marginal cost and social platforms that blast content to the top of everyone’s feed, it’s difficult to for an ethics based on scarcity to sustain itself.
subpixel space • After Authenticity
Yet, ours is not truly an information economy. By definition, economics is the study of how a society uses its scarce resources. And information is not scarce - especially on the Net, where it is not only abundant, but overflowing. We are drowning in information, yet constantly increasing our generation of it. So a key question arises: Is there som... See more
L. M. Sacasas • Your Attention Is Not a Resource
Alex Wittenberg added
The Internet and the connection economy turn the economics of mass on its head. It’s now cheaper and more efficient to make edgy, amazing products for the weird edge cases (who are listening and talking and who care) than it is to push yet another average product onto the already overloaded average people in the middle of the curve.
Seth Godin • The Icarus Deception: How High Will You Fly?
Ponder this: “If it’s true that attention is the only scarcity we have in this world of abundance, how come you and I are giving our attention away for free?” – Kevin Kelly
Kevin Kelly • a16z Podcast: The Truth about 1000 True Fans + Pricing Our Attention | Andreessen Horowitz
sari added