Have you seen In Time, starring Justin Timberlake? Nothing unusual in terms of the plot; it follows the usual save-the-world logic of most sci-fi films. But what fascinates me is that the characters in the movie are living in a social structure where they pay with time: their lifespan is the universal currency. The movie is beautifully dystopian, yet not very removed from our current lives and not-too-distant future.

Apart from the dark undertones of life-threatening situations, isn’t this something we’re already encountering every day?

We live in a world where our time is spent completing tasks that require near-total focus. And yet, are confronted with more than ever which distracts us and pulls that precious attention away. Hence, we are trapped in the middle of these two competing paradigms. That’s where it becomes hard to differentiate between the signal we desire and what is simply noise. Herbert A. Simon, rightly noted, “Wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” There is a huge amount of information floating around us that the human mind is unable to process.

In this ocean of information where there is a fight going on about whom you are going to pay attention to. The economic structure emerging from the sale of attention is built on the strategy to keep your eyes stuck to the screen. You can call it attention or visual attention economy (are podcasts a part of the audio attention economy?). That focus of consciousness is the currency with which you are paying for time spent on the internet. When you trade away your attention, you pay with your time, your energy… your life.

How many times have you wanted to get off of your phone, and eventually realized that you’ve far exceeded the period that you could afford to be on it? Companies have invested billions in systems and algorithms to hold, repackage and sell your attention. In this case your time is indirectly, but also quite literally, money.

Then again, if we take a quick detour into Tara Fung's (CEO of Co: Create) line of thought, there’s a more optimistic argument. The attention economy is providing a wonderful use-case for Web3, which aims to create an autonomous and scalable open-source digital community system. We are seeing completely new modes of social interaction and fresh takes on concepts of conveyance on value, information and beliefs.

We’re moving towards a community system where both creators and viewers can share in the rewards related to value created and not give up ownership to 3rd party gatekeepers. I believe this is a much better system than the barebones attention marketplaces of the last decade. The hope is to create value-driven ecosystems that exert generational impact above and beyond the classic touch-sensitive phone screen.

Attention is definitely finite and zero-sum to a certain extent. But the incentives for its capture, which can be directly enjoyed in an open-source network, are tremendous. While the frameworks might be changing, one thing remains the same: attention is the scarce asset of the current digital age.

I say “current” because I think that constraint is being solved for whether we like it or not. Technological and/or biochemical advances will likely allow humans to indirectly do more than one thing at once. The progress being made in the AI space is incredible to witness. Maybe we’ll even see a world where people could have digital “sims” that have learned your personality and preferences, and complete tasks and projects in virtual reality on your behalf. These virtual copies of ourselves might also have the technology to report back to us and upload relevant memories. In this sense, you’ll be able to scale your attention to multiple projects at once.

Of course, general trust issues with these developing technological structures will have to be evaluated and understood. What permissions should you give your digital representative? What things in base-layer life require the genesis consciousness to unlock? Proof of work, attendance, voting and transaction confirmation are all things that would have to be solved for.

When the printing press started producing books and reading material at a rapid rate, people feared the extinction of spoken communication. And now there is already a counter-movement towards trying to rid life of social media and focus on what’s right in front of you. Surely there will be many fearful of mankind’s merging with the technological tools it’s built. I think those debates are closer than most realize.

I believe once the metaverse reaches higher fidelity, making AR/VR tech closer to real-world sensory experience, the real war on attention will begin. The digital realm will begin to really compete with the IRL experience for most. People will have two different visual planes to live in and it may become harder to discern the lines between them.

And even then, once we’ve scaled attention to some degree, we get back to the age-old constraint - time. And this is where the dilemma returns: where do we focus? Do we embrace man’s progression further into the digital or fight against the forward trend and try to unplug? Sure, you can do the latter, although perhaps at the expense of having a material impact on a changing world(s). How does one participate and create/add value if mindfully choosing not to participate in the modern forum?