qp11
Joined 3 years ago
Joined 3 years ago
So that kind of confuses everyone including the experts.
Network growth, trade growth, capital growth, info growth all are happening faster than expert growth.
There are more than 50 countries right now standing with begging bowls outside the IMF cause their economies have no hope of growing without help. As long as that list has no hope of shrinking, people who live there and recognize that reality, are going to find ways to get out by hook or crook.
Immigration is a symptom of growing global inequality. Without inequality reducing no rules or walls are going to stop the incoming waves.
Cycle goes something like this. Factories in parts of the city shut down after it get cheaper to run them outside. Those spaces lay empty, rents drop, decay begins. Poor Artists move in. Area starts getting interesting. Yuppies move in cuz of the 'cool' factor. Property developers notice. They start buying everything up. Rents jump. Artists get kicked out. And you end up with boring rich people living in a formally cool area.
Tech makes it easy to build things quick. Some things gets popular more by accident than design. Zuck didn't build insta, or whatsapp or tiktok. The reasons for popularity and what is working is generally discovered post facto.
Popularity attracted funding. Things scale up (scale is the only thing tech brings to the table). That attracts financial engineers of Wall St. They take over and control how firms are managed. Cuz most creatives, engineers and scientists have no training in finance or business. And that sets up where the story goes.
The financial engineers aren't programmed to design goods or improve quality of life. They are programmed to capture market, as quickly as possible and collect rent from as much of the market as possible, getting the cheapest rates on interest/labor/forex/tax etc.
Market capture tactics increasing rely not on product, or quality of product, but on arbitrage capability, taking out competition AND outspending the competition in Marketing/Advertising/PR (ie Demand Engineering). Demand engineering works cause people have finite Attention bandwidth. As long you get your signalling and messaging into that finite bandwidth you win over the people who cant.
The technologist, the financial engineer, the demand engineer are all furiously optimizing what they are individually good at.
When they come together we end up with a very efficient corporate machine. When a whole herd of these machines, all copying each others behavior, run around the individual human being has less and less control over their own environment.
The machine herd will capture your kids in some other way if you get them off smartphones and social media. The only solution is to change the behavior of the machine and the herd.
The UN report on the Attention Economy quotes a study that says 0.5% of content generated is consumed by people. And that number was from 2015 and keeps falling.
As networks grow, more connections happen, and as tools of content generation/distribution/broadcast gets cheaper or free, Info keeps exploding. But Attention available does not grow.
So this creates a problem for 2 groups - those who want the Attention of others (eg corporations/politicians/influencors etc) and those who are having a hard time working out what info to pay attention too.
The global attention allocation system is designed for the first cause they are willing to pay to capture finite available global attention.
The second group is mostly left to fend for themselves against extremely sophisticated systems designed to capture, buy and sell their attention or sometimes even steal it.