RealityApologist posted:

I was digging through the SomethingAwful archives and found my first essay on the attention economy, written on April 5th, 2011. At the time, Bitcoin had yet to experience it's first bubble and was still trading below a dollar, and Occupy Wall Street was still five months in the future. If you don't have access to the archives, the thread which prompted this first write up was titled "No More Bitchin: Let's actually create solutions to society's problems!" Despite my reputation on this forum, I'm not interested in pop speculative futurism or idle technoidealism. I don't think there's an easy technological fix for our many difficult problems. But I do think that our technological circumstances have a dramatic impact on our social, political, and economic organizations, and that we can design technologies to cultivate human communities that are healthy, stable, and cooperative. The political and economic infrastructure we have for managing collective human action was developed at a time when individual rational agency formed the basis of all political theory, and in a networked digital age we can do much better. An attention economy doesn't solve all the problems, but it provides tools for addressing problems that simply aren't available with the infrastructure we have available today. My discussion of the attention economy was aimed at discussing social organization at this level of abstraction, with the hopes that taking this networked perspective on social action would reveal some of the tools necessary for addressing our problems. .

In the three years and multiple threads since that initial post, I've done research into the dynamics and organization of complex systems and taught myself some of the math and theory necessary for making the idea explicit and communicable. And in that time the field of data science has grown astronomically, making a variety of tools and theoretical resources available for modelling and predicting the dynamics of complex networks. In general, the public discourse has become much more comfortable thinking about attention and network dynamics and its implications. Some of that discussion is gross hype and misrepresentation, but some of it is really giving us unprecedented pictures of our collective behavior at large scales. And for this reason, more people have been articulating proposals that look quite a lot like the attention economy I've been describing. I'm not saying this vindicates my theory, but it suggests a possible convergence in in the direction I've been pointing.

In any case, if I was going to make a new thread I didn't want to just vomit out some more impotent rhetoric. Instead, I wanted to give a specific, proposal of limited scope that can be addressed on is own merits independent of whatever reputation I've developed. So I wrote up a proposal for a new digital currency.


I posted this on my blog yesterday, and it's received a fair bit of attention since then, largely driven by a fantastic discussion on Hacker News that gets a lot of the up-front reaction and criticism out of the way. There is also a less active thread on /r/BasicIncome that has a few interesting comments, and several comments on my blog. There's also been at least one scammer attempting to profit off the idea already.

The idea isn't complete and there are obvious problems that need to be worked out. But given the reaction I've been seeing, the idea seems to be genuinely novel (something that surprised me, given the insane activity in the bitcoin world), and seems to be stimulating people's thinking in some interesting directions. The proposal is already more successful than I would have anticipated. So I'm pretty interested to see what this thread might do with it.