ksey3

Follow the banter around a single term "Financialization" (setup a google news alert). It will lead you to everything else, including how the financial sectors thinking about it.

Thats cuz you think of it as a tech/content company, instead of Wall St financializing content.

In the same way they did mortgages. The people who built the houses that were sold to people who couldnt afford them, were also standing around scratching their head.

Its a joke because there is an upper limit to what the world can offer for content. Only the finance robots who run these companies believe it doesnt matter.

After all this time, Netflix hasnt been able to get more than 200-250 million subscribers, even though Startups and CEOs love to bray about how the internet is full of billions of people, just waiting to hand over their cash. The truth is vast ocean of people dont have cash.

And now the market capture phase is complete. The people who can pay, have already been corralled into pens and are milked everyday. The finance class then turns their attention to milking the "subprime" crowd. Give them credit cards. Get the advertisers involved. Reduce the VFX, content creation, animation budgets, layoff those self important expensive engineers.

Such a system doesn't generate software quality beyond a point, cuz it doesn't need it. In a few years Netflix will look like Yahoo.

Tech and Content do not run the world. Finance does. Sooner or later into the ground. Cause the goal of milking cows hits an upper limit.

How many didnt get famous? Thats what no one reports.

If the UN report on the attention economy is saying 0.5% of content produced is consumed and dropping, then how are people getting views? It doesnt make any sense. Unless the game is rigged.

People have limited attention to give anything but unlimited capacity to receive attention. The platforms are taking full advantage of that fact to keep this ponzi scheme running.

Spam and trolling even happens on a physical newspapers/radio/tv/books/magazines. Its just that you have to pay to do it.

The rich/ceremonial/leisure classes have through out history been constantly spamming everyone with whatever shit occurs to their 3 inch brains, because they can afford to buy the largest amount of attention.

To bad there is not enough attention for anything anymore cause production of content is happening at volumes that dwarf Consumption of content.

If 99% of comments and links on HN are not read by anyone, do you think the great geniuses who run HN will tell you that? Whats the use of such systems no one asks. They want to just keep it alive like some dumb engineers in the control room of Jurassic Park after the children are lost and the T Rex is loose.

The platforms, without knowing what the fuck they are building, have made it Free for everyone to Broadcast. So its now not just the rich who are spamming and trolling. Its everyone. For free. All you get is noise. Read the UN Report on the Attention Economy.

One dimensional software engineers now have capability to build and scale systems quickly. Thats the only reason we have these dumb fucking mindless systems wasting everyones time and energy.

Well someone has to pay for the tech. Its not free. And that puts an automatic upper limit on what happens.

People have no idea how much debt Police depts (lets not even talk about the military) have racked up playing with high tech toys and paying off compensation every 2 days for people they accidentally harm or kill. So whats funny here as Big Bro gets access to more and more tools the more broke he gets.

And guess what the financiers of this debt will do when it cant be paid off. Raid police pension funds. Thats how financialization of public service works

No free lunch big bro. Have fun with all the "cool toys" while the good times last.

Its called Attention Theft.

What we are missing is industry. People and politicians by themselves really cant take on the financial sector. They are the modern day rent collecting feudal lords.

The Financial Sector(banks/insurers/real estate/stocks/bonds) has a much larger say on the allocation of resources (the economy) than anyone else including politicians and individual corporations.

The counter balance is not just people. It has to come from people+industry. The western industries have basically been hollowed out thanks to financialization.

Even Google and Apple bow to the shareholder. The shareholder doesn't do any actually work, but is sitting on his ass demanding greater rewards even if it means fucking others over, or even the entire system. Same thing with real estate and insurance. So we end up with monopolies.

Now the system is fucked, cause we have already peaked in terms of customers available to milk. Everyone is in debt to keep things afloat. The FED balance sheet has jumped from 900 billion to 9 trillion in mostly junk debt. People/Politicians we already saw during 2008 gfc folded, when they had a real shot at change.

Its in the interest of Google, Apple et al to use their influence to get on the right side of this.

VFX makes 0 sense to me as a business especially in todays over saturated content world. I have friends in DNEG were each movie has 100-200 people working on 20-25 minutes worth of footage for an ENTIRE fucking year. Thousands of people basically. And its a coin toss whether these movies are going to get the views.

Whenever I ask them how the fuck can such a business work, they just tell me erm we are just artists and coders. The job pays well so we dont ask the corporate robots too many questions about it.

And I keep pushing them to do so, cuz it doesnt make any sense given the costs involved unless it some elaborate walter white money laundering op.

Very few "best" people/"superstars" have a great track record of doing anything useful outside comfy large corp support structure. Its like moving exotic plants out of a specialized botanical garden.

Cuz the majority want to emulate the same behavior. Dont underestimate how mentally bankrupt everyone is.

You think Jack Ma didnt try that?

In the US sure, where its blasphemous to slit the throats of the leisure classes for their excesses. In China they made Jack Ma disappear.

Through out history when it gets time for the Kings & Queens to waive the debt of the plebs away, cause they have nothing left to pay, the Rentier classes take the haircut.

In the US the rentiers have owned the Kings & Queens for a long time. To the point where any American institution cant touch them. This is not the case in China. There will be mass disappearances and cullings (already have been).

the plight of the high-income, low-wealth American is getting worse

Solution is pretty simple. Reduce status signalling (leisure class activities and purchases) and start saving. This is what the Japanese did once the cheap credit taps were turned off. Its not the end of the world.

Michael Goldharber said it best - people have limited attention to give anything, but unlimited capacity to receive attention. Exploitation of that inequality keeps the Attention Economy afloat.

Its also why HN stays afloat, even though the architecture ensures the amount of content consumed is a small insignificant fraction of the content produced.

Ideally we track content consumed/content produced gives us a ratio of the information waste an architecture is producing. And all these architectures are producing a whole lot of waste.

Suzuki mostly sells its crap to the Indian market. Doesn't really sell much to the first world.

And Raghuram Rajan agrees. He has been saying it wont work and govt incentives should have gone to the services sector (which has been India's strength) instead of Apple - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUDaHgHC8ao

Indian labour can be a nightmare thanks to the numerous factions (religion/caste/language differences). All sides needs to be bribed to keep things running drama free. And that cuts into margins, in ways you wont see in other countries.

Services firms margins are 2-4x more than manufacturing margins, which is why their Services sector has thrived.

I have the wallet/bat token stuff turned off. Its not even turned on when you install Brave.

The main reason I moved to Brave is Firefox's bizarre updating model on Ubuntu which causes it to randomly shutdown all the time. Plus on Android, brave just blocks a ton off ads, that firefox doesn't without extensions and fiddling about.

Just dismissing it as a "crypto feature" is pure robotic mindlessness. We are past the point where crypto scammers ruled the day. The scammers/hype herd have moved on to AI.

Who is left behind holding the crypto bag, are different kind of people. Even central banks are using "crypto features" to implement CBDCs. The BAT tokens Brave has proposed is not a bad thing, even if it doesn't work out, to the problem of Attention Capture and Attention theft. We need such ideas and experiments. People's attention is not someone else's property. Google and Mozilla don't even talk about how much Attention theft is going on, leave alone what the solution is.

I have been using Brave for about a year. Dont miss Firefox or Chrome.

Are politicians creators?

We can. Just ignore anyone who works on "scaling things up". Its like paying attention to brainless robotic ants for too long.

Interesting. Both my retired parents don't exercise, yet my Mom seems to be in much better health than Dad (based on number of hospital visits required off late). And this kind of explains it. She is up to something or the other the whole day, while Dad is pretty much a couch potato.

We are probably seeing the end of the Ad funded Content Creation golden age (or spam age depending on your perspective).

The low interest rate/cheap funding regime allowed everyone to get broadcast tech for free. As cheap funds to keep everything afloat dries up, we realize the Actual value of everyones content is quite low.

So now we see all the content based platforms from youtube/netflix/snap/reddit/spotify/fb(layoffs/starting threads) etc and now twitter trying all sorts of new things.

Doesn't feel like a big loss cuz this period has surfaced enough number of people worth paying attention too, that there is no great reason to fund all this tech, to find more people worth paying attention too.

In this case CBDCs (the interest bearing kind) actually have the potential of disintermediating banks. Or atleast reducing credit/liquidity risk. Grandma's savings/deposits arent going to evaporate the next time a bank collapses. Cause her CBDCs are going to be sitting in her wallet.

He is just another mindless robot, sent on rounds on behalf of corporate wonderland, to tell govts and regulators what to think. Basically a lobbyist. From what he chooses to talk about, you can see how totally vacuous corporate wonderland actually is.

Well its not called censorship when we allocate radio spectrum. But I think the point is above a particular level, there is so much noise everyone gets drowned out and some will act out of frustration causing harm to others or themselves. Really a question of being able to detect where that level is.

Managers running the show there for quite a while. The creatives get turned into stepford wives.

He pays his mortgages doing attention capture well. He is not fit for anything else.

Once upon a time the western intellectual class was known for their outcomes, not just their thoughts. Now its just overflowing with this kind of performing buffoon class, that spends their whole day not doing any actual work beyond mesmerizing the ppl with word play.

Thank trash software. Keeping the ship afloat becomes more important, than wondering where the ship is heading. Thats what trash software does to ppls brains.

Its so bad, it allows (and requires) 600 ppl to sit together and produce a few seconds worth of mindless forgettable sensory over stimulation, to keep a 14 year old glued to his seat. I mean Bill Waterson does a better job with just a pencil.

On top of it, there arent enough over stimulation requiring eyeballs on the planet to sustain such a mindless mega machine(see Odlyzko Content is not King), that the trash software enables. Its natural the whole thing keeps breaking down regularly.

It will only change when people step back from keeping the ship afloat and ask where the ship should be heading.

Our abilities to pay attention are limited. Not so our abilities to receive it - Michael Goldharber

The Attention Economy accidentally came into being taking advantage of the inequality above without anyone knowing about the inequality itself.

People have a need for attention. Advertisers have a need for attention for their products. The platforms had a need for cash to keep all their freebies running (search, chat, video, social, email, streaming etc) and make sense/filter down exploding Information the internet produced.

These 3 needs accidentally came together, with no one having any clue about Goldharbers inequality and we get the absurdity that currently exists.

The original problem being solved - how to handle the info explosion was forgotten. Everyone got side tracked into how to capture attention. And then they got rich.

The question today is knowing much more abt the inequality and still facing the ever increasing Info overload problem, how do we build better less exploitative systems?

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