Hacking the attention economy

A few weeks ago danah boyd posted an insightful entry on 4chan’s emergence “ from complete obscurity to being recognized by mainstream media as something of significance”.  The site, probably most famous for being the genesis of rickrolling and lolcats, is primarily an anonymous imageboard with, well, just about anything imaginable.

boyd claims that “4chan is ground zero of a new generation of hackers – those who are bent on hacking the attention economy,” and “these attention hackers are highlighting how manipulatable information flows are.” If today’s hackers are turning their attention to attention, even while maintaining anonymity, they are truly hijacking the economics of attention, not to sell product, but, in true hacker fashion, to explore and exploit holes in the system.

While marketers try to harness the power of viral ideas, these attention hackers spread memes just for laughs. I find  the popular equation of the attention economy as “attention = money” deeply dissatisfying, because it talks about the power of attention as important only insofar as it fits into the current capitalistic system, which elides difference and erases dissent, reducing everything to its potential to create profit under current conditions. A new economy based on attention might be radically different, and, ideally, embrace difference. Do the 4chan hackers embody this possibility? Probably not. But they do point out the possibility of embracing, manipulating, and possibly thriving in a more radically pure attention economy.

Advertisement