See Through Network’s Psy Ops: speed up carbon drawdown by exploiting the Attention Economy
The Attention Economy
Taxmen do it.
Preachers do it.
Even educated fleecers do it.
Let’s do it.
Let’s grab eyeballs.
In 1971, a 55-year-old professor, trained in political science, now immersed in economics and computing, wrote:
In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.
Simon, Herbert A (1971). Designing Organizations for an Information-rich World. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. pp. 37–52.
A bit dry, but the kind of language required when you’re seven years away from a Nobel Prize in Economics.
Herbert Simon is credited with conceiving the Attention Economy. It may have taken the son of an electrical engineer and a pianist to sift through all the noise, and be first to isolate the chimes announcing the birth of The Digital Age.
Simon’s insight transcended technology: others were already onto that. Mathematician John Wilder Tukey coined ‘software’ in 1958. ‘Moore’s Law’, observed by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, predicted a biennial doubling in transistor density in 1965.
Half a century after Simon’s observation about information ‘consuming the attention of its recipients’, we’re all feeling its full force.
The Attention Economy is capitalism and technology’s latest love-child, delivered by the new midwives of psychology and economics.
Is the Attention Economy destined to hasten humanity’s demise, or is it a tool we can use to create a sustainable future?
Our Ape-brains – not as clever as we like to think
In 1971, Simon foresaw the possibility that the Attention Economy might dominate 21st-century rich lists, oligarch lineups, polls, coups, and mental health crises.
Read today’s news, and try to find an economic, social, or political headline that’s not related to ‘social media’, ‘online influence’, ‘new media platforms’, ‘big data’ or ‘monetising eyeballs’.
But how new is all this, really? In the 70s, Simon was wise enough to ignore the ‘this time it’s different’ techno-hype. He took a further step back from the computing revolution under his nose, and saw it was just the latest iteration of a story as old as humanity.
Simon’s electrical engineer father could have built a Moog for his mother, but she’d play the same music she’d learned on the piano. If it sounded so satisfactory to our cavemen ancestors, why would we not hit the same notes? Simon realised that while the instruments might change, our ape-brains still love the old tunes.
Herbert Simon was first to identify what was to become the Digital Age’s new currency – eyeballs, but he saw it not as a revolution, but an evolution.
Our species has found many ways to transact between ourselves – stories, sharp rocks, cowrie shells, paper. We’ve just added ‘eyeballs’, tech bro-speak for the clicks, hits, engagements, likes, subscribes etc. that provide their immensely profitable data troves.
Since we started out as tiny dots on a vast plain, we’ve multiplied mightily and can now communicate instantly across our planet, but we still yearn for the same thing. The validation that comes from our fellow apes’ attention. The thrill of being the hero of our own stories.
Simon grew up under a generation of robber barons who measured their wealth in barrels of oil. He saw how today’s trillionaires would trade in eyeballs. 81% of humans today have internet access. That’s 5.5 billion pairs of eyeballs to monetise.
When Simon tapped out his prophetic words on a typewriter in 1971, today’s Silicon Valley Overlords were teenagers assembling their first computers in their parents’ garages, or yet to be born. Most of our data kings started out innocently obsessed with coding, determined to use their superpowers to make the world a better place.
We now have a word to describe the process by which their ideals became corrupted by the pursuit of profit: ‘enshittification’.
But they’re just playing the same old tunes that wiser, older humans described long ago.
Bloody ignorant apes
Two years before Herbert Simon alerted us to the Attention Economy, Samuel Beckett won the 1969 Nobel Prize for Literature. The Swedish Academy’s citation speech explained ‘the essence of Beckett’s outlook’ as:
the difference between an easily-acquired pessimism that rests content with untroubled scepticism, and a pessimism that is dearly bought and which penetrates to mankind’s utter destitution… It houses a love of mankind that grows in understanding as it plumbs further into the depths of abhorrence, a despair that has to reach the utmost bounds of suffering to discover that compassion has no bounds.
How could Beckett know the Attention Economy would turn out to be the same tune, played by different musicians? And how did the post-war advertising industry prove it?
One of the profoundest lines of Beckett’s most famous work, Waiting For Godot, comes after one of the two tramps attempts, fruitlessly, to pass the time by trying to puzzle out why people favour comforting stories over objective evidence.
Vladimir, who fancies himself as a rationalist, demands an explanation from Estragon, who’s more inclined to accept his fate unquestioningly. Why, asks Vladimir, do people remember the Bible story about one of the thieves at the Crucifiction being saved, when only two of the four Gospellers mention any thieves at all, and only once says anything about one of them being saved?
Exasperated, his fellow-tramp Estragon delivers his excoriating verdict:
People are bloody ignorant apes.
(In Beckett’s original French version, En Attendant Godot, Estragon’s line was more euphonic and even pithier: ‘Les gens sont des cons’. ‘People are idiots’.)
Beckett wrote his masterpieces during the post-war period when academic studies were starting to be co-opted by the advertising industry.
At the same time, one journalist was quick to spot the significance of this alliance. Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders (1957) documented how the migration of behavioural psychology from ivory towers to Madison Avenue resulted in what became known as the ‘consumer society’. Lab experiments were being used to sell us more stuff.
Back then, even visionaries like Packard, Beckett and Simon focused on what their insights taught us about the human condition. They were unaware that this brave new world was also heating our planet.
As things turned out, it wouldn’t have made any difference if they had. If we ignored the scientists, why would we have paid any attention to the journalists, playwrights or economists?
By the late 70s, atmospheric physicists started to honk the greenhouse gas klaxon. Big Oil, Wall Street and Madison Avenue – and their international counterparts – closed ranks to shut them up, and keep the oil and profits pumping.
The oil economy, like the attention economy after it, seeps into our language. The oil barons made ‘striking oil’ an everyday aspiration. Now the digital economy is doing the same for young YouTubers intent on ‘monetising eyeballs’.
The Internet means all this is in the open now. Anyone can access the information that joins these dots, connecting our fossil fuel addiction to increasingly violent storms, fires and floods.
Yet most of us still choose to ignore it, and seek out narratives that justify the status quo. From anti-vaxxers to climate deniers, even Flat Earthers, there’s no shortage of disinformation that casts the Inactive as heroes of their own stories.
Is this all hopeless? Is the Attention Economy just consumerism’s latest machine to drown out scientists’ shouted warnings, and make us feel good about our la-la-lah-ing?
Or might it, like AI, just be a tool, neither intrinsically good nor evil? If so, can the Attention Economy be leveraged to be part of the solution, rather than the problem?
Could eyeballs be stealth-exploited to rapidly move large numbers of people from damaging climate inaction to positive decarbonising action?
The Tiny Gap Between Denial and Despair
This has never been a more pressing, or important, question.
For half a century, the world’s richest companies have paid the world’s most brilliant storytellers to manipulate the psychological hot keys that connect our heads and hearts to our limbs.
The Mad Men have been playing us like a Wurlitzer, but already had the odds stacked in their favour.
Sure, Big Oil has spent billions. Sure, they hire the best PR people in the business. Sure, billionaire infiltration of governments is so comprehensive they no longer need to hide or use proxies.
But their biggest advantage is inertia.
Neophobic mammals have evolved to prefer the status quo most of the time. Why risk eating an unfamiliar plant, poking a dangerous-looking animal, or crossing the river? Better stick to the same familiar patterns.
Still, Homo sapiens’ marginally greater appetite for risk means 8.2 billion humans are now spread all over the planet, while our few remaining primate relatives are crammed into smaller and smaller areas of rainforest.
The problem, as Beckett observed, is that with ‘intelligence’ comes hubris.
Amplifying tiny differences, and ignoring big similarities and seeking patterns that suit our comfortable self-aggrandising narratives, are also evolutionary traits.
They must have benefited us – so far – when we were competing with other human tribes. Now we’ve created a planet-wide existential threat that requires us to respond with our heads, not with our hearts, these foibles may hasten our extinction.
With our default setting as Inaction, our capacity for self-delusion makes us easy prey to the Hidden Persuaders. We ‘like to think’ of ourselves as rational beings who act out of self-interest: in fact we’re remarkably easy to convince not to do anything, even if incaction will kill us.
‘Business as usual’ is an easy sell. Who wants to give up flying to foreign holidays, going on cruises, eating meat, buying more stuff? We celebrate martyrdom not because it’s normal human behaviour, because self-sacrifice to a greater cause is so unusual.
Link inaction to positive emotions, and we’re only too happy to do nothing. Just push the usual advertising emotional buttons, from patriotism to parenthood, sex appeal to social status.
Pay the PR shills to make inaction look sexy and smart. Lobby and fund the politicians not to rock the boat or risk the wrath of The Markets or The People. Bish bosh.
The Three-Headed Beasts of Business, Government and Media are formidable opponents. Not only do they occupy the high ground, with limitless resources as their disposal, they even have a choice of tactics. To keep making money, Big Oil needs only convince most of us:
- There’s No Problem (‘Denial’)
- Not Quite Yet (‘Delay’)
- It’s Too Late (‘Despair’)
All have the same outcome: inaction.
The Attention Economy, so far, has accelerated climate change.
It’s latest ‘latest thing’, AI, promises to supercharge global heating even further via our unrestrained demand for data centres to create pictures of puppies wearing funny hats. Profitable trivia like this drives the construction of new data centres, the energy-guzzling earthbound reality behind ‘The Cloud’.
Stated this bleakly, it’s easy to lapse into despair, but despair guarantees and accelerates the worst outcomes.
Is global heating, now powered by the Attention Economy and Big Oil, now a runaway train we can’t get off, gathering speed as we approach the cliff?
Or can we still pull the emergency cord, and lay a new track to guide us away from the abyss?
The Climate Action Resistance
Despite these odds, the Climate Action Resistance grows with every new ‘natural’ disaster. There’s a spectrum of people trying to nudge us from climate inaction to climate action, each using different strategies, each armed with different weapons.
The Resistance spectrum ranges from the intercontinental ballistic missiles of Government Regulation, to the hearts-and-minds guerilla tactics of those dedicated to ‘Raising Awareness’ or ‘educating’ people about The Science.
The big guns are continent-wide laws. Weapons-grade regulations directed towards legally mandated outcomes, supported by funded incentives, underpinned by the threat of enforced penalties.
Government regulation is the carbon equivalent of the Taxman. Tax collectors don’t need to nudge, persuade, hint or encourage. They have the law, and penalties, on their side.
The world’s biggest market, the EU, can claim to be current Only Grown-Ups On The Planet title-holders.
The EU’s Green Deal package of regulations governing any business trading in the EU, is detailed, comprehensive, and is bristling with teeth. Brussels’ Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), Cross-Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) and EU Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS), along with other Green Deal regulations, are due to kick in from 2025 onwards. The laws stipulate a tariff of penalties for non-compliant businesses.
For better or worse, late in the day, Europe’s collection of Old Rich Emitters has at least come up with a plan.
Less powerful markets and governments around the world are waiting to see what will happen. Whether the EU can hold its nerve will determine which way others, experimenting with their own decarbonisation systems, may jump:
- Fellow Old Rich Emitters, like Canada, Japan and Australia
- New Rich-ish Emitters, like China and India
- Poor, Barely-Emitters like Uganda and Afghanistan
The EU regulations may be imperfect and insufficient, but they do at least map an achievable path towards a sustainable future. The next few years will test how resistant Brussels’ bureaucrats prove to be in the face of internal and external forces promoting deregulation, red-tape bonfires, libertarianism etc.
We know with absolute certainty that whether the EU doubles down, holds out, dilutes, or folds, atmospheric physics will continue to apply its inexorable laws. Governments and industry can undermine the EU, but the Greenhouse Effect is an implacable opponent.
There’s no negotiating with physics, only with the subset of humans determined to pretend it doesn’t exist, or the Order of Extreme Optimists who place their faith in carbon capture, nuclear fusion, Mars missions, Good Robots, or other tech silver-bullet illusions forever just over the horizon.
Most of us revert to the standard instinctive stress responses: flight, fight, freeze.
Flight, Fight or Freeze
Without your own space rocket, Flight isn’t an option. If Fight seems futile, that leaves Freeze, AKA Inaction.
Most of us, one way or another, have resigned ourselves to being impotent spectators. Encouraged by Big Oil’s PR whisperers, most of us have abandoned ourselves, like Estragon, to having our fates determined by others.
We do our best to dodge the battling Three-Headed Beasts of global government, business and media, and hope there’ll be somewhere for us or our children to live once it plays out.
Around two thirds of the 8 billion of us alive fall into the category of ‘Unwilling Inactivists’, i.e. people who accept the science and reality of human-induced climate change, but who feel powerless to do anything about it.
Inaction has its appeal, once you’ve decided you’re powerless. While we burn, shrivel and drown, those profiting from the attention economy appear at best oblivious to, and at worst complicit in, hastening the civilisational collapse they’ve triggered. If we’ve not yet learned to judge Big Oil by its actions, not its words, we never will.
Old and new billionaires are determined to keep their show on the road for as long as possible. They appear happy, or at least indifferent, to see us drown, burn and shrivel, glued to our screens, oblivious to the waters around our waists and flames licking at our front doors.
Freezing is an understandable response to a planetary-scale crisis. It’s seductive.
But if, like Vladimir, you perceive the problem, what can you do? If you’re not a politician, billionaire or influencer, how can you make your voice heard, and see the impact of your actions?
See Through Network’s Psy Ops Option
The See Through network is part of the Climate Action resistance movement that’s decided to take the Fight option. Not the ‘shock troop’ tactics involving street protests, superglue, chains and covering artworks and politicians in coloured power or canned soup. Others are already trying that.
See Through’s approach involves transparency, integrity, hiding in plain sight, and deploying the same psychological tricks learned from advertising.
See Through is more of a Psychological Operations division, using the same techniques consumerism uses to convince us to buy a fizzy drink, car or pack of cigarettes, to decarbonise.
In short, See Through programmes deploy the same tricks, tactics and strategies uncovered by Vance Packard, in a world predicted by Herbert Simon, to leverage timeless human characteristics nailed by Samuel Becket.
See Through is a global network of ordinary people. None is individually big, rich or powerful enough to tip the scales directly.
All are pooling their scientific expertise, street smarts, tech chops, administrative abilities storytelling superpowers etc. toward See Through’s shared Goal of:
Speeding Up Carbon Drawdown by Helping the Inactive Become Active
See Through volunteers reckon that while there’s great asymmetry in the resources available to the forces of Inaction, not least the advantage of inertia, Big Oil and those who put profit before people have one huge, glaring, permanent, growing disadvantage: they’re lying.
They know they’re lying, and most of them are well aware of global heating’s inexorable reality. They just want to make a bit more money while it’s still possible. None of us can negotiate with physics.
Rather than wait for the Three-Headed Beasts to play out their mutual destruction, and hope to survive in whatever ravaged aftermath they leave, See Through’s network of volunteers is taking action now.
See Through doesn’t seek to ‘raise awareness’ or ‘educate’ as an end in itself, but to measurably reduce carbon by inducing Unwilling Inactivists to take action.
See Through measures results not in the corruptible proxies like dollars or clicks so valuable to those who have a lot of them, but in the same unit used by climate scientists: metric tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent reduced or sequestered (CO2e).
See Through operates through four interlinked programmes:
- See Through News: journalism and outreach designed to recruit new volunteers to the network and expand its global reach (around 1M by early 2025)
- See Through Carbon: carbon reporting ecosystem that’s accurate, free, open and transparent
- See Through Together: eyeball acquisition via attractive social media content, without ‘green’ labels
- See Through Games: gamifying critical carbon drawdown information to engage ordinary people, and induce them along a path to measurable carbon reduction
To date, this has been achieved on a budget of zero, by leveraging the free infrastructure created by Attention Economy social media platforms.
To join See Through’s network of Fighters, constructing and deploying an array of transparent Trojan horses to charm, nudge, stimulate, induce and trick ordinary people into taking actions to measurably reduce carbon, email