Blockchain and the Mining of Human Attention

Mining is usually understood as the extraction of natural resources from the Earth. Similarly, mining human attention can be defined as the extraction of an innate human property. Staying within this metaphor, attention - measured in time - might be considered the only non-renewable resource available to human beings. And, this resources is being mined at an accelerating rate.

Mining of minerals, stones and metal has been a human activity since?prehistoric?times, and has indirectly led to today's concept and use of money. Therefore it is not surprising that the creation of cryptocurrency is usually referred to as 'mining'. While prehistoric miners soon realized that one could faster and easier trade the paper receipt of a clump of silver than waiting for the coins to be created by a silver-smith, modern societies seems for the most part content to hold on to a few cents and nickels in their charming metal manifestations.

Nostalgia seems to keep minting and banking alive

Except of course where these ideas were never part of social infection or indoctrination. This leads to the curious picture of a smart-phone carrying Masai warrior giving the first world visitor a confused look he gets handed a Coin or Dollar bill. The former might make a good bracelet charm and the later an inadequate fire starter. But it might really get him going when you suggest that he might share three percent of his goat sales with the mighty VISA man in the sky so that anybody with a plastic card might be able to buy his goats. But than again, the story could fetch him some likes on his Facebook status update.

US teenagers check their smart-phones on average every 9 Minutes (Masai warrior stats were not available at the time of writing). Although, attention economy is a term going back as far as 1971, many technology observer seem to have (re-) discovered the term as of late, pointing out the addictive properties and intentionality of advertising-based businesses. Most often companies like Google, Facebook, Apple and Instagram are named here, whose key performance indicators are tightly bound to usage and return numbers. The general message here is that any usage attention will eventually (and somehow) mined into advertising revenue.

While for some the next logical step might resemble the Wachowski brothers' vision of computer harvesting humans for their energy-generating powers as visualized in The Matrix, it seems more likely that human attention will find a direct monetary correlation closely resembling existing 'money' time schemes but without the friction of employers, banks or governments - each person writing its own 'mining-algorithm' (your personal Initial Coin Offering!) , leaving only the question: "Are you coal, salt, or a diamond?" When in doubt ask the current reseller of your attention, and while you are at it, maybe ask to be cut in.

Kameir