Subprime Attention Crisis
From FSGO x Logic: a revealing examination of digital advertising and the internet's precarious foundation In Subprime Attention Crisis, Tim Hwang investigates the way big tech financializes attention. In the process, he shows us how digital advertising—the beating heart of the internet—is at risk of collapsing, and that its potential demise bears an uncanny resemblance to the housing crisis of 2008. From the unreliability of advertising numbers and the unregulated automation of advertising bidding wars, to the simple fact that online ads mostly fail to work, Hwang demonstrates that while consumers’ attention has never been more prized, the true value of that attention itself—much like subprime mortgages—is wildly misrepresented. And if online advertising goes belly-up, the internet—and its free services—will suddenly be accessible only to those who can afford it. Deeply researched, convincing, and alarming, Subprime Attention Crisis will change the way you look at the internet, and its precarious future. FSG Originals × Logic dissects the way technology functions in everyday lives. The titans of Silicon Valley, for all their utopian imaginings, never really had our best interests at heart: recent threats to democracy, truth, privacy, and safety, as a result of tech’s reckless pursuit of progress, have shown as much.
Stats for nerds
11recommend
22mentions
20people
2020–2024years
50% recommend41% neutral9% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Or there is large scale number fudging and fraud.
Just remember no one is auditing what views, likes and clicks count Google and Facebook tell you, you are getting. Advertisers just milk corporations. They dont care if the numbers are fake. They are now trained to tell everyone to spend more or you dont get attention someone else will.
As Goldharber once famously said , about the Attention Economy - people have limited attention to give anything but infinite capacity to receive attention.
No one likes to hear or believe they dont really have any influence when the system is signalling they do. So the ponzi scheme grows larger and larger.
There is a great book about it (from an ex-googler) called the Subprime Attention Crisis.
No one knows what to do about it so everyones head is buried deep in the sand.
We need new attention allocation systems that are not market driven.
- I don’t have experience but I thought Subprime Attention Crisis was an interesting read
- For the economist in you:
There's a book on this topic that explicitly draws the parallels to the housing market meltdown, "Subprime Attention Crisis." There is also a professor at Columbia, Kinshuk Jerath, who has written explicitly about these misaligned incentives.
- No has mentioned Subprime Attention Crisis yet. It’s worth reading. The whole thing is a hyper-inflated, opaque house of cards, and its collapse will cause a lot of pain.
- The Marxist definition of "commodity" is a useful one, but doesn't do full justice to the nature of the problem. Attention is a commodity in the same way that corn and other raw materials are commodities: it's subdivided into abstract units for sale (and speculation), entirely divorced from the underlying asset (Joe Schmoe on Facebook) until the moment of redemption.
Commoditization is (arguably) a very good thing: it allows the market to make stable pricing decisions (at various risk levels) without having to worry about the exact load of corn (or human attention units) showing up right when needed. But it's also a fundamentally obfuscative force: the commoditizing party is incentivized to lie about the underlying asset's value. Advertising exemplifies this to a greater extent than agriculture: we don't really know what attention is, and so it's much easier (and more profitable) to misrepresent to buyers.
Subprime Attention Crisis[1] is a really fantastic analysis of the attention market, this specific sort of commoditization, and its latent risks.
[1]: https://www.fsgoriginals.com/books/subprime-attention-crisis
- Agreed. Online advertising measurement remains opaque and there is no incentive to fix it.
The book Subprime Attention Crisis by Tim Hwang does a good job covering this! (It is a solid bear case for fb,g,etc as well :p)
